— Anand Kapadia, Founder & CBO, Credilio

A card that doesn’t sell itself

Not every financial product finds its customers through a search bar or a digital ad. The novio Fixed Deposit Credit Card — Credilio’s flagship secured credit product — is built for a customer who is entering or re-entering the credit system, often for the first time. A young professional. Someone building a credit profile from scratch. A segment that is credit-eligible, financially motivated, and almost entirely absent from the digital acquisition funnels that conventional fintech distribution relies on.

Secured credit cards require active outreach. They need a distributor who can sit across the table from a first-time credit customer, explain how an FD-backed card works, and earn their trust in a single conversation. That is not something a banner ad can do. It is not something a push notification can do. It requires a human being, embedded in the right community, with the right context.

Credilio had the product. The challenge was building — or finding — the distribution infrastructure to take it where it needed to go.

Getting there. And staying there.

Anand Kapadia’s account of the partnership names two distinct things that mattered — and they mattered in sequence, not simultaneously.

First: reach

The novio card needed to get in front of young, financially underserved users — a segment concentrated in semi-urban and peri-urban India, not in the metros where digital acquisition is strongest. Reaching them required physical presence, local credibility, and a distribution model built specifically for the last mile. Credilio could not build that network from scratch without significant time and capital. They needed to plug into one that already existed.

Then: stickiness

Getting a customer to take the card is one outcome. Getting them to use it, engage with it, and build a relationship with the product over time is a different one. That required a second surface — somewhere the novio card would exist in the context of a customer’s ongoing financial life, not just at the moment of acquisition. Discovery needed to become usage. Usage needed to become habit.

These are two problems with two different solutions. What made the airpay partnership consequential was that both solutions existed within a single ecosystem — and they compounded.

vyaapaar took them there. The app kept them engaged.

vyaapaar — distribution with embedded trust

The airpay vyaapaar network is a 2 lakh+ community of small merchants, kirana owners, agents, and last-mile business owners across India — each operating in their local market with the kind of embedded trust that no digital channel can replicate. For Credilio, plugging into this network meant immediate access to a human-led distribution engine positioned precisely in the geographies and demographics where the novio card’s natural customers live.

vyaapaar partners did not just expand Credilio’s geographic footprint. They expanded its credibility surface. A recommendation for a financial product from a known local business owner carries weight that a sponsored post does not. That is the distribution advantage the network provided — and it translated, in Anand Kapadia’s words, into “strong early adoption” almost immediately after deployment.

Credilio did not have to recruit, train, or manage this network. They activated it.

The financial management app — discovery becoming engagement

Reach gets a customer to the product. The airpay financial management app gave the novio card somewhere to live after that first interaction.

By embedding the novio Fixed Deposit Credit Card within the app, Credilio’s product entered the daily financial context of users who were already engaged with airpay’s ecosystem — managing expenses, tracking transactions, engaging with financial tools. The card was no longer something a customer had been sold once. It was something present in the interface they returned to regularly.

The result, as Kapadia notes, was “seamless discovery and usage, driving both visibility and sustained engagement” — the second half of the distribution challenge resolved through a channel that the payment gateway relationship unlocked.

Payment Gateway — the foundation underneath

Underlying both distribution channels is airpay’s core payments infrastructure: a full Payment Gateway supporting 200+ instruments with failover logic and direct bank integrations, T+1 settlement across all instruments, and full RBI Payment Aggregator licence coverage. A dedicated key account manager — not a support queue — ensured that operational issues were resolved directly rather than escalated through tiers.

For Credilio, this meant that as distribution scaled and transaction volumes grew, the payment infrastructure underneath held without degradation in success rates or settlement predictability.

What a single ecosystem enables

The table below captures where the airpay ecosystem compares to conventional fintech partnerships. The first three rows are the ones that tell Credilio’s story: the distribution network, the app embed, and the FD credit card distribution model are capabilities that simply do not exist outside this ecosystem.

On distribution

• The novio Fixed Deposit Credit Card reached customer segments and geographies that Credilio’s existing digital channels could not serve — specifically young, financially underserved users in semi-urban India.
• Strong early adoption followed deployment almost immediately — a function of distribution quality and embedded trust, not just product quality.
• Onboarding new distribution capacity became a platform exercise rather than a ground-up recruitment challenge.
• Real-time visibility into partner activity gave leadership a consolidated view of distribution performance.

On engagement

• Integration into the airpay financial management app created a sustained in-ecosystem presence for the novio card beyond the point of acquisition.
• Discovery converted to usage: customers who encountered the product in-app engaged with it as part of an ongoing financial relationship, not a one-time transaction.
• The dual-platform model — vyaapaar on the ground, the app in the palm — created two compounding growth channels under a single partnership.

On payments and operations

• Transaction success rates held as volumes scaled, maintaining advisor confidence and customer trust.
• T+1 settlement across instruments gave the finance team predictable, reliable cash flow.
• One vendor relationship replaced what would otherwise have required multiple separate integrations — eliminating the reconciliation overhead and accountability gaps that come with a fragmented stack.

— Anand Kapadia, Founder & CBO, Credilio

What Credilio’s story tells us

The novio partnership is not an isolated case. Across fintech — in insurance distribution, lending, wealth management, and beyond — there is a class of product that digital-first channels cannot adequately serve. Products for first-time credit users. Products that require explanation. Products whose natural customers are in the second and third tiers of Indian cities, not on the platforms where premium digital acquisition is optimised.

For these products, the question is not whether to build distribution. It is whether to build it from scratch or activate infrastructure that already exists. The vyaapaar network represents years of on-ground relationship-building, technology deployment, and last-mile trust — available to a business like Credilio as a platform, not a project.

What the app integration adds is the second chapter: converting acquired customers into engaged ones, within the same ecosystem, without a separate retention strategy. Reach and stickiness, compounding through a single partner.

That is the model the novio story demonstrates. And it is replicable for any financial product that has found the ceiling of what digital acquisition alone can deliver.

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airpay - Full-stack financial infrastructure operating across India, UAE, and Tanzania. To explore how airpay can support your business, visit airpay.co.in