Nitin Gupta (left), general manager of MasterCard International (South Asia), with C.P. Swarankar, executive director of Punjab National Bank, in New Delhi on Monday. Picture by Ramakant Kushwaha

New Delhi, Feb. 6: MasterCard International and Punjab National Bank (PNB) today introduced a joint debit card ? the PNB MasterCard Debit Card.

The card can be used for all electronic transactions and will be accepted at over 120000 merchant establishments as well as 25000 ATMs across the country, said C.P. Swarankar, executive director of PNB.

To use the debit card for any purpose other than withdrawing money through ATMs, customers will have to sign as is the case with credit cards, MasterCard South Asia general manager Nitin Gupta said.

However, the ATM facility could only be used only on the basis of a personal identification number (PIN).

PNB already has a PIN-based debit card, Maestro, in the market.

Swarankar said the bank is targeting at least one crore customers in the current year. Every account holder of all the 1800 centrally networked branches will be issued such cards. At present, the bank has 3.6 crore customers across 4500 branches in the country. The bank plans to bring all the branches under the central network within a couple of years.

Swarankar also said PNB does not plan to increase interest rates in the short-term. “At least in the near future, we do not plan to increase the rates,” he said. The coming budget should address the problem of de-acceleration of deposits in the banking system, he added.

“If interest rates do not firm up further in the system, we do not have any plans to hike the rates. But if they go further northwards, we will review the present rate structure,” he said.

Talking about pressure on interest rates in the system, he said it was definitely building up on the sub-BPLR, but card rates would remain intact at the moment.

The bank, which had hiked interest rates on domestic term deposits by 0.4-0.57 per cent last week, said the coming budget should contain measures to ease availability of deposits to meet increase in credit offtake necessitated by booming economic growth. Swarankar’s statement assumed significance in the wake of HDFC and IDBI hiking home loan rates and the SBI reviewing these rates.