Cashfree has launched its festive campaign, ‘Mithai Joint Family’, featuring comedian Biswa Kalyan Rath. The campaign uses the familiar soan papdi joke around festive gifting to draw a parallel with what it describes as default choices in the payments category.
The campaign film opens with Biswa holding a box of soan papdi and observing how it passes from one household to another during Diwali without necessarily being anyone’s preferred sweet. The film then introduces an assorted mithai box, described as the ‘mithai joint family’, where soan papdi sits alongside other sweets.
The analogy is then extended to payment gateways. The campaign positions Cashfree’s offering around features beyond payment success rates, including a dedicated account manager, next-day settlements and the ability for new merchants to go live in minutes, along with zero payment gateway fees for up to ₹20 lakh in sales.
The campaign is part of Cashfree’s Zero Payment Gateway Fees initiative, which waives payment gateway fees for new merchants signing up on the platform for their first ₹20 lakh in sales. The initiative is being rolled out during the festive season, when online sales typically increase and payment infrastructure costs become a consideration for smaller businesses.
Cashfree said its active SMB merchant base grew 50% year-on-year in FY26 and that it currently serves close to one million SMBs, with a stated goal of doubling that number by the end of FY27.
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 is built around his observational and deadpan style, which the campaign uses to deliver its comparison between festive gifting and payment gateway choices.
The ‘Mithai Joint Family’ campaign also marks Cashfree’s first major communication under its new brand identity. The refreshed identity includes a new black and green visual system and a redesigned logo, referred to by the company as ‘the edge’, as Cashfree expands its positioning from a payments gateway to a broader AI-native payment platform.
The company’s wider product portfolio includes Relay, Checkout360, SecureID and an Agentic Payments Stack.
