Rent and education payments
Owned CRED Max rent payments end-to-end - rebuilt the journey, scaled it, and added KYC, fraud controls, OMS migration, and multi-pricing.
Problem
Rent is one of CRED's fastest-growing and most profitable payment lines, but it was a 4-year-old product with a fragmented, drop-off-heavy flow and no foundation for the capabilities the business needed next - KYC, fraud controls, a modern order-management system, and flexible pricing.
Approach
- Rebuilt the payment journey into a single intuitive screen while keeping full backward compatibility with legacy flows.
- Owned the platform end-to-end: scaling, reliability, and the rails for every new capability.
- Layered on KYC, fraud management, migration to the new OMS, and support for multiple pricing models.
Outcomes
- 01New-user transaction rate on rent rose from 12.3% to 20.4% and education NTU from 16.26% to 31% (+91% relative).
- 02Shipped a reliable, extensible foundation that supported KYC, fraud, OMS, and pricing without a rewrite.
The work, chapter by chapter
Rebuilt the payment journey
Collapsed an 8-9 screen rent flow into one screen and expanded the story beyond rent.
- Collapsed the fragmented 8-9 screen journey into a single, intuitive payment screen with strong backward compatibility for legacy flows.
- Reframed the user story from "pay rent" to "instant transfer to bank account", opening education fees, maintenance, and other categories.
- Added VPA verification from saved contacts, fair-usage (FUP) policy checks, an onboarding education flow, and a quick-access recent transactions section.
- Wrote the tech spec end to end: low-level design, tech decisions, and a staged rollout plan.
Scaled it to full capacity
Owned reliability and capacity as rent grew into a flagship payment line.
- Drove iterative profiling and fixes across the Go services to keep the flow healthy under rising volume.
- Fixed recurring CPU, memory, and database-connection spikes through query fixes and caching on hot paths.
- Added read replicas for high-throughput reads so growth never outran reliability.
KYC
Added know-your-customer verification into the payment onboarding and reuse paths.
Fraud management
Built fraud controls into the payment path to protect users and the business.
Migrated to the new OMS
Moved rent onto the new platform order-management system, built as an extensible service supporting the broader BBPS/Max migration.
- The order service was the first Max product on the shared OMS and pricing platform, so it had to be built to be reused.
- Designed it as an extensible service using the latest shared platform modules, supporting the BBPS/Max migration in later phases.
Multiple pricing support
Added support for multiple pricing models through the platform pricing service so rent could ship offers and margins flexibly.
Lessons
- Backward compatibility on an old product is its own project - budget real time for understanding legacy flows before estimating.
- Compressing a multi-screen flow into one screen is as much a product decision as an engineering one.