Best of 2023: Credit-card whizzes are beating banks at their own game

Every great Indian enterprise has a story worth telling in full.

With The Intermission, The Ken's flagship long-form podcast, hosts Rohin Dharmakumar and Seetharaman G do exactly that—tracing the origins, turning points, and defining strategies of the companies that shaped modern India. 

Built on exhaustive research and proprietary interviews, each episode unfolds as a richly reported narrative. 

The first episode drops on March 23! Stay tuned!

For the last week of December, we are taking you back to some of the most popular Daybreak episodes of 2023. We'll be back with regular programming from January 3, 2024.

For a people who were quite averse to the whole concept of credit, Indians really seem to be developing a new found love for the piece of plastic and banks have been happy to ride the wave.

But lately they’ve been left quite baffled because they are being being beaten at their own game. A growing community of people are constantly finding hacks to take advantage of the loopholes in credit-card reward systems. For some of them , in fact, it’s going so well that they’ve turned their secret operations into lucrative businesses. Turns out they can make more money from it than their 9 to 5 jobs.

Meanwhile banks have realised they are being taken for a ride so some have taken extra security measures to keep such tricksters at bay.

Tune in.

Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, analytical business stories.

🚨The Ken's Zero Shot podcast is hosting a live event! This is a speculative yet realistic discussion built around one premise: what happens when AI agents take off in India? How will they rewire existing habits, business models and profit pools? Since nobody knows for sure, we won't pretend to have all the answers. Instead we are going to break the narrative. Click here for details.