RBI freezes new OneCard issuance across every partner bank
The Reserve Bank told every bank issuing a OneCard to stop onboarding new customers while it examines how FPL Technologies shares cardholder data. Existing cards keep working — the freeze is at the front door, and it has not lifted since.
On 6 December 2025 the Reserve Bank wrote to every bank that issues a OneCard and told it to stop taking new customers. Not a fine, not a ban — a pause, while the regulator works out how much of the cardholder relationship actually sits with FPL Technologies, the fintech behind the app, and how much sits with the bank whose name is on the statement.
That question has a rulebook. In its 7 March 2024 amendment to the Credit and Debit Card Master Direction — live from 1 July 2024 — the RBI wrote that “the co-branding partner shall not have access to information relating to transactions undertaken through the co-branded card”, and confined the partner’s role to marketing, distribution and delivering its own goods and services. A partner may surface transaction data drawn from the issuer’s systems in encrypted form, visible to the cardholder alone and never stored by the partner. OneCard’s entire product is an app that does everything a bank app does. That is the tension, stated plainly.
The freeze is at the front door only: existing holders kept swiping, earning and redeeming throughout. In April 2026 the RBI appointed a firm for a unified audit of FPL’s partnership and data-sharing framework — technology systems, data-access controls, consent management, KYC — with all seven issuing banks (Bank of Baroda, CSB, Federal, IDFC FIRST, SBM India, South Indian and Indian) approaching the regulator for clarity on restarting. Entrackr put the review at three to six months. As of 1 August 2026, nobody has resumed.
Our take: as a points card, this costs India almost nothing. We rank OneCard Metal 95th of 107 — 0.2% base earn, a closed-loop point worth exactly ₹0.10, and precisely zero lounge visits behind all that metal. Its 1% forex markup, the cheapest on any lifetime-free Indian card, is the whole argument for holding it, and the people holding it still have it. The signal is the part worth reading. The fintech-fronted co-brand — the app owns the experience, the bank rents out its licence — is the model on the audit table, and the RBI has form: it barred Federal Bank and South Indian Bank from issuing co-branded cards back in March 2024. Eight months into a freeze with no restart date, treat OneCard as a card you can hold but not get, and build your wallet out of cards you can actually be approved for.