Cashfree has launched its festive campaign, “Mithai Joint Family,” featuring comedian Biswa Kalyan Rath, using the familiar soan papdi joke to question why merchants default to certain payment gateway choices without looking deeper. The film draws a parallel between soan papdi, the sweet routinely passed from household to household during Diwali but rarely eaten, and payment gateways that appear similar on the surface, offering the same core features.
It opens with Rath holding a box of soan papdi, noting how it’s received but never actually enjoyed, before introducing an assorted mithai box, dubbed the “mithai joint family,” with soan papdi placed alongside other sweets. The comparison positions Cashfree as the assorted-box alternative, one that goes beyond payment success rates to offer a dedicated account manager, next-day settlements and the ability to go live within minutes.
The campaign ties into Cashfree’s Zero Payment Gateway Fees initiative, which waives gateway fees for new merchants on their first Rs 20 lakh in sales. Aditi Olemann, VP of Marketing & Communications at Cashfree, said the soan papdi joke resonates because it’s a universally shared experience, and that merchants often fall into a similar pattern, assuming higher success rates are the standard without asking what else a gateway offers. She added that Biswa’s dry humour was well suited to surfacing this assumption without the campaign feeling like a typical B2B ad.
The campaign also marks Cashfree’s first major communication under its new brand identity, featuring a redesigned logo and visual system reflecting its shift from a payments gateway to an AI-native payments platform.
