CRED pivots to wealth on Kuvera, betting on `truth telling’
MUMBAI: CRED, once a high-trust credit-card payments app aimed at spenders and monetised through cross-sold loans, insurance and payment flows, is now turning to savers, using Kuvera—acquired in 2024—to enter wealth management.The upgrade of Kuvera targets affluent investors with large portfolios, with an emphasis on long-term compounding. The platform seeks to improve discipline, decision-making, asset allocation and performance, arguing that outcomes depend less on activity than on judgement.Its users already invest more aggressively with an average monthly SIP that is twice the industry average, and portfolio values which are the highest among digital platforms. This comes even as India’s mutual-fund industry has tripled in five years. Kuvera, yet nearly 80% of funds have lagged their benchmarks. According to Cred founder Kunal Shah, Kuvera’s proposition rests on “truth telling”: exposing gaps between perception and performance, and forcing investors to confront whether their returns justify the risks they take.“We have upgraded Kuvera for investors who have enough at stake that a single move can impact years of compounding. Kuvera by CRED is now a behavioural system that enables the wealthy to do less, but do it better. At that level, the biggest alpha is in judgement, not activity,” said Shah.Kuvera’s redesign centres on behaviour. It measures discipline through consistency and time in the market, allocation through concentration risks across assets and sectors and performance against custom benchmarks adjusted for risk. The aim is to insert analysis between impulse and action.A new feature, Surplus, puts idle cash to work by allocating it to liquid funds managed by SEBI-registered AMCs, while preserving flexibility. Investors can withdraw up to Rs 4 lakh within minutes and the full amount within a day; access is restricted and requires a minimum of Rs 1 lakh.Founded as a commission-free investment platform offering mutual funds, stocks, fixed deposits and US equities, Kuvera is being recast as CRED’s core wealth arm for affluent retail clients. It sits within a broader “premium finance” ecosystem spanning lending, insurance and payments, where revenues are driven by products such as CRED Cash and bill payments, and where access remains limited to high-credit-score users.
