Mumbai: Union Bank of India (UBI), focusing on increasing its retail banking business, is launching an independent international credit card in association with Visa International. The bank will utilise the shared infrastrucutrue for e-payments by Venture Infotek, India's premier shared e-infrastructure service provider for its entire credit card processing.

UBI will issue 250,000 cards by March 2006, and expects to double it within one year. The bank has 2,054 branches, and 98-lakh savings accounts.

Venture Infotek will prove value-added services to the Bank and extend new features as an offering to all its cards variants, such a s "Apply" an application processing and credit scoring module to screen customers, web enabled "Collections" module to manage its credit outstandings, and fraud monitoring.