IDFC is becoming an increasingly well-known Bank. It has only recently started issuing credit cards too. IDFC First Select Credit card features are too good considering all card are issued Life Time Free.
Do go for this card blindly, lifetime free cards seldom get better than this.
Welcome Offer and fees
The icing on the cake is the offer to claim a Gift Voucher of Rs 500 on spending Rs 15000 within 90 days.
A comfortable voucher to achieve. And yes, you can choose it to be an Amazon voucher.
Additionally, you can use my referral. This will give you and me extra 2000 reward points (worth Rs 500) on spending min Rs 500 within 30 days of card issuance.
Eligibility
Till now they have not released the income requirements for getting this card.
I received an invite email to check if I was eligible for this card as I was already a holder for the IDFC First saving account. This bank was providing up-until recently 7% interest on it saving account. For comparison my SBI account was providing 5.5% interest rate on its fixed deposit (don’t even ask about its savings interest rate). It’s presently devalued to 6pcpa. However, it is still a good number. I had maintained an average monthly balance of about Rs 1lac. I suspect this is the only number on which they select what variant to give away other than your CIBIL score.
If you APPLY with my referral Link for the savings account, both of us will get a Rs 250 voucher.
The application was approved for the “Select” variant. I was not asked for any documents. There are two more variants – Classic (lower version) & Wealth (higher version).
Lounge Access
International Lounges: Not Provided
Domestic Lounges: Complimentary Domestic Airport lounge (16 per year). This is a very healthy number. Incidentally, the IDFC First Debit card also provides domestic lounge access.
Railway Lounge Access: Very few cards provide railway lounge access. This card does. 4 complimentary accesses per quarter (16 per year). The locations are given in the below table.
Table Source: FIRST-Select-Privileges.pdf by IDFC First.
The lounges look to be much better than railway AC waiting coaches along with complimentary food options. I tried using my card for the Ahmedabad location, however they denied access saying that the system is not accepting. However, it was just the second day after my card had arrived, and I plan to try again.
IDFC FIRST Select Credit Card Reward Points
IDFC First Select Credit Card benefits rewards ae quite good considering it’s a lifetime free credit card. Also the points never Expire.
3X Reward Points on all Offline Spends which is 0.75% return
6X Reward Points on Online Spends which is 1.5% return 😊
10X Rewards on all spends done on your Birthday
10X Reward Points on all Spends above ₹20,000 which is 2.5% return.
Kindly note for spends upto ₹20,000, 10X is not applicable.
The blessing is you can easily pay “rent” to get 10x rewards.
6X points are given the next day of your transaction. The rest 4X do come at the end of the billing cycle. They even advertise that this is valid for "rent" payments :)
10X excludes Fuel, Insurance, EMI transactions and Cash withdrawals.
The best part is that this reward program has no capping on the points you can earn.
Reward Points Redemption
The points earned can only be used after the end of the billing cycle. There are many vouchers that you can buy.
Amazon vouchers are the ones you should go for. There are two good news regarding this.
1) You can buy even a Re. 1 amazon voucher for 4 points. I think this is the first time you can use your reward points so freely. We are generally used to redeeming in set multiples of
Rs. 500. This is a welcome change and much appreciated. You can redeem all your points in one go.
2) There is no redemption charge. SBI and HDFC are notorious to charge Rs. 99 + taxes extra per redemption request.
IDFC First Select Credit Card offers
This is card that keeps on giving.
Book my Show 1+1 on movie tickets (off upto Rs. 250)
This works twice per month and you can also buy 2+2 (off upto Rs. 500)
Fuel Surcharge waiver upto Rs. 300 per month
Cash Advance: International & Domestic Cash Advance Fee- ₹250. You can withdraw upto Rs. 20000. For one month the interest rate works out to be 1.25%. This is an average deal but useful when you are in a crunch.
Effective Reward Rate
The below table estimates the average savings as per my own expenses.
The effective reward rate is above 3%.
IDFC First Select card Savings Calculator
You can use this calculator to find out how much will save by using this credit card. Just punch in your expected expenses and find out if this is the best credit card for you.
If the Calculator doesn't run, click here and run again :)
Rating
Easily 4/5
It only loses a point as it does not have a reward portal like HDFC’s smartbuy or SBI yono.