India, July 31 -- For the first five years of CRED's existence, the question on everyone's minds was: how will CRED even make money. In 2023, we started seeing the first signs of how the fintech giant was going to monetise, and that started clearing the murkiness around CRED's future.

What stumped many in the early days - and this could simply be called a misreading - was the CRED's go-to-market strategy and customer profile was so differentiated from the likes of Paytm or PhonePe, which targeted mass fintech consumers. But CRED chose to go after a slice of the market that was harder to reach, but could prove more profitable in the long run.

CRED's focus was on the cream of the Indian financial services consumer base. The credit card ho...