Bengaluru, 23 September 2026: Cashfree, India’s leading AI-native payments platform, today launched its ‘Mithai Joint Family’ campaign for the festive season, featuring comedian Biswa Kalyan Rath. The campaign borrows from India’s most enduring shared joke about festive gifting to make a pointed argument about payments.
The joke, of course, is soan papdi. It arrives every Diwali, circulates through four homes without being eaten, and is accepted everywhere without anyone being particularly glad to receive it. It is the default and as the film argues, the payments category has its own version of the same problem. Every payment gateway claims high payment success rates, but in the current market, success rates are table stakes. What truly differentiates a payment gateway, the campaign suggests, is what it offers beyond them.
The film opens with Biswa holding the familiar small soan papdi box, observing that everyone receives it but nobody really eats it. He then brings in the assorted mithai box which he calls the mithai joint family, where the soan papdi sits respectfully in one corner alongside everything else people actually want. The parallel to payments follows naturally. Cashfree is like the mithai joint family, it does not just offer high success rates, but also a dedicated account manager, next-day settlements, and the ability to go live in minutes all at zero payment gateway fees for up to ₹20 lakh in sales. The choice between the two, as Biswa concludes, is an absolute no-brainer.
Commenting on the campaign, Aditi Olemann, Vice President of Marketing & Communications, Cashfree, said, “The soan papdi joke works because everybody has lived it. We all receive it during the festive season and accept it reluctantly. But we also know the feeling of receiving something genuinely better, like an assorted sweet box, and that contrast between the two emotions is exactly what we wanted to capture. Merchants face the same pattern when they assess payment gateways. They see higher success rates, assume that is the standard, and do not think to ask what else is in the box. We wanted to break that assumption in a way that did not feel like a boring B2B ad. Biswa was the natural choice. His dry humour works because he points out what everyone already knows but nobody has said out loud, and that is precisely how this message needed to land.”
The choice of Biswa Kalyan Rath was deliberate. His observational, deadpan sensibility has built a loyal following among the audience Cashfree is speaking to. He is a voice they trust precisely because it is never oversold, and because what he says reflects the realities of the everyday aspiring Indian. That authenticity, applied to the shared experience of the festive season, is what the campaign set out to harness.
The ‘Mithai Joint Family’ campaign is part of Cashfree’s Zero Payment Gateway Fees initiative, which waives payment gateway fees for all new merchants signing up on the platform for their first ₹20 lakh in sales. The initiative is timed for the festive season, when online sales volumes climb sharply and the cost of payments infrastructure hits smaller businesses hardest at a time when their margins are already under pressure. Cashfree’s active SMB merchant base grew 50% year-on-year in FY26, and the company now serves close to a million SMBs, with a goal of doubling that by the end of FY27. The campaign speaks directly to the merchants still deciding which payments partner to go with before the festive rush.
The campaign also marks Cashfree’s first major communication under its new brand identity. The brand refresh, built around a new black and green visual system and a redesigned logo the company calls ‘the edge’, reflects Cashfree’s transition from a payments gateway into a broader AI-native payment platform, one that powers businesses with products like Relay, Checkout360, SecureID, and an Agentic Payments Stack. The new identity is designed to reflect a company that has outgrown the category its original name described.
About Cashfree:
Founded in 2015, Cashfree is India’s leading AI-native payments platform, processing over $80 billion in transactions annually for more than a million businesses–from high-growth startups, ecommerce & D2C brands, SMBs, and enterprises.
Businesses use Cashfree to collect payments across 180+ payment modes, provide seamless one-click checkout to their customers to improve conversions, and conduct cross-border payments across 176+ countries and 140+ currencies. Built for scale, Cashfree’s infrastructure handles an industry-leading 12,000 transactions per second, processing peak volumes without friction.
Alongside payments, Cashfree offers Secure ID, an identity verification stack with a comprehensive suite of APIs and KYC components. Secure ID enables fintechs and startups to streamline compliant onboarding and KYC flows by minimising user inputs, thus reducing drop-offs, intelligently verifying identity documents, and detecting fraud and anomalies with high accuracy.
Cashfree is India’s first AI-native payments platform, enabling AI agents to process invoices and conduct payments autonomously through its MCP server, and allowing businesses to embed payments natively within AI chatbots through Cashfree Here. With its newly launched Agentic Payments stack, Cashfree enables businesses to adopt agentic payments across different payment rails.
The company was one of the first fintech companies to hold all three RBI licenses of Payment Aggregator (PA), Payment Aggregator-Cross Border (PA-CB), and Prepaid Payment Instrument (PPI). Cashfree is backed by Silicon Valley investor Y Combinator, Apis Partners, State Bank of India (SBI), KRAFTON, and was incubated by PayPal.