How Cashfree Payments’ ‘One of Your Kind’ brand campaign is forcing us to look at businesses differently

Here is a test for any B2B fintech brand: open their latest campaign and try to guess what they actually do. Odds are you will land on the same elements every time. A confident voiceover. Abstract animations of dashboards and data flows. A headline about speed, scale, or security. Maybe all three. The businesses these companies claim to serve are a distant afterthought, nameless and interchangeable, just props to illustrate a feature.

Cashfree Payments is attempting something markedly different.

The company's new brand campaign, 'One of Your Kind', opens not with a product demo or a promise about uptime, but with the real, recognisable chaos of building a business in India. The film features BigBasket, Heads Up For Tails, Third Wave Coffee, Prashanti Sarees, and RedBus, all of them long-time Cashfree merchants, portrayed not as distant success stories, but as restless, still-evolving businesses that got where they are by refusing to do things the standard way.

It is a different kind of B2B marketing. The question worth asking is why it took this long.

The campaign: One of your kind

Think about what it took for BigBasket to convince Indian households to hand over their weekly grocery shopping to an app. Or what RedBus had to navigate when it set out to bring order to intercity bus travel, a network so fragmented that millions of people were essentially planning journeys on hope. Or how Third Wave Coffee built a specialty cafe culture in a country where coffee consumption habits were being shaped in real time. Or how Heads Up For Tails created an entirely new category of premium pet care where none had existed before.

None of these businesses followed a playbook. Each one wrote its own.

That is the observation at the heart of 'One of Your Kind'. Over a decade of being the first payments partner for businesses operating at the edge of their categories, Cashfree Payments developed what Co-founder & CEO Akash Sinha describes as an intimate view of how differently ambitious businesses operate.

“While everyone talks about scale, success, and more for every startup that is being built,” Sinha says, “what we witnessed as more important was the unique blood, sweat, and tears of these businesses that propelled them to become category disruptors. We felt, this journey was more important to highlight. And celebrate what these businesses have become, despite all odds.”

The philosophy behind it: a founding story

'One of Your Kind' did not come out of a marketing brainstorm. It came out of the way Cashfree Payments itself was built.

The company started in 2015 when Akash Sinha and Reeju Datta, two engineers in Bengaluru, got frustrated watching cash-on-delivery settlements arrive late for restaurant owners. The problem was specific, annoying, and largely invisible to the incumbent players in the market, who had little incentive to fix what worked well enough for most of their customers. Sinha and Datta saw it differently, and that instinct, to solve the problem that everyone else had decided was not worth solving, became the company's operating mode.

India’s consumer economy was, by then, in the middle of a leap. Mobile, internet, and UPI had created an entirely new kind of customer, and with them, an entirely new kind of business. The businesses that thrived were the ones willing to rethink everything from scratch.

And yet, for most of that journey, the payments layer underneath them was still being built as if all businesses were fundamentally the same.

That tension between infrastructure that treated every merchant alike and merchants that were anything but, is what eventually gave shape to the campaign. “No two journeys look the same,” Sinha says. “No two sets of challenges are identical.” The campaign was born from the discomfort of watching payment infrastructure treat them as if they were.

Walking the talk: Payments built for specific problems

The campaign works as a statement of values. The products it is anchored to are where that statement gets tested.

Take return-to-origin, or RTO, a term that keeps many D2C founders in India awake at night. Over half of Indian shoppers still prefer cash on delivery, which means a significant portion of every shipment comes back to the warehouse when a delivery does not go through. The logistics costs pile up. The cash never lands. Cashfree Payments’ AI-powered RTO suite was built precisely for this, helping merchants reduce RTO rates by up to 20%.

Then there is checkout, the moment just before a sale is won or lost. Cart abandonment in India is endemic, driven by clunky payment flows. Cashfree Payments’ One Click Checkout was built to eliminate that friction and maximise conversions with 25% faster checkout completion.

For Indian businesses that have started to look beyond their home market, the challenge shifts just as dramatically. Cashfree's cross-border payments stack now supports collections from 176 countries in over 140 currencies, letting international buyers pay through methods they already trust. In markets like the US, UK, and UAE, merchants using the platform have seen checkout drop-offs fall by up to 75%, translating to as much as 40% in additional revenue.

And then there is what comes next. Agentic commerce, where AI agents handle the entire customer journey from discovery to payment within a single conversation, is no longer a speculative use case. Cashfree's infrastructure for this is already live, built in partnership with Swiggy and Mastercard. The same payment rails powering today's SMBs are being extended to handle whatever commerce looks like in the next five years.

What the campaign is really saying

B2B fintech has spent years competing on pricing tables and feature checklists. The pitch is usually some variation of: we are faster, cheaper, or more reliable than the other option. It is not that these things do not matter. It is that they have become the floor, not the ceiling.

What 'One of Your Kind' suggests instead is something different: that the businesses building India's digital economy are not interchangeable, and they deserve a payments partner that has actually paid attention to that. Not a partner that adapts an existing product for whoever walks through the door, but one that has been building from the specific realities of specific businesses for the past decade.

The merchants in the campaign film, BigBasket, RedBus, Third Wave Coffee, Prashanti Sarees and Heads Up For Tails, were not chosen because they are famous. They were chosen because they are genuinely one-of-a-kind businesses, and because Cashfree has worked closely enough with them to understand what that actually entails. That kind of familiarity does not show up in a feature comparison table. But it shows up in the infrastructure you build, and increasingly, in the campaigns you choose to make.

A generation of Indian founders is building globally from day one. A wave of AI-first companies is arriving with payment needs unlike anything the industry has handled before. The window for a payments infrastructure that treats them all the same is closing. Cashfree's bet is that the companies paying attention to that shift right now are the ones that will matter on the other side of it.