Axis Bank – Rent payments removed from milestones and annual fee waiver

To begin February, Axis Bank made a new announcement on Edge rewards. For the unversed, Edge rewards is the earning currency of Axis where 1 Edge reward point = Rs 0.2.

Major Overview of the New rules

1. From 5th March 2023, the rent payments will be excluded from the monthly and annual spend milestones along with the exclusion of the rental transactions on annual fee waiver.
   Along with this, there will be a 1% surcharge capped at Rs 1500 per transaction applicable.
2. Another announcement was that there will not be any Edge points received for Insurance transactions.
3. Third point which for me is not significant, was that there will be dynamic currency conversion markup fee of 1%. This is 1% fee on the payment that we do in INR on a foreign entity, where ideally payment should have been in Dollars (or other foreign currency)

For reviewing the detailed document, please click here

Cards Impacted by rent and wallet transactions exclusion

Spends threshold for Milestone benefits

This impacts Axis Bank Privilege Credit Card, Axis Bank Select Credit Card, Axis Bank Magnus Credit Card, Axis Bank Atlas Credit Card.

Spends threshold for Annual Fee reversal

This impacts Axis Bank Privilege Credit Card, Axis Bank Select Credit Card, Axis Bank Pride Platinum Credit Card, Axis Bank Pride Signature Credit Card, Axis Bank Titanium Credit Card, Axis Bank Platinum Credit Card, Axis Bank Indian Oil Credit Card, Axis Bank Magnus Credit Card, Reserve Credit card.

Merchant Category Codes impacted

Category	Merchant Category Codes (MCC)	Remarks
Rent	6513	Excluded from spend milestones and annual fee waiver & 1% Fee surcharge + GST
Insurance services	6300, 6381, 5960, 6012 & 6051	No Edge reward points but still added to milestones
Wallet	6540	No Edge reward points and not added to milestones

My Final Comments on this

This devaluation or restriction, whatever we want to say is harsh but its also on expected lines since other issuers already were removing reward points or adding surcharge and aiming to curtail the rent spending on their credit cards. This actually will put an end to the manufactured spending.
But I personally feel they should have allowed 1 transaction / month with some capping for genuine users.

Second, the removal of insurance spends was a bit surprising for me since those transactions are genuine and cannot be manufactured spending. They could have added some capping on high spends but removal is quite harsh.

This should particularly impact the HNI cards of Axis Bank, particularly Magnus where rent and insurance were the major expenses for people to meet the Rs 1 Lac milestone. Although Magnus has good reward structure, including Air miles but some people donot have that high spends and for them, it will be either close the card or overspend to meet the 1 Lac milestone considering the high joining fee as well.

But this also could mean that the 1 Lac milestone may continue a bit longer.

All in all, this is not a great news for Axis card holders and for anybody who was doing rent payment using credit cards.

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Update – New notification came next day from Axis bank, where Insurance was not mentioned. Most probably, they did a rethink and now we will get reward points on insurance. This would be a great news for all of us…