Two fields in which one must never go by "common sense", Law & Finance. I agree something is better than nothing but in many people's experience, customer care will often say things not really true & for which they can't be held accountable.As for the case here, kotak 811 cb comes after weeks/month so most likely it is done via some sort of automation+manual intervention combo which means they can always manually exclude any txn they think is excluded even if it's mcc is not under the excluded category & most likely this is why they specifically mentioned "utilities payment" & not mcc of utility payments.