CRED Case Study – Business Mode, How CRED APP Works

CRED Case Study

Introduction

CRED is India’s first application that rewards its users for paying their credit card bills on time. It was founded by Kunal Shah, former founder of Freecharge in April, 2018.

Kunal Shah started CRED with a vision to create an exclusive community for India’s most trustworthy and creditworthy individuals.

It helps to manage and pay all your credit cards in one place. It also reminds us about payments, offers on our credit card, and also monitors your spending’s.

CRED Tagline: pay your credit card bills & earn rewards.

How CRED APP was started?

After selling Freecharge in 2015, Kunal Shah was researching another idea to make people’s life better. While researching, he found that so many things are automated in the developed nations like super markets with no cashiers, petrol pumps with no attendant, etc but there’s no such trustworthy system that helps the individuals to pay the right amount of credit card bills on time with zero additional charges.

According to one Kunal Shah’s interview with Yourstory, There are over 30 hidden charges and exorbitant interest costs that haunt you even if you pay a single rupee less than your full bill. The current model thrives on you making an error. It wants you to faulter. The system has taken the good guys for granted for far too long. Creditworthy individuals deserve better.

CRED Founder - Kunal Shah

But the problem was, why would people pay their credit card bills through their APP, then the idea came to reward the trustworthy credit card users, who pay their credit card bills on time. With this strategy to attract users, CRED was started in April, 2018.

Now, Cred is getting almost 341 thousand traffic per month organically with more than 3 thousand backlinks to their 690+ pages. (As per Ahrefs.com)

Here is the organic traffic growth chart of Cred since January 2019.

Organic traffic growth chart of Cred

Top Performing Pages of Cred in July 2023.

Performing Pages of Cred

CRED APP Features

CRED offers you to manage all your credit cards at one place.

Whenever you pay your credit card bills you’ll get some CRED Coins that you can use to get discounts on various brands partnered with CRED.

It analyzes your total spending, hidden charges, and tracks credit limits and reminds you about all these to avoid such additional charges.

Apart from all these, few more amazing features of CRED,

CRED Protect – CRED protect is the feature of the app that reads the statements from the email and gives information about- balance, due date, bank charges, and expense bifurcation.

Smart Statements – This feature helps the user to streamline their expenses by analyzing the CREDit card statements.

CRED Powerplay – It is the new feature of CRED after it has become the official partner of IPL 2020. It enables 100% cashback on the entire bill provided the bill is paid in the first six overs of both the innings. Also, the winner gets an exclusive spot in the virtual fan box.

CRED Funding Rounds

Announced Date Funding Round TypeMoney RaisedLead Investors 
Nov 6, 2018Seed Round$30 MillionSequoia Capital India, Ribbit Capital, RTP Global
Jan 1, 2019Seed RoundRainmatter Capital
Apr 16, 2019Series A₹1.8 BillionSriram Krishnan, Sriharsha Majety, Rainmatter Capital, Nithin Kamath, Nami Zarringhalam, Mukesh Bansal, Haresh Chawla, Amrish Rau, Amit Mital, Alan Mamedi
Jul 26, 2019Series B$120 MillionGemini Investments, Ribbit Capital, Sequoia Capital India, Tiger Global Management, Hillhouse Capital Group, General Catalyst, Greenoaks Capital, Dragoneer Investment Group.
July, 2019Series B$4 MillionSequoia Capital India
Nov, 2020Series C$80 MillionDST Global, Ribbit Capital, Sequoia Capital, and Tiger Global
According to YourStory

CRED APP Business Model

Currently there is no business model of CRED. Currently, CRED is focused on expanding its user base and not focuses on making any profit. Though the primary vision is to create a trustworthy community and company will further build their business model.

Various sources say they’re earning money from listing the brands in their CRED Coin redemption but it’s a conflict but CRED might use this in the future.

There’s a prediction that it will use their data to monetize their business. Currently, the app creates a database of users based on the bank details, bill payment history, rewards used, and interests but not share this data with any 3rd party. Therefore they can do multiple uses of users’ data in the future and can make a profitable business model around it.


Also check out 👉🏻 Khatabook Business Model


How CRED APP Works?

Step 1. Download the CRED App and register with your mobile no.

Step 2. Once the account is set up, the app scans the credit cards linked to the registered phone number.

Step 3. Users get access to the app if the credit score is higher than 750, otherwise the user went to their waitlist.

Step 4. If you get the access, then CRED app requires access to the mail id to read and scan your credit card transactions like due dates, statements from the applicable services, etc.

Step 5. And then you can earn CRED coins after paying your every credit card bill. One CRED coin equals Rs 1. These coins can then be used to claim rewards.

Step 6. Users can also choose to burn the coins to win cashback and then the cashback is directly credited to your credit card.

Most Asked FAQ’s

Q. Who is the founder of CRED?

Ans. Kunal Shah is the founder of CRED.

Q. How to contact CRED?

Ans. There’s no official contact number. Users can drop a mail on the email id – support@CRED.club

Q. Is CRED app safe?

Ans. The app is trustworthy as the records of the founder are intact. Also, it does not ask for any critical information such as the date of expiry or CVV.

Read More,

  1. Swiggy Case Study
  2. Udaan Business Model
  3. Top E-commerce Companies in India