The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) granted CRED a Payment Aggregator (PA) licence, officially authorising it to operate as an online payment aggregator in India.
The authorisation, confirmed in the RBI's official list of authorised payment system operators under the Payment and Settlement Systems Act, 2007, was issued on March 10, 2026 to CRED's parent entity, Dreamplug Paytech Solutions Private Limited.
The licence is a significant expansion of CRED's business model. As a payment aggregator, CRED can now sign up merchants, collect payments on their behalf across multiple payment instruments (UPI, credit cards, debit cards and net banking) and handle settlement and refunds. Previously, CRED primarily offered its users a platform to pay credit card bills, manage rewards points, and access curated offers. The PA licence transforms it into a competitor in the full-stack payments infrastructure space, where it now sits alongside Razorpay, PayU, Cashfree, Juspay and Paytm Payments Services.
In the fiscal year ended March 2025, CRED said that it processed payments worth ₹8.5 lakh crore for 15 million users. Its backers include Tiger Global and Peak XV (formerly Sequoia Capital India), and it was last valued at approximately $6.4 billion.
Founded in 2018 by Kunal Shah, CRED built its initial user base by exclusively targeting high credit-score individuals (typically salaried professionals with CIBIL scores above 750) and offering rewards for paying credit card bills on time. That carefully curated user base, known for high spending power, is precisely the kind of merchant-acquisition advantage a payment aggregator would prize.