India-based food delivery startup Swiggy has offered its customers a credit card as the company increases effort to drive engagement and retention. The Bengaluru-headquartered startup is co-launching the credit card with HDFC Bank, an India-based private bank.

The credit card will offer customers a 10% cashback on spends on Swiggy and 5% across over 1,000 partnered platforms including Amazon, Adidas, Zara, Flipkart, Nike, Uber, and BookmyShow, as pe Swiggy. The card, supported by Mastercard, will also offer a three-month subscription to Swiggy One, a service that waives off delivery charges, and 1% cashback on all other spends, said the startup, which is backed by Prosus, SoftBank, Accel, and Invesco. Additionally, it will extend a few Mastercard benefits.

Swiggy joins a roster of a long-list of non-fintech Indian startups that have launched a credit card in recent years. The credit cards give the startups an avenue to diversify their revenue streams, make better use of customer data, and stimulate spending. These cards, often laden with tailored benefits, deepen customer loyalty and provide a lucrative gateway into the country’s burgeoning middle-class market, bolstering growth in a fiercely competitive landscape, analysts say.

Zomato, Swiggy’s publicly-listed chief rival in India, has also made similar offerings in the past. Officials from the Indian startup said they recognise that modern-day consumers actively seek rewards, offers, and cashback programmes that add value to their spending. Keeping this in mind, they have launched this all-encompassing card in partnership with HDFC Bank and Mastercard that makes everyday shopping moments across a range of categories more rewarding and convenient.

Previous news from Swiggy In February 2022, Data and analytics company GlobalData has said that Swiggy and Zomato are set to benefit by venturing into the growing Indian BNPL space. BNPL has been gaining prominence in India with increasing number of payment and fintech companies vying to get a piece of this fast-growing market, according to GlobalData. Swiggy’s announcement comes within few days of its rival Zomato’s plans to offer BNPL services.

While the concept of BNPL is currently more prominent in categories like travel and accommodation, electronics, clothing and footwear, it is set to penetrate food delivery. Swiggy has a network of around 128,000 restaurants across 500 Indian towns and cities with around 20 million monthly active users, while Zomato has a network of nearly 390,000 restaurants and 32 million monthly active users. Despite reopening of restaurants, growing number of consumers continue to order food online.

This reflects in GlobalData’s 2021 Financial Services Consumer Survey conducted during Q1 and Q2 of 2021, where 55% of respondents in India stated that they used BNPL service for online payments in the past six months. .