United Western Bank IndiaCard
CancelIndia and Nepal, two lakh of air cover, and not one reward point.
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: Nothing published — the bank advertised no joining gift, only that there was no admission fee to pay
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 United Western Bank 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 #987
Why #987 A ₹300-a-year Mastercard-linked domestic card that stopped at the Nepal border, carrying ₹2 lakh of air-travel insurance and no reward programme at all. Carried for the record; United Western Bank was amalgamated into IDBI Bank on 3 October 2006 under an RBI moratorium.
The take
United Western Bank was a 93-year-old Satara bank that ran its credit card out of a Nariman Point office, and the IndiaCard is the whole of what it issued. It was linked to Mastercard but it was not a Mastercard you could take abroad: acceptance stopped at "over 1,00,000 establishments in India and Nepal", which is the same unusual pairing Bank of India's own domestic card drew and the same one that made it useful to exactly one kind of traveller. The pitch was insurance, not points. Two lakh rupees of air-travel insurance and one lakh of personal accident cover came with the ₹300 annual membership, and the bank threw in the services a 1990s Indian cardholder actually needed away from home: emergency payment of bills at selected hospitals and nursing homes, emergency replacement of a mutilated card, and cash withdrawal up to ₹5,000 on two occasions in a calendar month. It booked rail and air tickets, it paid magazine subscriptions, and it renewed itself automatically every two years. There is no reward programme anywhere in the bank's own privileges list — not a point, not a rung, not a catalogue — which for a card of this vintage is not an omission so much as the design. The economics were plain: ₹300 a year for the primary card and for a corporate card operated by a company's nominated staff, ₹200 a year for each add-on issued to a spouse or child, no admission fee, and an income bar of ₹60,000 a year that was low even in 2002. Nothing about it moved between 2002 and the bank's last published page in September 2006. Weeks after that page, it was over. The Reserve Bank placed United Western Bank under moratorium in September 2006 and the bank was amalgamated into IDBI Bank on 3 October 2006; the IndiaCard page survived on the dead domain into 2008 and then 404ed.
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
United Western 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
- ₹2 lakh of air-travel insurance and ₹1 lakh of personal accident insurance, included in the ₹300 membership
- No admission fee — the bank listed it as a privilege in its own right, so the ₹300 was purely annual
- Cash withdrawal of up to ₹5,000 on two occasions in a calendar month
- Emergency payment of bills at selected hospitals and nursing homes, and emergency replacement of a mutilated card
- Accepted for booking rail and air travel tickets, and for paying periodical subscriptions
- Renewed automatically every two years
- Add-on cards for a spouse and children at ₹200 a year each, and a corporate membership operated by a company's nominated staff at the same ₹300
- An income bar of just ₹60,000 a year
Watch out
- WITHDRAWN — the Reserve Bank placed United Western Bank under moratorium in September 2006 and it was amalgamated into IDBI Bank on 3 October 2006
- NO REWARD PROGRAMME AT ALL: the bank's own privileges list has no point, no cashback and no catalogue, so there is nothing here to earn or value
- Acceptance stopped at India and Nepal despite the Mastercard link — it was no use anywhere else in the world
- Nothing about the card moved in the four and a half years between the bank's first published listing and its last
What these points actually fly
United Western 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. United Western Bank ceased to exist when it was amalgamated into IDBI Bank on 3 October 2006 following an RBI moratorium; the IndiaCard was not carried forward under its own name. While it was open, applications went to the Credit Card Department at 161 Mittal Court, Nariman Point, Mumbai, via a branch manager's recommendation, and needed an average annual income above ₹60,000.
United Western 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 United Western 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 — 3 of them, each with the day we read it
- official United Western Bank's Services & Products page (archived 28-Apr-2002) — the IndiaCard's Mastercard link, its ₹300 membership fee, the nil admission fee and the full privileges list
- official The last IndiaCard page United Western Bank published, two weeks before the RBI moratorium (archived 20-Sep-2006) — the same ₹300 and ₹200, unchanged
- official The IndiaCard application form (archived 09-Nov-2006) — the declaration binding the applicant to United Western Bank's own card rules, and the bank's own issuing committee