Kunal Shah's Cred is testing UPI payments, may go live in a month.

Bengaluru-based Cred, which is trying to disrupt the way consumers pay their credit card bills, could go live on Unified Payments Interface (UPI) within a month. According to two people in the know, it is being tested in a closed user group currently as per the guidelines of the National Payments Corporation of India which runs UPI. 
While the testing is being done in partnership with Axis Bank, it could go live with multiple banks as well, issuing handles to its users through the application. 

Cred was founded by Kunal Shah, who had disrupted the digital payments space with his mobile wallet startup Freecharge. With Cred, Shah is targeting the users of 44 million credit cards in the country offering them gift points for credit card bills settled through the platform that are redeemable across merchant outlets. 

“We are launching the UPI to be able to make faster credit card payments. It is in early days of testing,” Shah said. He further added that the company is not foraying into UPI payments and the move is just to make credit card payments.

UPI, which is an instant interbank payment railroad, has attracted a large number of internet companies onto the platform. While companies like Google and WhatsApp are trying to use UPI as a peer to peer payment mechanism, Amazon Pay is using it to make shopping on their website easy. Recently Just Dial said that they would go live on UPI in the coming weeks.

Cred, launched in November 2018, has already raised a massive $25 million in a round led by Sequoia India and Ribbit Capital amid a few others.