CRED launches financial management platform CRED Money

Reward-based payments platform CRED has launched financial management platform CRED Money that allows users to see balances and transactions from multiple bank accounts, wallets, and UPI IDs in one place, making recurring payments, and analyse spendings, among others.

With CRED Money, members can understand their financial patterns without sharing their bank account. The app will fetch details from participants of the account aggregator ecosystem such as banks, mutual funds, and insurance, among others.

CRED Money will be rolled out to its members in phases starting today. It will also allow customers to trace forgotten investments, tax refunds and streamlining recurring payments such as SIP, insurance policy and track transactions across bank, accounts, UPI ids and credit cards among others.

According to CRED Money, it is built on the account aggregator (AA) framework, which enables consumers to permit secure and encrypted sharing of their bank account information between authorised organisations.

Experts see this product as another attempt from CRED to make more daily or weekly use cases. The company also launched UPI-based payment service in April 2023 and vehicle management platform Garage in September.  It’s also beefing up its offerings in the wealth management space after Kuvera’s acquisition in February this year. 

More importantly, the service will continue to provide CRED With data that helps it map its user’s financial status, habits and investments even more closely, to target offerings from its own, or third party firms better. Consider how its loan product and Cred Mint offerings have emerged as a key growth driver with a great experience in terms of low defaults for CRED.

The financial sector in India is one of the most heavily digitalised sectors today, a fact that has ot escaped any firm, though many consumers may not realise it yet. That is what has created mini-opportunities like finding long lost investments as long as they are linked to a PAN or a Phone, for instance, something CRED is also playing on. Or identifying underperformers in a portfolio more effectively. CRED, with its ‘creamy layer’ of customers in the top quartile by credit rating, clearly sees a less is more opportunity from these well off users.

On the UPI front, CRED UPI emerged as the fourth largest player in terms of processing UPI payments. As per NPCI data, CRED is far behind PhonePe, Google Pay and Paytm but it surpassed Amazon Pay, WhatsApp and BHIM in terms of transaction volume and processed more than one third of Paytm’s value of transactions in June.

As of FY23, the firm drew the majority of its primary revenue from facilitating rental transactions, interest income on the p2p loans, processing fees (on loans), advertising space and listing fees (on CRED Marketplace). Its operating revenue grew 3.5X to Rs 1,400.6 crore in FY23 from Rs 393.5 crore in FY22 while the company’s losses saw a modest 5.3% increase to Rs 1,347 crore in FY23 .