Niyo IDFC Card vs Niyo Global DCB Card
Update (12th July 2021) : Niyo no longer offers the Niyo IDFC bank account. They now offer Niyo Equitas bank account instead.
Niyo DCB account is still offered.
Hence you can use the information about Niyo DCB account from this article, but information about the Niyo IDFC product will be irrelevant.
Hey everyone! Today I am comparing two products by Niyo.
One of them is the Niyo Global Card by DCB bank & the other is the Niyo IDFC Card.
Niyo is known for providing multiple financial products but their claim to fame is their 0% forex charge debit cards.
Forex for who aren’t familiar is basically a short form for Foreign Exchange.
When you travel to a foreign country and you pay in a foreign currency you are charged a forex markup by your bank and that charge can be as high as 3.5%.
So for a $1000 transaction, you end up paying $1035 and these charges can slowly add up to a much higher number.
Niyo wanted to solve this problem for Indians who go abroad for travel or other purposes so they decided to make a card with 0% forex charges.
Niyo has been around for 5 years now and they launched with the Niyo DCB bank card at first and it was well accepted and I heard a lot of good things about them so I thought of getting the card.
But when I came to their website I saw two different products with almost the same benefits and it got a little confusing so I decided to do some research to find out the differences.
And I thought of creating a video & writing this article to share my findings with all of you so that you don’t have to do spend your time researching.
Here is the video if you are interested:
To be honest, the biggest and the most practical difference I have found is that when you are making an online transaction in a foreign country you get your OTP on your email if you use the Niyo DCB card.
And for the Niyo IDFC card, you get your OTP on your phone and if your phone isn’t working in that country you could face some trouble with the Niyo IDFC card.
The second difference is that the Niyo DCB account is a current account so you don’t get any interest on the deposits you make in that account. On the other hand, the Niyo IDFC account is a savings account.
Niyo IDFC gives interest up to 7% if you deposit more than 1 Lakh rupees and since Niyo DCB is a current account you earn no interest on the deposits.
That being said, since the Niyo IDFC account is a savings account, it comes with a Minimum Average Balance requirement of ₹10,000; there is no such requirement for the Niyo DCB bank account.
The last difference has to do with the apps, earlier both of the cards could be controlled from the same app but Niyo recently created separate apps for both of the accounts and one can easily figure out the Niyo DCB card app is tailored towards the travellers because it has features like currency converter, on the other hand, Niyo IDFC app can be compared to a banking app with more wealth management features.
To conclude, if you are just going for a short trip it’s better to carry the Niyo DCB card with you and if you are going for a longer trip, for example, to study, it's better to carry the Niyo IDFC card so that you can earn interest on your deposits.
But the safest bet would be to carry both the cards so that one could act as a backup for the other card and you get best of both the worlds.
I hope I was able to bring some clarity if you have any questions, feel free to put them in the comments section below and I would love to help.
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