BUY THE POWER OF EMI CARDS
The cards carry no processing fee or interest and allow you to decide the tenure of repayment
Gone are the days when you needed to save diligently for months together to buy an object of desire: electronic items, furniture, consumer durables, gadgets. Now, they can be yours on instant credit, with the added attraction of the facility to pay in easy instalments at no extra cost. Enter the EMI card. “Convenience and the preapproved feature are reasons behind the popularity of these cards,” says Brijesh Dalmia, director, Dalmia Advisory Services. “It’s a great marketing strategy that appeals to shoppers.”
Bajaj Finserv, the market leader in the EMI card segment, claims to have more than 10 million members. Capital First is another major lender in the category and offers the ‘Easy Buy EMI Card’. There are also several emerging online players, such as Kissht, Snapmint and ZestMoney, offering the zero-cost EMI conversion option on online markets, such as Amazon, Flipkart and Snapdeal, to name a few.
BIG PURCHASES MADE EASY
A major attraction of the EMI card is that it offers zero-cost finance. Once you have decided on a product at a particular price from a store, you can convert the amount to be paid into equal EMIs of your choice. You need not pay any processing fee or interest. This makes the EMI card a product that is very simple to understand. Vishal Dhawan, founder and chief financial planner at Plan Ahead Wealth Advisors, cites one of main factors behind the popularity of these cards: “It’s the ability to make higher value purchases in smaller sized digestible bits that they (buyers) believe is affordable for them.”
An EMI card is a payment instrument that comes with a pre-approved loan