CRED, the credit card bill payment firm has seen its marketing expenses go down by 27 percent to Rs 713 crore in the fiscal ending March 2023, from Rs 976 crore in FY22, a Moneycontrol report revealed.
In advertising, almost everything CRED touches goes viral. Known for its quirky and hilarious advertising, the fintech startup in the past had rolled out a campaign in the form of classified ads which appear in newspapers as either product listings, announcements, matrimonial ads and even apologies. CRED’s eccentric ads featuring Zeenat Aman, Rahul Dravid and Madhuri Dixit have also gone viral.
The Moneycontrol report shared that as per Cred, an average monthly transacting user (MTU) performs around 20 sessions on the platform, which may include credit card bill payments, other utility bill payments, travel packages, shopping, money transfers, and merchant transactions through UPI.Kunal Shah’s Cred was valued at more than $6 billion last year and has around 12 million users. In contrast, the country’s unique credit card customers are estimated to be around 40 million. Recently, the number of credit cards issued in the country crossed 100 million, and most affluent customers use multiple credit cards.
Cred Cash is a big revenue driver for Cred. It has disbursed about Rs 12,000 crore worth of loans, sources shared. Almost 90 percent of its revenues come from Cred Cash, utility bill payments and from Cred Max, insurance services.
Credit card bill payments is mostly a reason for Cred to attract premium customers, it does not generate revenue by itself.
Moneycontrol report further revealed that today, about one-third of credit card bill payments are made through popular UPI apps. Cred has been expanding its UPI payments game over the last year. From around 0.3 percent market share in UPI transactions last October, it has gone up to 0.8 percent this year. In UPI transaction value, Cred’s market share improved to 2 percent this year from around 1.6 percent last year.