The company reported a net loss (after expenses on employee stock ownership plan and taxes) of Rs 1,644 crore, up about 22% year-on-year.
The Bengaluru-based company attributed the increase in revenue to deeper engagement with its customers and multiple avenues of revenue generation that it has built.
Its marketing expenses stood at Rs 453 crore for 2023-24 and employee costs at Rs 1,199 crore, including a one-time employee stock ownership plan cost incurred during the fiscal.
Overall Cred’s total payments volume surged 55% year-on-year to Rs 6.8 lakh crore.
Credit and larger finserv
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Cred gets about 90% of its revenue from the three pillars of financial services – credit, payments and insurance.
While the company did not disclose details of its credit business, its founder Kunal Shah said that the platform focused on longer tenure and larger ticket sized unsecured loans.
The company has helped its lending partners, including banks and non-banking finance companies (NBFCs), to create a loan book of about Rs 15,000 crore.
“Given that we focus on prime and super prime customers, top financial institutions are actually keen to work with us. We have already announced some new lender partnerships and more are in the works,” Shah said.
He added that while he had looked at building a co-branded credit card for Cred’s user base, he had not decided on a specific time frame.
On Cred Mint, the company said that it has stopped taking new investments and is aligning with the regulator’s view on the sector. Cred works with Liquiloans for the peer-to-peer lending product.
New products and deeper engagement
Cred said that while it has increased its monetised user base by 58%, it has slashed its marketing expenses by 36% and its overall customer acquisition cost is down by 40% owing to a larger share of customers joining the platform organically.
The Peak XV-backed startup is looking at creating deeper engagement with its customers through new products.
“Cred Garage (a vehicle management platform), within a year of launch. has around 6 million cars parked with it. We are now looking to focus on investments in new products, engineering and design over the next few quarters,” Shah said.
The company also said that it is set to launch fresh products over the next few quarters.
ET reported on June 11 that Cred is working on a secured credit product.
Cred is also building its own NBFC business under Newtap Finance and is strengthening its credit team as well.
Expanding market
Cred has expanded its monthly active user base to 13 million. The monthly transacting user base stands at 11 million. Products like UPI (Unified Payments Interface) payments and ecommerce are helping increase the sessions each user has on Cred, which helps build deeper engagement with the platform.
Cred is now the fourth largest UPI payments app with around 147 million payments reported in August, settling around Rs 50,720 crore worth of transactions. Its average ticket size of UPI transactions, at around Rs 3,000, is much higher than Rs 1,200-1,500 for the likes of PhonePe and Paytm.
“India’s growth story is helping expand the market of creditworthy and taxpaying individuals and we are riding on that growth curve – we want to focus on that market,” Shah said.
