CRED — Rewarding you for paying credit card bills (Product Deep-Dive)
In Dec 2018, a new app launch from Kunal Shah, named CRED caught my eye. I was hooked onto the Credit Card world after understanding the benefits of using a paid card.
I downloaded the beta and was instantly amazed. I am now incentivized to simply PAY my credit card bills, and in a much easier process. I frantically got all my friends and colleagues to install the app too. Moreover, according to some calculations I did on December 4th, CRED points were INCREDIBLE value, sometimes around 0.2 paise per point. That’s a 20,000 INR reward for a spend of 1,00,000. (20 Percent)
An idea like this still does not exist anywhere in the world. Meaningful incentives to pay your bill on time was a game-changer.
Fast-forward about a year ahead, CRED is targeting 15–20 million “premium” users, that are in CRED’s case, something more than users. Using CRED is slowly turning into a habit, rather than a simple app for its users. Personally, I’ve shifted from cumbersome Excel Sheets tracking my Credit Card Payment dates to completely relying on CRED.
Let’s take a look at what CRED is right now, how it works, and what the future may hold.
The Product
CRED is one of the few apps that excites me while I use it. They’ve managed to pique that interest in users, where checking CRED every few days/hours/minutes? becomes an involuntary action.
After a seamless login experience tied to your mobile number, CRED sends an SMS from your number to retrieve the cards linked to your mobile number.
You’re then welcomed with a screen with three main sections: Home/Cards/Lifestyle. Let’s dive into each section and understand the design and my takes on why some things work and some don’t.
The Home Page
The Home page welcomes with you an interesting credit card fact, and as you swipe left you will find ‘popup cards’ that remind you about recent statements and offers available. Some of these popup cards can be dismissed while some cards are permanent.
On the top left corner, you’ll find your profile picture which takes you to your profile that has details about when you joined, your credit score, payment history, and links to support, payment history, etc. Note: You need a credit score of 750+ to join CRED.
Two features with immense potential I have noted: the Dark Mode setting on the top left of this page is a must use, and you will never go back once you go black!
Second: Under Payment Settings, you’ll find the Auto-Pay feature. After some pretty simple setup steps for a piece of extremely complicated machinery happening underneath, your credit card bills will be auto-paid every month! (Up to 1 Lakh). This is easily the evolution of simplicity in credit card payments. From clunky payments -> smooth, incentivized payments -> automated, incentivized payments.
On the top right corner, there is a feature called Control Panel, that I don’t find much utility in. It provides shortcuts to the lifestyle section, your cards and coin balance, and support, etc. The interface of this page is relatively cluttered compared to the rest of the app and is not very intuitive to use.
So far so good, 8/10 on the homepage design, one point cut for the Remote Control improvements.
The Cards Page
The Cards page has details about all the cards added so far, and a convenient ‘Add New Card’ button on the top right. I have to give it up to CRED’s design team for nailing what I feel is the heart of the product. None of the banks have been able to present their cards so aesthetically pleasingly in a virtual form.
Clicking on each card will take you to a detailed page with complete details about your current statement, amount due and spend analysis for the previous month. CRED has done a marvelous job of simplifying complicated statements and extracting the most relevant information. It does this by reading your email for the PDF statements and extracting relevant information from there.
This brings us to an interesting question. What do Banks think about CRED? I feel they’re still processing the impact CRED has on them, and how they decide to move forward will affect CRED’s technology too. If Banks embrace CRED, Credit Card Statements could be superpowered and CRED could work with banks to bring about meaningful statements. If they don’t embrace CRED, things could get difficult if they decide to impose protections on the PDFs they send out.
One of CRED’s underrated features is the Bank Offers option available on each card. It lets you see the various offers running on your card, and even filter them by travel, shopping, electronics, wellness, etc. This is an interface that displays the offers even better than existing pages that banks use.
My only feedback would be about finding Payment History for each card. It requires more than two taps to reach and is a little tough to find. I would give a 9/10 on the card page design, one point cut for the Payment History flow.
The Rewards Page
CRED’s USP: Rewarding you for paying your bills. The rewards page has seen multiple redesigns over time. The Rewards Page is also where I feel CRED makes most of its money. We’ll look at the design and then the reward economics. On every bill payment, you get a cashback scratch card that credits a random amount directly to your credit card.
There are 3 main views: the Individual View, the Mosaic View, and Category View.
Firstly, MAJOR props to the copywriters at CRED. They have completely transformed how credit card offers are advertised. I’ve never seen such innovative and informative copywriters in any of India’s or even global startups. Keep up the good work!
The Individual View is CRED’s primary strength in eyes. It manages to give complete phone-screen space to a particular company/offer and highlights them well. This is where CRED makes profits too since many of the offers are percentage discount offers. For eg., an offer from Ather Energy offers 1000 INR discounts on their new electric scooter for burning 50K coins. This is an incredible source of leads for Ather Energy from the 15–20 million premium consumers we earlier discussed, who have a higher probability of buying premium products.
The Mosaic View personally does not work for me and has diminished utility as compared to the other views and features. You can basically view all the offers in a mosaic.
The Category View lets you view offers by their category, and is a very useful screen to decide what offer to redeem.
Recently, CRED has started testing Video Reward Pages, which was extremely impactful for me. Moreover, the kinds of rewards offered by CRED are continuously growing and evolving. My favorites so far are CRED Experiences: Customized Experiences for CRED Members. There were Harry Potter Screenings, Special Sections at Concerts, etc.
I also loved the partnership with GiveIndia, where you can burn your coins to do acts of good, like plant trees or feed kids in need.
The Future
CRED has grown so much in the past year simply because of their seemingly effortless execution. I see a profitable company that can move onto areas like Corporate Payments, and one day even launch their own Credit Card. There is also a highly functional use case to integrate CRED points with Blockchain and create an international product that rewards you for paying your bills globally. Soon, the community will also see efforts to value the rewards and subsequently value CRED coins, which will lead to greater and better rewards.
Here’s wishing all the success to CRED. If you liked this piece, do share it forward and let me know what else you would like to see.
Sign up for CRED Here to stand a chance to win a Harley-Davidson Street 750: https://cred.onelink.me/spQx/dbb8d38b
Bonus: Enjoy this Jim Sarbh ad of CRED that I absolutely loved: