CRED’s Unveils Fourth New Offering In 4 Months, Launches UPI P2P Payments

In what is CRED’s fourth new launch in the past four months, the fintech major on Monday (April 17) rolled out its Unified Payments Interface (UPI)-based peer-to-peer (P2P) payments system.

The service will allow CRED customers to make P2P payments for sending money to other users via UPI IDs or contact numbers. With this, CRED aims to elevate user experience and make payments instant and secure.

Describing the features, CRED said that the new launch will allow users to set payment reminders for recurring transactions and will also include a host of safety features. These will include ‘proactive nudges’ during potentially risky and high-value payment scenarios. 

The new service will also allow users to set custom virtual payment addresses (VPAs) to protect the privacy of the users. 

“CRED Protect will actively nudge members to protect their identity through a system generated alias UPI ID- helping them mask personal details like mobile numbers and ensuring privacy. Once Custom VPAs are activated, payments will be made via members’ alias UPI ID by default,” the company said in a release. 

The new service will also include a new ‘WIN-WIN’ feature, under which cashbacks will be credited into the CRED balance of both payer and recipient for payments made to ‘special contacts’.

The users will be able to redeem the balance on bill payments or store transactions on the CRED app. 

CRED has been on a spree of new launches over the past four months. Last month, the fintech platform forayed into the luxury travel space with CRED escapes, which offers a curated travel platform for its customers. 

In February, CRED also launched its buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) product called CRED Flash and prior to that, it launched its tap-to-pay offering for retail payments using credit cards. It also unveiled a ‘Scan & Pay’ feature on its app in October last year to enable its customers to make payments directly through their bank accounts.

The slew of launches are part of CRED’s renewed focus on scaling up revenue and adding more customers to its user base. 

The host of announcements come amid mounting losses for the unicorn. The company saw its net loss surge 2.4X year-on-year (YoY) to INR 1,279 Cr in the financial year 2021-22 (FY22) while revenue from operations stood at INR 393.5 Cr. 

The plethora of launches in the past few months has pitted the unicorn directly against fintech giants such as PhonePe, Google Pay and Paytm across multiple offerings. 

CRED’s foray into the P2P UPI payments arena comes at a time when the space is making rapid strides in numbers. As per the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) data, UPI logged 868.5 Cr transactions worth INR 14.1 Lakh Cr in March.

During the month, CRED processed 4.2 Cr transactions totalling INR 21,056.31 Cr. 

However, CRED appears to be looking at the larger UPI P2P payments, which accounted for  77.15% of the total transaction value and 44.43% of the total transaction count last month.