Why Meta wants your CREDit score

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
Hello folks, you're tuned in Finshots Daily. In today's episode, we explain why Meta is the last big tech company yet to crack India's payments market and what it's doing about it.
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Now, back to the story.
For years, Cred has occupied a strange place in India's startup ecosystem. It's one of the country's most recognizable fintech brands, commands a fiercely loyal user base, and has steadily expanded from credit card bill payments into lending, UPI, rent payments, and wealth products. Yet, every conversation about the company circles back to the question, how exactly does Cred make money? And it's a fair question. Because for all its popularity, Cred remains a company that's still figuring out the economics of its business.
While revenue has grown steadily over the years, profitability is yet to catch up. But despite being loss-making, investors haven't stopped backing the company. In fact, the list of believers, we have just expanded this week to include one of the biggest names in technology. According to reports, Meta is in talks to invest in Cred at a valuation of roughly $3.5 to $4 billion.
That's well below the company's peak valuation of over $6 billion, but still among India's most valuable fintech startups. Which is where the story gets interesting. Because the bigger question isn't why Cred wants Meta's investment, it's why Meta wants Cred. Let us explain.
Meta isn't short on users. It owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, which are three of the world's largest consumer platforms. In India alone, WhatsApp reaches hundreds of millions of people, and it even has its own payment product, WhatsApp Pay. So why look outside? You ask. If payments are already built into WhatsApp, why invest in another fintech? Why buy a company that's still chasing profitability? Well, the answer begins with a simple fact. While Meta may own one of India's biggest messaging platforms, it has never managed to dominate payments. In fact, Meta was one of the earliest big tech companies to bet on India's UPI revolution. It launched WhatsApp Pay in 2018, hoping to turn the country's most popular messaging app into its next payments platform. But things didn't go quite according to plan.
India's payment regulator, the NPCI, that is National Payment Corporation of India, didn't want any single app to dominate UPI. To keep the ecosystem competitive, it proposed a 30% market to share cap on UPI transactions. In WhatsApp Pay's case, it imposed separate onboarding limits. That meant WhatsApp Pay could initially onboard only 1 million users, the limit was later raised to 20 million and eventually 100 million users before being removed altogether in late 2024 But by the time those restrictions were finally lifted in 2024, the race had already been won.
Google Pay and Phone Pay had become the default way millions of Indians paid for everything from groceries and cab rides to utility bills and restaurant meals. Together, they now account for more than 4 out of every 5 UPI transactions. WhatsApp Pay, meanwhile, processes less than 0.4% of countries' UPI transaction volume as of June 2025, which leaves Meta with an unusual problem. It owns one of India's largest digital platforms, but it still doesn't own one of India's biggest digital habits. And in today's internet economy, that may matter more than the number of users you have. Which brings us to another important question. Why does Meta care so much about payments in the first place? Well, because once you become someone's preferred way to pay, you have a much better chance of becoming their preferred place to borrow, invest or manage money. Think about the last time you ordered food or booked a cab. You didn't just make a payment, you paid, earned rewards, stored your card, maybe bought insurance and perhaps even used a buy now pay later option all without leaving the app. And that's called embedded finance. The idea is pretty simple. Instead of treating payments as the end of a transaction, companies use them as a starting point for a much larger financial relationship.