Why don't banks give credit where it is needed?

Claire is a 32-year-old mother and the wife of a fund manager at one of Hong Kong's biggest banks, but when she hands her credit card to a waiter after a meal, she never knows if it will be declined.

When Claire and John (not their real names), who earns a six-figure salary, returned to Hong Kong after a two-year stint working in Japan, HSBC would only offer the couple a joint credit card with a limit of HK$40,000, despite the balance on their savings account being 10 times that amount.

"The limit was a fraction of my monthly salary," says John, 34. "So when we pay for flights or were trying to book a private hospital for my daughter's birth, we couldn't use the card. In restaurants we'd often be declined as my wife and I wouldn't know how much the other one had spent. I had several cards, but she only had one. It meant trawling the streets with a small child to find an ATM."

Yet when John wrote to HSBC asking to increase the limit he was declined without explanation.

His story is not uncommon - if anything, John and Claire are the lucky ones.

A growing number of Hong Kong expats with unblemished credit records, little debt, permanent employment contracts and respectable salaries find it difficult to obtain a credit card at all - and impossible to find out why. Many couples report one partner being approved while the other - sometimes better paid - is rejected.