With just days remaining before Navratri, banks are rolling out comprehensive festive offers to woo retail customers during the festival season. According to Business Standard, HDFC Bank is set to launch its Festive Treats 2026 campaign on October 10 with more than 10,000 offers spanning loans, cards, accounts, and EasyEMI. The campaign provides savings of up to ₹70,000 on purchases across categories including electronics, travel, home décor, and jewellery. Other major lenders including State Bank of India (SBI), Axis Bank, Yes Bank, Kotak Mahindra Bank, and Punjab National Bank (PNB) have also started rolling out festival season offers, as reported by Business Standard.
Punjab National Bank has officially launched its 2026 festive retail loan campaign under the name 'PNB Utsav Festivities 2026 – Celebrate Dreams, Celebrate Life', as reported by Zee Business. The campaign offers a full waiver of upfront, processing and documentation fees along with a 5-basis-point rate concession for home loans. For car loans, the campaign provides full waiver of upfront and processing fees, eliminating initial costs that customers typically face. The offers are valid until December 31, providing customers with extended access to these attractive benefits during the festive period.
The campaign introduces mortgage loans with a 10-basis-point concession for existing home loan borrowers, including top-up loans, according to Zee Business. For loan against property (LAP) under 'My Property' scheme, PNB will bear NEC/legal and valuation charges of up to ₹15,000, excluding GST, subject to applicable terms and conditions. These enhanced benefits significantly expand the scope of the festive campaign beyond traditional home and car loans to include comprehensive asset financing solutions.
According to Business Standard, lenders are not going into overdrive for retail customers amid robust loan growth and expectations of a reversal in the rate cycle. The credit growth stood at 18.1 per cent as of September 15, while deposit growth was 17.3 per cent, as per latest RBI data. A private banker noted that festival season offers appear relatively muted this year, but this is not reflective of underlying asset quality concerns, rather strong credit growth and healthy deposit mobilisation in Q2FY27. The upcoming RBI monetary policy committee meeting is widely expected to increase the policy repo rate by 25 basis points - the first increase in two and a half years.
As reported by Business Standard, banks are considering fee waivers and targeted concessions to lower the upfront cost of borrowing for prospective customers rather than relying only on interest-rate cuts. This approach allows lenders to push retail credit while protecting lending margins. The festival season push typically begins towards the end of Q2FY27, with the only reason it has not started around the same time this year being that Q2FY27 was particularly fulfilling for banks. ICICI Bank has launched its Festive Bonanza with offers across online shopping, electronics, travel, furniture and home décor, partnering with Flipkart for its Big Billion Days sale offering 10 per cent discount across products.
