MAM
Cashfree appoints Vikas Guru as chief financial officer
Mumbai: Digital payments and banking technology company Cashfree has announced the appointment of Vikas Guru as its chief financial officer, to fuel the next phase of its growth.
Guru will be responsible for bringing a new level of insight, requisite experience, and strategy to drive the change and build an agile finance function at Cashfree. He will oversee operations, reporting, governance, investor relationships, and management information system. He will also play an active business partnering role within the leadership team to ensure both top and bottom-line targets are met and continuously exceeded, the company said in a statement.
“As Cashfree embarks on the next phase of growth, we are seeking out accomplished professionals who share our values and work ethics,” said Cashfree CEO & co-founder, Akash Sinha. “We are pleased to welcome Vikas Guru, at a critical juncture of the Cashfree journey. Vikas brings with him extensive experience in conceptualizing and implementing financial processes which are essential for an aggressively growing company like Cashfree. He has led teams across diverse industries and spearheaded finance operations in growth-centric organisations. We are confident that Vikas’s in-depth knowledge of financial planning and analysis, mergers and acquisitions, and corporate development will be invaluable as we continue on our journey to becoming one of the largest players, globally.”
Guru comes with two decades of experience across sectors such as financial services, retail, banking, and real estate. In a decade-long stint at FINO PayTech Ltd, he led the organisation to achieve scale and profitability. He was featured in the CFONEXT100 as a financial controller.
“This is an exciting time for Cashfree, and I am happy to join a team of extremely talented people fueling India’s next big story in banking technology and digital payments,” Guru said. “With innovation at its core, Cashfree is one of the fastest-growing fintechs in the country and I am sure that we will continue to create products and services which will benefit the entire ecosystem. I am looking forward to working with the team here in executing its strategic growth plans in India as well as in international markets. Together, we remain optimistic to capture the next wave of growth in the Cashfree journey.”
MAM
The Merit of Madness: How AI is Changing the Game in Advertising
By Ritz Malik, founder, Ritz Media World.
MUMBAI: When it comes to growth in a competitive landscape, a businessman always has to be a firm believer in Darwinism. You either need to bring a better product, or a better price, or both to the table to get customers and scale. Without this value proposition, you remain unnoticed, and staying unnoticed is not something that a brand wants to do.
You have to do all this and also make sure that you stay cashflow positive at the same time. Otherwise, you’re at a real risk of becoming a large hollow balloon that your competitors are just waiting for to explode or implode under its own weight.
As we’ve entered the era of AI, the notion of a product’s efficacy, cost efficiency, marketability, workflow management, and logistics reliability has become increasingly relevant and prevalently impactful. None of this is background noise anymore. It is the difference between bleeding money on traditional media and actually engineering a profitable campaign.
For example, META’s AI Algorithm has finally given us the ability to measure the ‘CREATIVE’ for a business’s promotions. The best part is that we can do so organically. Content that is actually relevant to the target audience gets more views through reach. This tells us exactly how the audience is reacting before we even scale the budget. This is how we have been gifted the ability to provide merit to the madness of the creative process.
So, our process is as follows:
A set of creatives is built for social media
Their performance is closely monitored for reach and engagement.
Based on the best organic performance, we choose the creative.
Make micro adjustments to add a sales proposition and CTA (but keep it subtle)
Publish the modified creative as an ad.
There’s a lot that goes on in between, but this is the basic method for getting it right. And this is just the AI that’s being used by platforms across the world.
AI utilisation is something that has greatly made the creative process a lot easier. As an agency that thrives on coming up with ideas that are out of this world, we have made the most of leveraging AI to bring ideas to life without spending a fortune.
So, this way, the ability to create high-impact brand stories is no longer under the tyrannical gatekeeping of large budget organisations. It is now that merit solely falls on the storyteller.
Now, AI-powered content production and the AI algorithm on Social Media platforms are asking the question: Is your content compelling?. If yes, the audience will watch your content, share it, and engage with it.
And when it comes to keeping budgets down, we can surely say that it holds the capability to execute million-dollar shoots at a fraction of the cost.
For example, we recently came across a creative challenge by a major Real Estate Developer from Gurugram. They had signed a celebrity couple for their brand ambassadorship a few months ago. They were now about to launch their new project, but for some reason, they could not get their shoot done.
What we came up with was to use the likeness of this celebrity couple and place them throughout the project’s feature video. With the help of AI generation, we were able to rebuild a completely new feature video with their brand ambassadors in 2 days, and no additional physical shots were required.
Imagine being able to save 50-60 lakhs in production costs, 15-20 days in production time, and comfortably be ahead of schedule to launch the project.
This has changed the game entirely. With AI, you can now just acquire the likeness rights of celebrities, and you can just build environments and scenarios with them. The balance between creative and artificial intelligence isn’t a battle for control; it is simply the ultimate tool for survival and scale in a landscape that rewards the fastest and the smartest.
