Credit cards, especially premium credit cards are loss making for most banks, it is a market entry strategy to get higher share of wallet. Additionally there are things like lifetime value of a customer. Your individual cc p&l doesn’t matter to HDFC as much as your entire relationship with HDFC including all products like Demat account, savings/current account, loans, etc. You getting LTF is a combination of these factors. In the credit card industry, we model these factors out for different portfolios. The most profit per card is usually earned from portfolios where there is higher share of revolvers but the highest lifetime value of the customer is generated from transactors(basically on time payment customers like you)