Credit cards lose ground as small-ticket personal loans gain traction: CIBIL

Mumbai: Credit cards are steadily losing their position as the default unsecured borrowing product, ceding ground to small-ticket personal loans and other consumption-linked credit, according to a TransUnion CIBIL report. The share of open credit cards in India's overall unsecured credit products has fallen to 38% in 2026 from 56% in 2016, it said. Small personal loans of up to ₹50,000 have steadily gained share during this period. Card balances as a proportion of total consumption-credit balances in the industry, meanwhile, have stayed flat at about 15-16%.

"Cards are now increasingly competing within the same consumption-driven small credit space, rather than operating as a default option," the report said. Even as card balances increased eightfold in a decade to more than ₹3 lakh crore at the end of March this year, risk spilled across products, delinquency data showed.

Credit information company TransUnion CIBIL segmented cardholders into four behavioural personas - occasional card users, card-centric users, diversified credit users and high exposure users - and tracked how missed payments on any credit product correlated with card delinquency specifically.


Among occasional card users, who use cards mainly for payments and rewards, just 4% missed at least two payments across products in a 12-month period, and their card delinquency rate (90-plus days past due) was only 0.6%.