Credit Card Users Won’t Benefit Cashback at Petrol Pumps from October

After a recent guideline by OMCs, the banks will be discontinuing the cashback offers for the payments by credit cards at the petrol pumps. This guideline will be in effect by the month of October, however, all the offers and cashbacks will be continued for all the other digital payment methods.

This decision of discontinuing the cashback schemes was advised by the public sector fuel retail companies and will be applicable by October 1 across the country.

…as advised by public sector oil marketing companies (OMCs), the 0.75% cashback on fuel transactions will be discontinued w.e.f. (with effect from) Oct (20)19

a message sent by SBI Cards to users said.

The advice of discontinuing the cashback offers was given by the oil marketing companies for the credit card users in order to reduce the losses experienced by them due to these offers, but as said before, all the offers and cashback offers will be continued like before for all other digital payment methods.

The three major public-sector fuel retail companies in our country, Oil Marketing Companies (OMCs), Hindustan Petroleum Corp. Ltd, Bharat Petroleum Corp. Ltd and Indian Oil Corp. Ltd provided a cashback of 0.75% to the credit card users, debit card users and digital wallet users.

The cashback offer has an interesting history, and it goes back to the time of demonetisation when the government introduced the cashback offers to promote the digital payment methods among the people of the country to achieve the goal of Digital India and Cashless Economy. Also, this was done to tackle the widespread cash crunch throughout the country.

Now after the widespread use of digital payments and increasing digital payment users the OMCs were unable to bear the cost of these discounts and decided to put a halt to these discounts to maintain the revenue of the firms.

Actually, what the OMCs did was more or less apt if we see from their side, as the discount and cashbacks were intended to make public shift to digital payment methods and reduce the payments by cash and after 3 years, the goal seems to be fulfiled and people have already made digital payments a daily routine.

What do you people think, did the companies took a correct decision of discontinuing these cashbacks?  Let us know in the comments.