Called the ICICI Bank Carbon card, it comes with EMV chip technology, apart from an alpha-numeric LCD screen, a 12- button touch keypad and an in-built battery. The bank wants to sell the card primarily to its existing customers.

These features make the card one of the most secured ones for online transactions, ICICI Bank Executive Director Rajiv Sabharwal told reporters in a conference call here this evening. The chip enables a card user to generate secure one- time pass codes for online transactions instantly on the card itself, he added.

Sabharwal claimed that ICICI Bank, with over 3 million cards in supply, has one of the lowest delinquency rates in the market. And at the same time it has one of the higher active card base at 90 percent. He said the bank's credit card portfolio is around Rs 3,000 crore as of the quarter ended June 30.

Without offering any numbers, he claimed the country's top private lender was one of the few card issuers which recorded growth in card base last fiscal. Sabharwal said the bank has set a target of acquiring half a million customers this fiscal, but did not say how much of it has already been achieved.

PTI