Pay Tab
Built the bill management and discovery experience on CRED Pay Tab - ranking, search, reminders, reward loops, and the re-architecture behind it.
Problem
Bills lived across many billers and categories with fragmented discovery and no unified way to manage, rank, remind, or re-engage users. The experience needed a cleaner architecture that old app versions could still talk to.
Approach
- Built the bill management service and the recommend-bill, manage-bill, and recharge-plan-search APIs behind a unified bill APIs layer.
- Added ranking and search so users could find the right bill fast, and reminders plus reward/offer loops to bring them back.
- Re-architected Pay Tab (v2) with a compatibility layer so new and old app versions kept working through the migration.
- Partnered across lending, gateway, and data-science systems to power onboarding, aggregation, and real-time offer segments.
Outcomes
- 01Unified bill management behind one service and shipped ranking, search, reminders, and reward loops on the Pay Tab.
- 02Scaled the read path to ~2-3k RPS at peak while serving 10M+ bill payments.
- 03Grew product revenue 5x as Pay Tab became a primary bills surface on the app.
- 04Delivered Pay Tab v2 re-architecture with a compatibility layer that kept legacy clients working through the migration.
The work, chapter by chapter
Bill management
One service to manage bills across billers and categories, with onboarding and aggregation.
- Built the bill management service and the recommend-bill and manage-bill APIs.
- Added onboarding for BBPS bills alongside bill aggregation, with a compatibility layer for old app versions.
- Surfaced the bill carousel on both home and Pay Tab through the new unified bill APIs path and the legacy path.
Ranking & search
Help users find the right bill fast with rule-based ranking and full-text search.
- Used rule engines to rank bills by relevance for each user.
- Indexed bill plans in Elasticsearch to power search across bills.
Reminders & reward loops
Bring users back with timely reminders and reward/offer loops.
- Built reminder flows that re-engage users around due bills.
- Wired real-time offer segments from user segmentation into reward/offer loops on the tab.
Technical re-architecture
Pay Tab v2 and unified bill APIs: a cleaner foundation built to be reused.
- Designed the unified bill APIs (end-to-end design docs) as the shared backbone for bill features.
- Shipped Pay Tab v2 with an aggregation service and a compatibility layer for legacy clients.
- Drove cross-team integrations across lending, gateway, and data-science teams.
Performance at scale
Profiled the hot paths and cut CPU, memory, fleet size, and recurring prod incidents.
- Ran iterative profiling across services to find the real CPU and memory offenders rather than guessing.
- Fixed database connection spikes through query fixes, cached hot bill lookups, and trimmed redundant offer calls.
- Added read replicas for high-throughput reads on the discovery path.
Lessons
- A re-architecture only pays off if the compatibility layer for old clients is airtight.
- Discovery (ranking + search) and re-engagement (reminders + rewards) are what make a bills surface actually used.