| Thursday, 25 December 2025 |
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Good morning [%first_name |Dear Reader%],
Merry Christmas from The Ken!
2025 has been a year of memorable highs and lows in finance. Dollar spikes, GST reforms, RBI’s rate cuts, and the bullion bullying its way to record highs—not to mention how artificial intelligence intersected with and disrupted the space. These are just a few headliners in a year that has felt like five.
And every Thursday, like clockwork, Ka-Ching! landed in your inbox, doing the heavy lifting by decoding everything from metal credit cards to spat between startups, even throwing in a Tolstoy story for good measure. Our writers sunk their teeth into policy, reading hundreds of pages of legalese. They did the math behind IPO-bound companies and the valuations they were seeking. And they traced the rise and end of many a fintech. We even dared to dream what a world without OTPs would be like, and come 2026, it might just start becoming a reality. But we only tease.
To wrap up this exhaustive year, we’re looking back at a few of our favourite editions of our finance weekly, so follow along!
In 2025, we witnessed one of the worst air crashes in Indian aviation history. The resulting anger and blame, fired at everything that went wrong, took in an unsuspecting victim—the SBI Card. India’s second-largest credit card issuer quietly rolled back an air-accident insurance cover that offered compensation of up to Rs 1 crore on certain cards. At first glance, it seemed then like a decision made in the wake of the tragic incident.
Immediately, social-media warriors took to their keyboards, calling it a cold, heartless, calculative move from SBI Card. The Ken has learnt that even the State Bank of India’s top management—the bank has a stake in the card company—enquired about the timing of the move.
But most reports on the development missed a small yet important detail.
SBI Card had rolled out these changes a month ago, well before the tragedy on 12 June. The notice to cardholders intimating them of this rollback can be traced back to 31 May with the help of the Wayback Machine, a digital archive of the World Wide Web. SBI Card, unfortunately, did not carry this date on its notice, a step that could have easily avoided this bad PR.
Arundhati Ramanathan brought us the numbers that made sense of their reasoning–such premiums were costing the credit card company at least Rs 18 crore annually. “And every penny saved counts for the card company, which is already having a tough time, with profits dipping 20% year-on-year in FY25,” she wrote. Read the story below.
The curious case of SBI Card’s air-crash insurance
An undated notice to cardholders has landed the card issuer in hot water
In other banking news, Anand Kalyanaraman, examined a promising alternative at a time of falling bank deposit rates: the Floating Rate Savings Bond (FRSB).
Introduced in July 2020, the FRSB has much going for it. It is issued by the RBI on behalf of the government, so it is as safe as it gets. It’s open to all. Any investor can invest any amount in the FRSB without restrictions. Its deposit tenure of seven years is longish, but not as long as the PPF. And the interest is paid out every six months, which is good for those who seek regular income.
Perhaps most importantly, the interest rate it currently offers—8.05%—is much better than what most banks give.
A possible downside, though, is evident in its name. The FRSB’s interest rate is a “floating” rate, pegged to the prevailing rate on the National Savings Certificate (NSC), another small savings scheme offered by the government.
Read more about what Anand calls an oasis in a desert of drying interest rates in his piece.
The name’s Bond. Floating Rate Savings Bond.
Bank deposit rates are drying up. But there’s still an oasis in the desert
March was particularly brutal for Indusind Bank and its former managing director and CEO, Sumanth Kathpalia.
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