The Best Credit Cards in India by Standard Chartered Bank

Update (03 May 2023): Standard Chartered Bank appears to have stopped issuing the DigiSmart Credit Card and has modified the reward T&C for the Ultimate Credit Card. This post has been updated to reflect these changes. The est. net reward yield on the Ultimate has dropped from 2.3 – 3.0% to 2.1 – 2.5%.

The Bottom Line

The Ultimate Credit Card is the best credit card in India by Standard Chartered Bank (SC) for high spenders. It offers a net reward yield of 2.1 – 2.5% on monthly spends above ₹50,000.

This makes it one of the more attractive credit cards in India in this category.

The Ultimate Card gives effective rewards of 2% on utility bills, shopping at supermarkets and some other payments like insurance premiums, government charges, school fees & rental. All other domestic transactions earn 3.33% with no monthly limits.

It also offers an effective foreign exchange mark up of 2% on your overseas spend, which is lower than the 3.5% an average credit card charges.

However, the Ultimate has a high and non-waivable annual fee of ₹5,000. You do get reward points worth ₹5,000 every year when you pay the annual fee.

If you are comfortable paying the high fee in exchange for reward points, the Ultimate would offer an effective net reward yield of 2.6 – 3.0% even on monthly spends below ₹50,000.

However, in our base case we do not assign any value to the points received for the annual fee payment and do not recommend the Ultimate if your monthly spends are below ₹50,000.

In any event, it is unlikely that SC would approve this card for customer who may have lower monthly spends.

Including the value of these points, the net reward yield on the Ultimate would be 2.9 – 3.0% for monthly spends above ₹50,000, making it a top 5 credit card in India for high spenders.

With the DigiSmart Credit Card no longer being issued, no other credit card from SC offers an acceptable net reward yield (1.5%+) for lower monthly spends.

Therefore we do not recommend another credit card or a card combo from SC any more.

Table 1: All our recommendations

Table 2: Recommended Reward Redemption Options

Everything we recommend

Who this is for

If you are a Standard Chartered Bank customer and you want to get a credit card this guide is for you. We recommend the best credit cards, no matter what your spending level is.

We have friends who have raised maximizing credit card rewards to an art form. However not everyone wants put so much effort tracking deals, discounts, reward caps and spending categories.

Most of us simply want a solution that is easy to manage – good enough, not perfect. If that’s you, you are in the right place.

In our guides for other credit card providers (HDFC Bank, SBI Card etc.) we have also recommended card combos that help you supercharge your rewards without a lot of micromanaging.

However, Standard Chartered Bank offers only 8 credit cards, and juggling more than one of these will not meaningfully increase your rewards.

So we do not recommend any card combos for SC customers.

How we selected

Banks and card companies in India offer hundreds of credit cards. Each credit card has a different set of rewards and other terms and conditions, which makes it difficult for most of us to figure out which card is best for us.

We cut through this complexity by ranking each card on its Net Reward Yield, which measures the total effective discount you receive in form of rewards, when you charge your expenses to the card.

To calculate the net Reward Yield of a credit card, we created 5 standardized spending profiles of a typical customer with different income levels. We then simulated the total rewards a customer with each spending profile would get on that card, based on the reward schedule for that card.

Table 3: Standardized Spending Profiles

Our reward calculations attempts to account for different types of rewards (cashback, points, miles etc.), reward caps by spending category, bonuses & milestone rewards, fees and differences in realizable value of the rewards depending on how you redeem them (e.g. on Bank website as statement credit vs. for flight bookings).

We prefer cards with higher rewards yields, lower income thresholds and lower fees.

We applied this standardized methodology to every credit card Standard Chartered Bank offers in India, allowing you to zoom in to the best credit cards for you.

If you’re willing to manage multiple credit cards strategically, you can supercharge your total rewards compared to using a single card. However, managing multiple credit cards requires some effort.

At a minimum, you need to:

• Sign up for the card
• Set up the monthly credit card bill payments (monthly effort or one-time depending on the banks involved)
• Review your statements periodically
• Remember to claim the reward (in some cases)
• Remember to get the annual fee waived (in many cases)

More work is also required to figure out which card to use where and possibly change the setup on various sites and apps to use a different card.

So while adding more and more cards to the mix can keep increasing the potential benefits (at least for high spenders), we think most people would want to manage another card only if the additional benefit is meaningful and the additional mental load low.

With that in mind we decided to identify sets of 2 credit cards that will work well together for most people i.e. so that you can easily remember which card to use where, meet the minimum spend & other conditions and not lose track of all the admin stuff like paying the bill and getting annual fee waived.

To find the best card combinations, we considered 100’s of card pairs for to figure out the combos that work best with each other to maximize rewards.

In testing a pair of cards, we assumed that only one card will be used for each spending category and it would be the one with the higher rewards in that category.

We think this is reasonable as you only need to know which card to use in which situation and don’t need to keep track of your spending on each card through the month.

We think most people do not want to obsessively track their spend by card and category on a daily basis. So we have tried to avoid a situation where you need to switch from one card to other based on how much you have spent on it during the month, in total or for a specific category. That’s too much work for most people.

As mentioned above, we found that combining multiple cards strategically did not give better rewards with SC cards. We found that most people would do just fine by selecting our top pick for their spending level and using it for all spending.

You can read more about our credit card recommendation methodology here.

The Best Credit Card from Standard Chartered Bank in India

The Ultimate Credit Card is the best credit card in India by Standard Chartered Bank for high spenders. In fact, if you charge more than ₹50,000 a month to your card, it is one of the better credit cards in India from any bank or card company.

Table 5: Feature Summary – Ultimate Credit Card

The Ultimate Card offers 2% effective rewards on utility bill payments, supermarkets, insurance premiums, school fees, rental and govt. payments. You earn 3.33% effective rewards on all other domestic spend with no limits.

It also offers a 2% markup on foreign currency transactions, which is among the lowest markup for any credit card.

Overall, after deducting the annual fee, the Ultimate Credit Card offers a 2.1-2.5% net reward yield on your total spend, making it the best credit card from Standard Chartered Bank in India for high spenders.

There are two possible concerns with this credit card.

First, the Ultimate Card has a non-waivable annual fee of ₹5,000. While this is very high, you do get rewards points worth ₹6,000 on signing up for the card.

You also get reward points worth ₹5,000 when you pay the annual fee in the 2nd and all subsequent years. So technically, you are not paying any fee for the card.

But not everyone will be comfortable exchanging cash for reward points on a 1-for-1 basis.

In fact, for our net reward yield calculations above, we assigned no value to the points you get in return for the annual fee, and deducted the entire ₹5,000 from the total rewards earned on the card in a year.

Despite this somewhat “unfair” treatment, the Ultimate still ranks one of the better cards in India as long as you spend more than ₹50,000 a month on the card.

In this case, the net reward yield on the Ultimate is 2.1% for spends of ₹50,000+, which is pretty good, although not enough to rank it in the top 10 cards in this category.

For ₹1 lacs+ this method gets you a net rewards yield of 2.5% which comfortably lands the Ultimate in the top 10 (7th) in this category.

If, however, you do value these points equally, the Ultimate has a net reward yield of nearly 3% for high spenders, which is good enough to rank 4th in the country.

In this scenario, the Ultimate is also a great card for lower levels of spending i.e. below ₹50,000. However we don’t expect SC to approve this card for most customers who would be spending the lower amounts.

Because of this reason, we do not recommend the Ultimate as an entry level credit card.

The second possible problem with the Ultimate Credit Card is that the rewards you earn are in the form of reward points.

These reward points can be redeemed on the Standard Chartered 360° Rewards platform, vouchers and gift items. For e.g. you can convert the reward points into EaseMyTip or Croma vouchers.

We did not see vouchers for Amazon / Flipkart etc. on the portal and the number of available vouchers seems to have done down meaningfully in the last few months.

MakeMyTrip and bigbasket vouchers which were available in Dec-22, are no longer available in May-23.

With reward points, there is always the risk that points expire unused or you cannot find a useful option to spend the points. The recent changes have increased this risk for the Ultimate and we are concerned that your actual realized yields may be much lower than our estimates.

Table 8: All Standard Chartered Bank Credit Cards Ranked by Rewards Yield

Table 9: Key Terms for Standard Chartered Credit Cards