As CRED slows down on its marketing-driven hype and looks for possible, actual business avenues for some real growth, the company has now announced an acquisition. Happay, an 8 year old startup that helps corporates manage spends, has now become a part of CRED.
The news came in via a post by CRED founder Kunal Shah. He writes, “As the workplace becomes cashless, contactless and paperless, professional expenses form a higher proportion of credit card bills. Today we welcome Happay into the CRED club, extending our proposition to make business expense management as rewarding for members.”
Founded in 2021, Happay started as a simple peer to peer money transfer app. The startup then gradually grew and added a slew of features under its belt, to become one of the most recognised spend management platform for corporates. With happay’s business expense card and mobile app, employees can report expenses automatically, in seconds, on the go. For management, there is great level of visibility and control into how and where money is spent, in real time, through web and mobile.
The platform also offers corporate cards, similar to standard bank cards but much easier to use.
For CRED, this cold be a serious avenue for financial growth. While the company has seen massive user sign ups — thanks to its hugely popular quirky ads featuring popular Indian cricketers — questions have been asked on the business model. Simply acting as a credit card payments platform that offers rewards, doesn’t translate into sizeable financial and business growth. With happay, CRED will aim to change that.
CRED recently raised $251Mn in a round that was put up to help the company expand its current set of offerings. Shah had made it clear that CRED would go on to become a full-stack financial services platform, with credit card payments just the beginning.
The company has already introduced services such as CRED Cash, which provides a flexible credit line of up to Rs 5,00,000 to users, with interest rates ranging from 12% to 15%, and partners with non-banking finance companies (NBFCs) such as IDFC First Bank.
Its CRED Mint is a peer-to-peer investment product from where CRED users can lend money to other members and earn interest of up to 9% per annum. Additionally, CRED Pay marked its advent into the D2C and e-commerce vertical – CRED Pay allows users to use their CRED reward coins across e-commerce sites and unlock discounts.
