India's HDFC Bank aims to reclaim credit card market share in coming quarters

(Corrects typo in "ago" in lead paragraph.)

MUMBAI (Reuters) -India's largest private sector lender HDFC Bank aims to regain lost market share in credit cards in the next 3-4 quarters after the central bank removed a ban imposed more than eight months ago.

The bank plans to issue up to 300,000 credit cards from next month which will be scaled up to half a million in the coming months, Parag Rao, Group Head-Payments at HDFC Bank said in a press briefing on Monday.

"We have significant headroom to grow...our conservative approach to credit will continue," Rao added as the bank's predominant focus on offering credit cards to its own bank customers will continue.

In December, the central bank barred the bank from issuing new credit cards due to outages in the bank's digital payment services.

As of May, HDFC's market share in the cards segment had fallen by two percentage points, according to a Macquarie report, but it is still the largest card issuer in India, commanding nearly 24% the total market.

(Reporting by Nupur Anand; Editing by Simon Cameron-Moore)