CRED: Pay Your Credit Card Bills & Earn Rewards |
CRED: Pay your credit card bills and earn rewards
If a registration is successful, all your credit cards will be displayed on the ication home page. You just need to verify these cards by entering the last 4 digits of the card. To ensure active status of this card, credit immediately up to Rs. will deposit. 1 for each card.
You will not be asked to enter your card’s expiry date or CVV which ensures the safety of this application.
Once your card is successfully verified, you can only earn rewards and scratch cards on every bill payment. MasterCard, American Express, Diners Club and Visa cards are currently handled by the CRED app.
5 Benefits You Get in CRED App
Coming to the main point of getting rewards and benefits from CRED app, the following are the points
Cashback on bill payment
discount
Free gifts and offers
Cost analysis
Credit score tracking
Let’s look at each of them
Benefit #1 – Cashback on bill payments
You can earn cashback (all called #killthebill) on every transaction. At the time of payment of more than Rs. 1000, you may be notified that you have won a scratch card and you may earn some amount which will be credited back to your credit card.
Benefit #2 – Discount Offers
Now, this is the main part of the benefits. The CRED app is associated with various brands and offers you some discount (cash discount or percentage discount) on spending a certain amount.
For example, one of the offers is “20% discount on next 20 orders of BOX8”, so you can see that you will get 20% on Box8 for a long time, but you still have to pay the balance. So even if you are getting discount you need to spend for it. So these discount offers are really only good if you are going to spend money on these brands anyway.
Sometimes, it may be that these offers also give you a chance to experience things that you wouldn’t be able to do without the discount, so technically it’s beneficial that way, but still, there’s a cost.
CRED: Pay your credit card bills and earn rewards
Benefit #3 – Free gifts and perks
There are some rewards that are actually free for you by burning some coins or gems. You don’t need to pay anything to avail the benefits. Thesis I personally think there are real benefits in a way, because you are not spending anything out of pocket, but just taking advantage of an offer.
Below you can see an example, where you can burn 2,00,000 coins and get a pass for 2 Bacardi NH7 weekend event and lounge access too. Apart from that, I have shown 3 more offers for complimentary benefits without paying any extra out of your own pocket.
So you can keep collecting coins and wait for the right offer or reward to come which is useful for you.
CRED: Pay your credit card bills and earn rewards
Benefit #4 – Cost Analysis
A small advantage of the CRED app is that you get some insight into your spending patterns and your credit card payment history in one place. This is good for people who have multiple credit cards and want some visibility into how their spending is going.
Benefit #5 – Credit Score Tracking
The CRED app will show your credit score over time, so this will help you stay motivated to make your credit card payments on time, and you can also keep track of how your credit score is progressing over time. Currently CRED has tied up with Experian and CRIF and pulls your credit score from both.
CRED: Pay your credit card bills and earn rewards
How to make payment in Cred app?
Paying credit card bills through the CRED app is very easy, just click on Pay Now, enter the amount and click proceed. Nowadays the minimum balance is automatically pre-linked with the bill amount. You can pay through Debit Card/Net Banking (NEFT/IMPS) or UPI. It may take some time for the funds to reflect in your credit card account.
On completion of your credit card bill payment, you will be given CRED Coins and Kill Bill Scratch Card which you have to redeem.
Is the CRED app secure?
I am sure you must be wondering about the security of this app as you are putting your credit card details and authorizing the app with all the details.
Firstly, the app is founded by Kunal Shah, who launched Freecharge and the startup is heavily funded. The past record of the founder is intact so you can trust the company.
The next point is that the CRED app never asks you to provide the expiry date or CVV on your credit cards, so you are not giving any important information to this app.
Then, you should know that when you install any other app, those apps also get various permissions like reading your SMS, making calls on your behalf, tracking your activity, etc., and this app is no different from others.
If you want, you can deny access to emails and messages, then you won’t receive notifications on due dates and you won’t get any cost analysis.
Nothing is free in this world
While it sounds great to get great offers and benefits and freebies, remember that
Nothing is free in this world. Everything that sounds amazing has a business model behind it and that’s the reason why you get those free rewards and offers.
You should be aware that CRED or any other coupon company has various affiliations and tie-ups with brands and companies and acts as a lead generation company. You are nothing more than a lead for another company and CRED is helping to increase sales for the other party.
They will most likely get something back in return and that is the business model. There is nothing wrong with that, but as an investor you should know what you are getting into.
Discounts and amazing benefits you get from CRED or other similar apps are basically tempting you to spend under the guise of a “great deal”. If you spend on something that you did not originally intend to buy then it is an additional cost to you at the end of the day. Coupons are pure rewards when you’re going to spend on something anyway and if you get an extra discount on the deal.
So, we need to be conscious while spending using CRED Coins and getting discounts, it should not happen that you are spending on some unwanted stuff just to redeem CRED Coins.
Let’s take my example, I attended two live concerts in Pune, a VIP pass of Rs. 5,000 each. No doubt I just spent Rs. 4,000 (Rs. 2,000 each) instead of paying Rs. 10,000. But, if this award was not in the picture, I would never have gone for that concert and Rs. 4,000 is.
RED: Pay your credit card bills and earn rewards
Who should use this app?
The app is more suitable for the following categories of credit card users –
High credit card bill payers
People living in metro cities/Tier 1 or 2 cities (most awards are dining or live concerts)
People who pay credit card bills before the due date (no reward on late payment)