Case studies / HDFC Bank / 2024
Card application declined with no reason given
Bank · Credit card application · credit-card application
- Complaint no.
- N202425016010111
- Against
- HDFC Bank
- Filed
- 9 Aug 2024
- Closed
- 10 Jan 2025
- Time taken
- 154 days
- Scheme
- RB-IOS 2021
- Closure clause
- 16(1)(a) r/w 10(1)(a)
- Did it help?
- Partly helped
- Compensation
- None
What happened
A credit card application was declined and the bank had not told me why.
What I asked the Ombudsman for
The reason for the decline, and reconsideration of the application.
What the entity said
The bank sent a decline-reason email on 28 August 2024, nearly three weeks after I had gone to the Ombudsman.
What the Ombudsman decided
Approval of a credit card is the bank's commercial judgement, which the Scheme does not cover. Closed as non-maintainable after 154 days, my slowest closure.
Did the Ombudsman help?
Only indirectly. The bank sent its reason after the complaint was filed. The Ombudsman then took five months to tell me the matter was outside the Scheme.
What I took from it
You cannot make a bank approve a card. What you can complain about is the failure to give a specific reason in writing. I framed this one badly; the same facts framed correctly won compensation a year later against another bank.
Related complaints
- Application rejected for a credit score of "-1" when the real score was above 800 (IndusInd Bank, 2025) Compensation
Summarised from the RBI closure letter and my own correspondence. Names of individuals, account numbers and reference numbers other than the complaint number have been removed.