Half a rupee

Published 29 September 2026

The cleanest devaluation is the one that touches every point you already hold: change what a point is worth.

On 1 September 2024, Punjab National Bank did exactly that. A short "Reward Point Notice" posted to its card site informed holders that the redemption value of a PNB reward point - ₹0.50 - was now ₹0.25. Every point in every account lost half its cash value overnight, including points earned under the old rate. No spend category changed, no cap moved. The currency itself was devalued, the way a central bank devalues - except this central bank owed its depositors nothing but notice.

The notice was not a rumor. It sits on the issuer's own site: the Reward Point Notice (Hindi PDF), with English coverage by CardInsider. In the AP Labs dataset, the same effective-September-2024 cut shows up across twelve PNB products - the RuPay Platinum, RuPay Select, RuPay Millennial, Visa Signature, both Rakshak cards, the Global Visa range, the Salary cards and the Luxura pair. A single page of prose, twelve card portfolios halved.

Axis Bank took the same lever to a more affluent audience. Until September 2023, Magnus cardholders could convert EDGE reward points to airline and hotel miles at five points to four miles. The July 2023 notice moved it to five for two, per Mint - a 60% cut in the miles your points buy, applied to a card whose entire proposition was travel. A Magnus holder sitting on 500,000 points woke up to find them worth 200,000 miles instead of 400,000.

Where the point settles

The direction of travel is visible in the dataset. Of the 232 cards analyzed, 106 carry an explicit, unambiguous rupee value per point in their current documents. Half of those - 50 cards - value the point at exactly ₹0.25. Only 17 still hold a full rupee, and 14 sit at ₹0.50. The quarter-rupee point is becoming the industry standard not because anyone announced it, but because one notice at a time, issuers drifted toward it.

The arithmetic for the cardholder is brutal in its simplicity. A card earning 2 points per ₹100 at ₹0.50 a point returns 1% of spend. Halve the point and the same spending, the same earn rate, the same brochure now returns 0.5%. Nothing on the marketing page needs to change. "Earn 2 points per ₹100" is as true the day after the notice as the day before. That is what makes the point-value cut the perfect crime of rewards devaluation: it is invisible in everything except the redemption cart.

And it compounds with every other move in the playbook. Cap the categories, exclude the big spends, then halve what the surviving points convert to. Each cut is small enough to survive a news cycle. Stacked over three years, they halve the value of the average cardholder's loyalty twice over.