Cashfree has launched its festive campaign, ‘Mithai Joint Family’, featuring comedian Biswa Kalyan Rath. The campaign uses the familiar Diwali experience of soan papdi being passed from one household to another to make a point about payment gateways.
The campaign opens with Biswa talking about the soan papdi box that shows up every Diwali but rarely gets eaten. He then introduces the idea of a “mithai joint family” — an assorted box where soan papdi sits alongside sweets that people actually want.
Cashfree uses this as a comparison for the payments category. According to the campaign, payment success rates have become a basic expectation for merchants, so the conversation is shifting towards the additional services a payment platform can provide.
The campaign highlights Cashfree’s offering of a dedicated account manager, next-day settlements and quick onboarding, along with its Zero Payment Gateway Fees initiative for new merchants on their first ₹20 lakh in sales.
Biswa’s role is central to the campaign’s tone. His observational style is used to turn a familiar festive joke into a business message aimed at small and growing online businesses preparing for the festive sales season.
The campaign comes as Cashfree targets a growing SMB base. The company says its active SMB merchant base grew 50% year-on-year in FY26, and that it now serves close to one million SMBs.
‘Mithai Joint Family’ is also the first major campaign under Cashfree’s refreshed brand identity. The new identity features a black-and-green visual system and a redesigned logo called ‘the edge’, reflecting the company’s positioning beyond a conventional payment gateway.
The campaign is part of Cashfree’s broader push towards positioning itself as an AI-native payments platform, with products including Relay, Checkout360, SecureID and its Agentic Payments Stack.
Watch the campaign
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.”
She further added, “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.”
