Economy

Meta's Potential Acquisition of Cred and the Future of Indian Payments

Friday, June 19, 2026
5 min read
Meta's Potential Acquisition of Cred and the Future of Indian Payments

So here’s what’s been floating around regarding that massive tech player, Meta . They are apparently looking into a big move either investing or trying to snag Cred , that Indian fintech outfit. A Moneycontrol report floated this idea, suggesting talks are happening right now with Kunal Shah, the guy running Cred. The talk isn't just about throwing money around; it could involve a full acquisition, maybe at a valuation they find more palatable, and bringing Shah onto the Meta team in some kind of operational role.

It’s a huge shift if that happens. It basically means Meta would own the entire payment infrastructure across India. Think about it: Facebook and Instagram become the discovery layer. WhatsApp handles all the commerce or maybe even agentic commerce later on, something more advanced. And Cred? That becomes the backbone for all those payments.

Right now, Meta has some footprint in that Indian payment space, thanks to WhatsApp Pay. But honestly, their market share is tiny. Less than one percent, really. It’s a small piece of the puzzle compared to what’s actually moving through the system. UPI itself is incredible, though the world's biggest real-time payments network. Walmart’s PhonePe and Google Pay together handle nearly eighty percent of those transactions. That context matters when you look at where Cred sits in this landscape.

Cred itself was built by Kunal Shah back in 2018. It started as a reward-based credit card payment app. People use it for bill payments, UPI stuff, tracking their credit scores, and getting short-term lines of credit. But there’s an entry barrier; you need a decent credit score usually seventy-five zero or higher just to join the club.

When you look at the numbers behind Cred recently, things are moving. They reported consolidated operating revenue of about Rs 2,735 crore in FY25. That’s up sixteen percent from the year before. And here's the kicker: their losses actually shrank, dropping fifty-one percent down to just Rs 298 crore. It sounds like they managed to pull back some operational slack while scaling up product offerings and monetization efforts. They haven’t even filed those official numbers with the Ministry of Corporate Affairs yet, though.

Looking at the total yearly losses, things narrowed by about eleven and a half percent compared to last year around Rs 1,457 crore overall loss for the year. Gross margins were looking healthy, sitting around seventy percent in FY25. That suggests they are getting better leverage as they scale up their services.

The user engagement side is also telling a story about how sticky the platform is. During that period, monthly transacting users climbed fourteen and a half percent to one point two six crore. Transaction frequency picked up even more; people were making fourteen point four transactions per user every month. The total payment value processed on the platform grew by twenty-three percent year-on-year, hitting Rs 8.5 lakh crore.

And when you look at how much users are actually doing, it’s interesting. About forty-five percent of active members were juggling three or more different products on Cred simultaneously. The average revenue per user, ARPU, settled around Rs 2,000. That figure is surprisingly high compared to the rest of the payments ecosystem. And really engaging with four or more products pushed that ARPU up by seventy-five percent over the platform’s general average. It shows people are getting deep into the system.

Written by Gree News Team — Senior Editorial Board

Gree News Team covers international news and global affairs at Gree News. Our collective of senior editors is dedicated to providing independent, accurate, and responsible journalism for a global audience.

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