CRED After Kunal Shah: Can The ‘Walled Garden’ Business Model Pay For Itself?

For the first five years of CRED’s existence, the question on everyone’s minds was: how will CRED even make money. In 2023, we started seeing the first signs of how the fintech giant was going to monetise, and that started clearing the murkiness around CRED’s future.

What stumped many in the early days — and this could simply be called a misreading — was the CRED’s go-to-market strategy and customer profile was so differentiated from the likes of Paytm or PhonePe, which targeted mass fintech consumers. But CRED chose to go after a slice of the market that was harder to reach, but could prove more profitable in the long run.

CRED’s focus was on the cream of the Indian financial services consumer base. The credit card holders who routinely spent heavily through their cards but paid them back on time, and those who aspired for a more sophisticated lifestyle, and earning their long-term trust takes its time.

This has essentially been the story of CRED’s journey so far. And in the past few fiscal years (with revenue disclosed till FY25) we know that this long road has paid off to some extent. In fact, CRED has even diluted its earlier premise of only catering to the most creditworthy Indians and their aspirations.

Everything CRED has launched since it stepped out of its original credit card payments segment can be linked to aspiration. But the revenue build up has been slow as per what we know.

The startup closed FY25 with INR 2,735 Cr in operating revenue after operating revenue jumped 71% to INR 2,397 Cr in FY24. Operating loss declined 41% to INR 609 Cr in FY24, but as of now, CRED has not disclosed its bottom line for FY25.

After raising $900 Mn from Meta in June 2026, CRED is now valued at $4.5 Bn. Founder and former CEO Kunal Shah stepped away from the company amid this transaction and has moved to lead WhatsApp globally, while Miten Sampat has taken over as interim CEO. The deal has put the focus back on CRED’s brand, its members and the long-term sustainability of the business built around them.

Despite the massive funding, CRED’s revenue has not come out in public. That remains a major uncertainty  for those looking at this company. What we do know is where the industry is headed, because the likes of Paytm, MobiKwik, PhonePe and others have disclosed their numbers to a large extent.

This gives us an idea of the state of the fintech super app ecosystem where CRED is aiming to hold its ground. The pieces are the same as PhonePe, which we recently looked at, but what makes CRED special is how it has kept steadfast to its core customer base even as it replicated the super app formula.

The revenue model is built around payments and rewards as a top-of-the-funnel lever with merchants and consumers getting their own revenue centres, followed by loans, personal finance management and investments, insurance broking, digital commerce and more built around the payments business. Like for like, this is comparable to something like PhonePe, but there are nuances. Which is what we are diving into now.

Payments: Premium Merchants, Creditworthy Customers  

For CRED’s super app go-to-market strategy to succeed, it needed to get its customer profile exactly right. It used the filter of creditworthiness to finetune its ideal customer profile and this was key in the initial days.

CRED originally admitted users with a credit score of 750 or more, giving it a narrow but valuable audience. These members are more likely to hold several credit cards, repay on time and qualify for loans, insurance or investment products. The score-gated entry rule also made the club feel exclusive.

Choosing credit card bill payments as a focus and staying away from UPI for a long time was another strategic move. It meant not diluting the premium positioning too quickly. Simply because credit card bill payments have a small merchant discount rate attached to them, while UPI does not.

The problem was early on this meant sacrificing profitability and revenue scale. Which is where a lot of the questions around CRED’s potential to monetise came from.

For PhonePe, Google Pay and Paytm, the prize is scale. More users bring more merchants, transactions and chances to sell merchant services or distribute financial products. CRED is playing a different game. It is willing to serve a smaller base if each user can generate more revenue.

Like any other super app, payments for CRED is an ‘always-on’ highway to take users deeper into its funnel. This became more true once CRED jumped on to the UPI payments bandwagon and invited more and more users into its funnel. Like every other UPI payments app, it too brought in maturity in terms of merchant services and consumer-centric features.

The company earns from payment-related services such as interchange fees for wallet to UPI transactions, commissions from billers for bill payments and credit card payments, commissions on rent payments through credit cards, subscription fees from a thin slice of the merchant ecosystem for its offline payments services such as QR codes and POS devices as well as from online merchants through its payment aggregator licence.

This is parity with every major UPI app out there. So there’s no differentiation here. But CRED likes to push the envelope when it comes to the usability of the product and its features such as anti-fraud insurance and other security measures. We have argued in the past that CRED’s signature USP is its product design, and this will be key in the long run because super apps are more or less on par when it comes to revenue streams.

In FY25, CRED said it had 1.26 Cr monthly transacting users, with transaction frequency rising 34% to 14.4 times a month for each user. Its total payment value grew 23% to INR 8.5 Lakh Cr. The numbers show that CRED has moved beyond a once-a-month bill reminder and into a wider payments relationship with the end consumer and this is essential for its super app play.

The premium focus manifests itself in terms of CRED”s average ticket size for UPI transactions. Even though CRED has a low market share, it is well ahead of every major UPI app in terms of ticket size.

For instance, ironically given Shah’s switch away from CRED, Meta-owned WhatsApp surpassed CRED in both UPI market share and transaction volume in June 2026. But WhatsApp processed 15.1 Cr transactions worth ₹11,391.85 Cr at an average transaction size of ₹754, compared to CRED’s 14.2 Cr transactions amounting to ₹55,116.8 Cr or ₹3,881 per transaction.

In the same month, UPI market leader PhonePe’s average ticket size was roughly ₹1,354 and Google Pay was just below that at ₹1,304. The challenge of course is that CRED is unable to push the accelerator on the growth at the same rate as some of the other players that are not bound by a sharp customer focus.

The model becomes stronger when the same member uses several products. CRED claims that 45% of its active members now use three or more of its products, and this is critical because the next steps in the funnel are highly dependent on this habituation.

Stepping Up The Lending Game

The most profitable part of the funnel is one where CRED has a bit of a leg up over the competition. CRED Cash is the main lending product offered by the company which earns money not just as a lending service provider or distributor, but also has an NBFC.

That is CRED’s one key advantage over other lending apps such as PhonePe, Paytm or Google Pay. The company owns just over 23% of non-banking finance company Newtap Finance, which enables CRED to have a share of the direct lending revenue.

Besides, like many of its rival apps, CRED has also tied up with more than 12 partner banks and NBFCs that decide eligibility and disburse the loans through the app. This lets the company earn from loan distribution and servicing without always lending from its books.

It has lending arrangements with YES Bank and L&T Finance, where Newtap provides 10% of the capital and the partner provides 90%.

As of June 2026, CRED’s managed lending assets had reached INR 24,000 Cr, up from more than INR 19,000 Cr earlier. Its disclosures also show INR 4,730.16 Cr in outstanding assets across portfolios covered by default loss guarantee arrangements. This is the size of the covered loan pools, not the amount guaranteed.

Besides personal loans, the company offers loans against mutual funds through CRED Cash+ and has a peer-to-peer lending business powered by RBI-authorised LiquiLoans.

Under the latter, individuals can directly lend to other individuals and earn through the interest rates with CRED and LiquiLoans keeping a share as well. Funds invested by users are spread across borrowers and returns depend on repayments. CRED enables onboarding and communication, while Liquiloans operates the platform. But P2P is a risky asset class because neither the principal nor the return is guaranteed.

The latest terms cap investments at INR 10 Lakh across P2P platforms unless a user provides the required net-worth certificate. Liquiloans says it has not accepted new lenders or fresh funds since August 16, 2024 following changes to the RBI’s P2P rules. It might not be a major revenue centre for CRED, but it is likely to have outstanding commitments under this business.

The more significant part of CRED’s lending products suite is CRED Cash+ distributes credit lines against mutual funds through Newtap and DSP Finance, while home loan balance transfers are offered through L&T Finance.

Cash by CRED, launched in June 2026, takes the model beyond CRED members by combining credit checks, affordability analysis and loan offers in a separate app.

Interim CEO Sampat has made clear where the company plans to use its new capital from Meta.

“Most customers now discover or take personal loans through fintechs and that shift is getting accelerated. While this capital gives us the ability to be more aggressive, it is not like we have plans to suddenly triple the marketing budget or splurge,” he said in a recent interview. 

Together, these products show the larger plan. CRED wants to own the borrower relationship across unsecured, secured and P2P credit, while banks, NBFCs and individual lenders provide most of the capital.

Garage, Money And Store Are CRED’s Other Bets

If lending monetises creditworthiness, CRED’s other products seek to turn the same relationship into insurance, wealth and commerce revenue. This is in line with the aspirational nature of CRED’s primary customer or its ideal customer profile.

Nothing defines this better than CRED Garage, which is a motor insurance and FASTag payments product dressed up as a vehicle management product. This is the kind of product direction that differentiates CRED from other companies which might simply launch a FASTag or insurance component as a tab on their home page.

CRED positions it as a vehicle management app where consumers can monitor fuel expenses, maintenance costs, traffic challans, reminders for motor vehicle law compliance updates and more. The monetisable bit are insurance and FASTag payments which bring in commissions to CRED. Further, the startup partnered with used-car marketplaces CARS24 and Spinny to enable users to sell their cars on its platform.

As per CRED, currently 7 Mn CRED Members use CRED Garage. It has partnerships with Kotak, Go Digit, ICICI Lombard, Acko among others.

With more maturity in these lines of businesses, CRED has to disclose revenue make-up more granularly. At the moment, there’s no clarity on how much the company earns through Garage.

The same could be said for CRED Money, which is its personal finance management product, built around the account aggregator framework.

The acquisition of Kuvera added an investment tech layer to CRED, which always had such aspirations. It was in talks to take over smallcase at one point, but that did not pan out. So when CRED acquired it in 2024, Kuvera, which only had about 3 Lakh users and around $1.4 Bn in AUM, the questions were around whether this was worth it.

Last year, CRED rolled out a co-branded credit card with IndusInd Bank, an expanded personal finance management feature, and an invite-only membership programme called Sovereign. With Sovereign, CRED is also entering the concierge services game, as the company promises “early-stage investment access with India’s top investors, curated art and collectibles; cultural influence, and white-glove travel including civilian spaceflight,” as per its press statement.

Earlier this year, Kuvera launched a new feature on called Surplus, enabling investors to invest their additional capital into liquid funds managed by leading SEBI-registered asset management companies.

But the bigger challenge is not launching products — CRED is excellent at that — but it is persuading high networth users and the affluent class  to move an investing habit already held by banks, wealth managers and dedicated trading platforms like Groww, AngelOne, Zerodha and others.

Finally, CRED Store plays a small but critical role in the company’s walled garden. It hosts about 800 brands and charges no listing commission, so it is not a conventional marketplace business built on a take rate. Its role is to support retention, product discovery and brand partnerships that match the customer persona that CRED is going for. The store reinforces the notion that CRED is what those who shop new and premium brands use.

For now, these new lines of businesses are not major extensions of the core engine like the loans business has become. But CRED needs them to be utilities and fuel repeat transactions or drive engagement within the app.

CRED In The Super App Race

None of this will be a surprise to anyone who has followed the consumer fintech wave over the past three years. The fintech convergence has been a long time coming.

But even with new product launches, super apps — CRED and indeed others — have not solved their principal problem of profitable transactions. Some say only MDR in UPI can change that, but Paytm and MobiKwik have shown that patient scaling has its place too.

What is indubitable is that diversification has to happen. It’s been a year since CRED made a major product push and something new may be on the anvil with the fresh funds from Meta. Plus, the new leadership will also have to prove that CRED after Kunal Shah is still the same innovation engine.

In fact, as the past two years have shown, whenever CRED makes a big product push like Garage or CRED Cash, it brings in a new wave of users that previously felt excluded by CRED. The app used to be behind velvet ropes, but no longer. In fact, it needs to be more welcoming to have more people inside its walled garden.

A word about how the fintech super app ecosystem is playing out — the era of high customer growth may not be around much longer. Apps will now need to maximise monetisation through their most active users as much as possible. Previously, there was a longer rope, but with AI and agentic workflows stepping in, payment apps will have to show more revenue on the table rather than product downloads and pure engagement metrics.

In this light, the question is whether the consumer acquisition engine built around a wider base of customers and merchants can become a high-margin financial services business because it is inherently a low volume play.

CRED needs to pull all levers to truly justify its premium positioning. It has shown flashes of that through UPI — as we explained above — but a lot of that capital from Meta will go towards rapid expansion of the user base to add some more volume and truly maximise the revenue capability of CRED’s various pieces.

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