Saturday, March 21, 2020

Customer Reviews: Why I Uninstalled CRED App


I was using CRED for over a year. I had heard about it from some friend and checked it out. The mobile app had a unique proposition: it allowed us to pay all credit card bills from single interface and it also gave some offers and ‘cash-backs’. When I logged into CRED for the first time, the app had already pulled one of my credit cards there and it was surprising (read scary) to me because of data privacy concerns. Still I listed my other credit card and thought to give the app a chance.

An interesting thing to use in CRED is the “CIBIL Score”. It is our credit score and using CRED we check our score for free any time. And then there were offers. When we pay credit card bills, we earned ‘coins’ which we can use to buy offers with discounts. I took a Uber coupon initially and later on I was not able to find any good offers. Most of the offers of up to 50% discounts were from unknown niche brands. I did not want to buy a new brand just because it offered discounts. Hence I started ‘encashing’ my ‘coins’ (reward points). But as per the algorithm, the cashbacks were very less. Mostly those were like only Rs 7 or 14. I waited for a few months and then gave up. I decided to quit CRED for a simple reason. The risk reward ratio was too less.

Whenever we install a new app, there is always a risk. Financial apps would definitely pose more risk. We are giving away important data like our credit card bills pattern every month and what kind of offers we are taking. It helps create a customer profile where the company can know us well. And then it can target ads to us and also if there is any data leak or data may be unethically sold to other companies. For paying credit card bills, very simple methods already exist – auto debit from net banking is one, or we can choose to pay a card from net banking of any bank. Therefore since the rewards were not attractive enough and the risks were high, I decided to quit. CRED team was helpful and they deleted my account after my request.

But before I deleted my account, I converted whatever unused ‘coins’ I had for charity. I converted the coins into ‘saplings’ which would be planted by CRED on my behalf. This is a noble feature from CRED.


My advice would be that if you are finding the CRED offers useful and if you are using those offers very often, then you can keep using CRED. Otherwise I am not in favor of giving away our data to any financial app which is not necessary and can be avoided.

- Rahul Tiwary

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