AU Small Finance Bank devaluation history — every nerf and buff, dated.

"CheQ AU — Joining Fee ₹499 & Renewal Fee ₹499"; the LED variant "Joining Fee ₹1499 & Renewal Fee ₹499"; renewal waived by spending ₹3,00,000 in a year. "CheQ AU Credit Card — Lifetime free (₹999 + GST one-time fee applicable for LED Card only)." CheQ no longer appears in the fee-waiver block at all, because there is no fee left to waive.

Caught as live drift on 24 August 2026 and dated to the document that carries it: AU's bank-wide MITC and Schedule of Charges, version 2.21, "Last updated on 7th July'2026". The previous edition — version 2.19, 16 May 2026, still served from a different path on AU's own site — prints the old numbers in the same table, which is what makes this a change and not a reading error. AU announced nothing. A ₹499 card becoming lifetime free is a real buff and the direction is worth naming, but price it honestly, because the fee was never the problem with this card. AU advertises the CheQ AU rungs as percentages — 12% on CheQ Travel and utility bills, 5% on online shopping, 1% on everything — and every one of those headlines is exactly double what it returns, because AU prints the POINT count with a percent sign and a CheQ Point is worth ₹0.50 at AU's own published redemption rates. The base rung AU calls "1%" pays 0.5%. Removing ₹499 a year from a card that returns half what its own page claims makes it a better free card, not a good one — and the earn still lands in a CheQ app account rather than on your statement, and expires two years from credit. ONE READING TRAP, since a later lane will hit it: three editions of this MITC sit at four URLs on au.bank.in, two of them differing only in filename case and punctuation, eight months apart. Only /credit-cards/mitc(with-schedule-of-charges).pdf serves v2.21. A drift check run against any of the others is a drift check against a stale table.

AU's lineup led by Zenith+/Zenith/Vetta Ananta (₹2,000), Lakshya, Tejas and Prathama join; Ananta gets 16 lounge visits and 50k milestone points

AU's 6-May-2026 portfolio reset puts Ananta on top: ₹2,000 fee, 16 domestic lounge visits a year, an 8,000-point welcome and up to 50,000 milestone points at ₹10L. The brochure is generous; the currency isn't — AU points still redeem at ₹0.25 in a closed catalogue, so the 5X headline is 1.25% and the lounge visits hide behind an AU Rewardz flight-booking gate.

Complimentary domestic lounge visits gated at ₹20,000 prior-quarter spend ₹50,000 prior-quarter spend required (bank-wide: Zenith, Vetta, Xcite Ace/Ultra, SPONT, NOMO, ABCL Pro)

AU's 10 April 2026 'Revision of Usage Terms & Conditions' lifts the prior-quarter spend needed to keep complimentary domestic airport-lounge access from ₹20,000 to ₹50,000 a quarter, across the Zenith, Vetta and Xcite range. The visit allotments are unchanged (Zenith 2 domestic + 2 Priority Pass international per quarter, Vetta 1+1), but the bar to earn them more than doubles — the kind of quiet, spend-gated clawback that keeps a closed-loop points card drifting toward downgrade territory.

Transportation MCCs earned the ordinary retail rate on AU's CA, Xcite, Xcite Ultra and Altura+ cards; only the CS twin already excluded them "With effect from 1st April 2026, Reward Points accrual on Transportation Merchant Category Codes will be discontinued." ixigo AU co-brand variants are excluded from the transportation treatment

One sentence, repeated verbatim across several AU product pages, and it lands in the footnote under the earn grid where nobody reads: "With effect from 1st April 2026, Reward Points accrual on Transportation Merchant Category Codes will be discontinued." Before this, transportation was a CS-card quirk — AU's CS exclusion list carried it and the otherwise identical CA card did not, which made the pair a genuine difference for anyone charging cabs and transit. It is no longer a difference: both twins now exclude it, and so do Xcite, Xcite Ultra and Altura+. Called minor and meant, because AU's currency was never the reason to hold these cards — points redeem at ₹0.20 to ₹0.25 in a closed catalogue with no transfer partner anywhere — so the rupees lost here are small. What it is worth naming for is the direction and the method. This is the fifth AU exclusion in three years, after the 2023 voucher markdown, the 2024 fuel/rent/education/government sweep, the ixigo MCC rewrite and the April-2026 lounge gate, and not one of them arrived as a notice with a subject line. One carve-out survives, and it is the co-brand: AU's own MITC states "ixigo AU co-brand credit card variants are excluded from Transportation category charges", so the travel card is the one AU left alone.

ixigo AU earned its flat 5 Reward Points per ₹200 across rent, education and government, BBPS, international spends, utility, telecom and insurance Rent (MCC 6513), education and government (fourteen MCCs), BBPS and all international spends earn Nil. Utility and telecom (4812, 4814, 4899, 4900) and insurance (5960, 6300) drop to 1 Reward Point per ₹100, insurance capped at 100 points a transaction

AU's notice "Revision of ixigo AU Credit Card Reward Points Usage Terms & Conditions" opens "Below changes will be applicable on your ixigo AU Credit Card with effect from 22nd Dec'24" and then tables the damage by merchant category code. Four categories go to Nil outright: rent, education and government across fourteen MCCs, BBPS, and every international transaction — the last of those explicitly traded away for the 0% forex markup AU launched in December 2023, which is at least an honest exchange and the reason this card is still the only 0%-forex row on AU's shelf. Three categories survive at a reduced rate rather than an exclusion, and that half of the notice is the part the reader gains from: utility and telecom pay 1 Reward Point per ₹100, insurance pays the same with a hard ceiling of 100 points a transaction, so a premium above ₹10,000 earns nothing more — AU's own illustration says exactly that. Why it matters more than the size of the cut: AU's live product page still carries an undated bullet reading "Fuel & rent transactions, insurance and wallets are excluded from Reward Points spends calculation", which is simply not what the dated MCC-level instrument says about insurance. The specific dated document wins. Against the base 2.5 points per ₹100, a reduced row is a 60% haircut on the categories that survive and a total loss on the four that do not — on a card whose points are worth ₹0.50 only as ixigo money, inside ixigo's app, minus ₹99 plus GST per redemption.

Fuel, rent, education and government spends earned points; utilities earned accelerated rates Zero points on fuel/rent/BBPS/education/government; utilities and insurance base-rate only, utilities capped at 100 points per transaction

Notified on 1 March and live from 1 April 2024, AU's bank-wide exclusion list strips reward earn from fuel, rent, education, government and BBPS payments outright, and demotes utilities and insurance to the 1-point base rate — utilities with a 100-point-per-transaction ceiling for good measure. On cards already earning 0.25% at the catalogue value, the categories most households actually spend on now earn nothing at all.

AU's range topped out at the ₹7,999 Zenith Zenith+ at ₹4,999: 0.99% forex, 16 domestic + 16 Priority Pass lounge visits, 4 Meet & Assist

AU's stainless-steel flagship gets the two numbers right that the rest of the lineup gets wrong: a 0.99% forex markup — lower than most full-service banks — and 32 lounge visits a year with airport Meet & Assist on top. The earn side stays AU: 1–2 points per ₹100 at a ₹0.25 catalogue value with no transfer partners, which is why this card is a lounge-and-forex tool, not a rewards engine.

E-vouchers at ₹0.25/point; free redemptions; uncapped Zenith earning E-vouchers cut to ₹0.20/point; ₹99 + taxes per redemption; Zenith capped at 40k points/cycle (20k per category)

AU's first big rewrite of its points program hits from three directions at once: the e-voucher rate — the redemption most cardholders actually use — drops from ₹0.25 to ₹0.20 per point, every successful redemption now costs ₹99 plus taxes, and Zenith's earning gets a 40,000-point statement-cycle ceiling. A closed-loop currency with no transfer partners just got 20% smaller and pay-per-exit.

No small finance bank issued credit cards Four-card range launches: Zenith (₹7,999), Vetta (₹2,999), Altura+ and Altura

AU's spring-2021 launch made it the first small finance bank in the credit-card business, leading with Zenith's 5% on dining and a fee-waiver ladder across all four cards. The fine print aged faster than the ambition: the points redeemed only in AU's own catalogue, and every rewrite since — the 2023 voucher cut, the 2024 exclusions — has made that closed loop worth less.