Deutsche Bank SmartGold
CancelPick the categories you actually spend in — then send the points to Qatar or Jet Airways.
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
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 Deutsche Bank publishes terms we can cite.
Why we decline to value some cards, and what it takes to change that →
2 notes on the card itself: how it is issued · why it ranks #944
Why #944 A lifetime-free card that let you pick which categories it rewarded — Shop, Travel, Party or Home — and converted the points into Qatar's QMiles or Jet Airways' JPMiles. Carried for the record; Deutsche's Indian card book went to IndusInd in 2011.
The take
The SmartGold was Deutsche Bank India's free mid-market card and its idea was unusual enough to be worth remembering: you chose the shape of your own earn. Four savings plans — Shop, Travel, Party and Home — each accelerating a different set of merchant categories, and if your spending changed you could switch plan for a nominal fee. Sixteen years later the Indian market has re-invented this twice and calls it a "choose your accelerator" card. It cost nothing to hold. Nil to join, Nil to renew, Nil for add-ons, on Deutsche's own Schedule of Charges — and this was the bank's mainstream gold card, not a stripped starter. With it came up to five add-on cards on the same limit, a statement cycle you picked yourself, the 2.5% fuel surcharge waived between ₹400 and ₹4,000, Total Protection against unauthorised transactions, and image personalisation from Deutsche's catalogue. What makes it a travel card is where the points went. Deutsche published two conversion routes off this product: QMiles, Qatar Airways' Privilege Club currency, and JPMiles, Jet Airways' — the only Deutsche card on the shelf that named both. A savings point was worth ₹0.50 against your dues or one airline mile, which is a two-to-one preference for the mile and exactly the arithmetic that made these cards worth holding for a flyer. It is carried and not ranked because Deutsche never published, on any surviving page, how many savings points a hundred rupees actually earned under any of the four plans — the tables that carried those counts were images the Archive did not preserve. A redemption rate without an accrual rate is half a rewards programme, and this desk does not guess the other half.
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
Deutsche Bank 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
- Nil to join, Nil to renew and Nil for add-ons on Deutsche's published Schedule of Charges — genuinely lifetime free
- Four savings plans — Shop, Travel, Party and Home — each accelerating a different set of categories, switchable for a nominal fee
- A savings point was worth ₹0.50 against your dues, or one airline mile
- The only Deutsche card that published conversions into BOTH QMiles (Qatar Airways) and JPMiles (Jet Airways)
- Up to five add-on cards for dependants, sharing the primary card's credit limit
- The 2.5% fuel surcharge waived on every transaction between ₹400 and ₹4,000
- Pick your own statement cycle, and personalise the card face from Deutsche's image catalogue
Watch out
- WITHDRAWN — Deutsche Bank sold its Indian retail and credit-card business to IndusInd Bank in 2011, and Jet Airways has since ceased flying; this page describes the Deutsche-era card only
- THE CARD DID NOT DIE IN 2011, AND IT STOPPED BEING FREE — this is one of only TWO products IndusInd re-priced across the sale, from this page's Nil/Nil to ₹500 at issuance plus ₹250 a year under the new issuer; that successor is a separate file, indusind-gold, and its four savings plans PUBLISH the per-₹100 counts this page cannot
- Deutsche never published the ACCRUAL on any of the four plan pages — only the redemption rate — so how much a hundred rupees earned is genuinely unknown
- Savings Points were a Deutsche HOUSE currency this board does not model, so even the ₹0.50 redemption cannot be turned into a house value here
- Switching savings plan cost money: Deutsche's own words were 'by paying a nominal fee', and the figure was never published
- Add-on cards shared the PRIMARY card's credit limit rather than adding to it
- Revolving cost was 3.83% a month — an APR of 46% — on the last published schedule
- Foreign currency was charged at 3.5%, the full Indian norm
What these points actually fly
Deutsche Bank 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. Deutsche Bank sold its Indian retail banking and credit-card business to IndusInd Bank in 2011 and deutschebank.co.in has not served a credit-card page since. IndusInd kept issuing the same card under its own name — see indusind-gold — and it stopped being free when it did; that one is gone too.
Deutsche Bank 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 Deutsche Bank'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 — 5 of them, each with the day we read it
- official Deutsche Bank India's SmartGold Credit Card page (archived 01-Sep-2008) — the four savings plans, the QMiles and JPMiles conversions, the add-on cards and the fuel surcharge waiver
- official Deutsche Bank India's SmartGold Reward Plan page (archived 06-Dec-2010) — all four plans and the ₹0.50-or-one-mile redemption rate each of them carried
- official Deutsche Bank India's Schedule of Charges for credit cards, effective 19 April 2010 — this card in the Nil-fee group, with 3.5% on foreign currency
- official IndusInd Bank's bank-wide credit-card MITC, 2011 — the buyer's own fee table, and the document that shows the new issuer started charging for a card Deutsche gave away
- official Deutsche Bank India's own Cards shelf today — titled "Debit Cards for Every Need", it lists debit cards only and no credit card at all