Centurion Bank of Punjab Miracle Card
CancelThe rewards card whose rewards went to somebody else — on purpose.
no published earn rate to price
Skip the arithmetic — the board, ranked → · nothing to sign up for
What it's worth to you, after the fee
Welcome: ₹50 from you and a matching ₹50 from Centurion Bank of Punjab — the whole ₹100 going to The Art of Living's Gift a Smile programme, not to you
Not valued. We can't value this card until the issuer publishes how it earns — every net-value number here would be a fee subtracted from rewards nobody has described. Everything we can source — the fee, the charges, the migration that put this card in your hand — is above and stands on its own; this card is simply not on the board, not in the calculator, and cannot win a best-of call until Centurion Bank of Punjab publishes terms we can cite.
Why we decline to value some cards, and what it takes to change that →
3 notes on the card itself: how it is issued · the network variants · why it ranks #975
Why #975 A free-for-life Visa co-branded with The Art of Living, whose reward points were never yours — Seva Points were donated to a children's charity on your behalf. Carried for the record; Centurion Bank of Punjab was merged into HDFC Bank in May 2008.
The take
The Miracle Card is the only card on this board whose points were never meant to reach the person holding it. Centurion Bank of Punjab built it with The Art of Living: every swipe accrued "Seva Points", and the bank's own page explains that "the monetary worth of Seva Points gets collectively contributed to the 'Gift a Smile' program". Taking the card cost you ₹50, the bank matched it with ₹50, and the whole ₹100 went to the charity. The pitch on the page was arithmetic on the donor base: "even if 5 lakh members take this Card the contribution works out to Rs. 5 crores, enough to sponsor education and living expenses for 5000 underprivileged children." Judged as a rewards card that is a zero, and it is meant to be. Judged as a piece of plastic it was unusually generous for 2006: free for life with no initial or annual fee, revolving credit at 0.99% a month for the first six months and 0% on balance transfers for three, a fully international Visa, and a comprehensive insurance stack — ₹20 lakh of air accident cover, ₹50,000 of hospitalisation, US$1,200 for checked baggage lost on an international flight and US$500 for lost travel documents. There was also a BTI-SITA travel tie-up carrying 3.5% off basic domestic and international airfares booked through it. What the card never had was a lounge, a transfer partner, or a redemption you could touch. By the time the bank republished its charges in July 2007 the honeymoon rate had already gone up — extended credit at 1.25% for six months and 3.15% after, against the 0.99%/2.95% the launch page advertised — which is the rate this desk records, because it is the last one the issuer published. Ten months later Centurion Bank of Punjab was inside HDFC Bank and the card was gone.
Your renewal — keep, downgrade or cancel
There is no renewal arithmetic to run on this card yet — and a break-even we cannot source is not one we will print.
the whole desk — what changed, the downgrade, and what we cannot price →
Keep, downgrade or cancel
what we can and cannot price
Not valued. We can't value this card until the issuer publishes how it earns — every net-value number here would be a fee subtracted from rewards nobody has described. A break-even is the spend at which value crosses a fee, and we are short one side of that sentence — so this desk prints no ladder, no crossing and no ₹0 standing in for either. What we can source about this card is under Sources.
Your copy of this card
You hold this card.
Kept on this device, in your browser. It is never sent to us, never synced, and nothing else on the site reads it yet.
The downgrade
Centurion Bank of Punjab publishes no document naming a card you can step down to, so we name none — an invented product change is a phone call you would waste. That leaves keep or cancel, and we cannot price either side of it.
If you call to cancel
What the bank offers to keep you is the one fact this desk cannot compute. We are collecting those reports — dated, and only in aggregate — before publishing any: an offer one reader was made is not one you are owed. Called about this card? Tell us what they offered →
The desk publishes subscribable .ics feeds for the dates it knows — offer deadlines, devaluations, expiry audits. Your renewal date is not one of them: only your statement knows it.
What's good
- Free for life — the product-features table's fee row reads NIL for both joining and annual
- 0.99% a month on revolving credit for the first six months at launch, and 0% on balance transfers for three
- ₹20 lakh personal accident cover in the air, ₹3 lakh on any other accident, and ₹50,000 of hospitalisation benefit
- International travel insurance: up to US$1,200 for checked baggage lost, US$500 for travel documents, US$300 for a 12-hour baggage delay
- 3.5% off basic domestic and international airfares booked through the BTI-SITA travel tie-up
- 0% fuel surcharge at select HPCL pumps on transactions up to ₹3,000, against 2.5% everywhere else
Watch out
- WITHDRAWN — Centurion Bank of Punjab was merged into HDFC Bank on 23 May 2008 and the Miracle Card went with it
- THE POINTS WERE NOT YOURS: Seva Points were converted to money and donated to The Art of Living's Gift a Smile programme, never redeemed by the cardholder
- The revolving rate rose before the bank died — 1.25% a month for six months then 3.15% on the last published schedule, against the 0.99%/2.95% the launch page advertised
- Foreign currency transactions carried a 3.5% fee, the Indian norm and no better
- Late payment ran 30% of the minimum amount due, floored at ₹300 and capped at ₹600
- Nothing about airport lounges was ever published for this card, and no lounge access is claimed for it here
What these points actually fly
Centurion Bank of Punjab has not published what this card earns, so there are no points here to fly with — not zero points, and not points that go nowhere: nothing stated either way. The moment a benefit sheet exists we will price whatever it names.
what the cards that DO reach a chart can fly — 2,196 corridors priced →
Lounge access
0 of 793 tracked doors
No lounge access. This card opens exactly 0 of 793 tracked lounge doors — board with the crowd, or find a card that doesn't →
Can you get it?
the route in — no cutoffs published
The cutoffs and the actual route in — not the "apply now" button, the door that opens.
Closed to new applications — existing cardholders keep the card; there is no way in.
You cannot. Centurion Bank of Punjab ceased to exist on 23 May 2008, when it was merged into HDFC Bank; the Miracle Card was not carried forward under its own name.
Centurion Bank of Punjab publishes no income or age cutoffs for this card. Blank means blank — we don't invent numbers to fill a grid.
no MITC row researched for this card yet · filter the board by what you can get →
What's changed for this card
nothing tracked yet — which is itself a fact
No tracked devaluations or changes yet — this card's history starts here.
Verified against Centurion Bank of Punjab's own documents on
Not published , and we will not invent it: the earn rate and the currency it earns.
Every document behind this page — 4 of them, each with the day we read it
- official Centurion Bank of Punjab's Miracle Card product-features table (archived 24-May-2006) — the NIL fee row, the Visa acceptance, the insurance schedule and the BTI-SITA airfare discount
- official The Miracle Card landing page (archived 08-Nov-2007) — Seva Points, the matched ₹50 donation to Gift a Smile, and the free-for-life claim in the bank's own words
- official The last Miracle Card fees and charges schedule Centurion published — the revolving rate after its July 2007 rise, the 3.5% forex fee and the fuel surcharge
- official Reserve Bank of India press release 2007-2008/1478, 20 May 2008 — the sanctioned merger of Centurion Bank of Punjab into HDFC Bank, effective 23 May 2008