Brands
DHL shows how football and business are alike
MUMBAI: International express services provider, DHL Express, has launched its 360-degree interactive brand campaign with a TVC that draws parallels between the game of football and the business landscape. The campaign was released during the Indian Super League (ISL) 2017 season for which DHL is an associate sponsor.
Anchored by three TVCs, the overall brand campaign is expected to engage over 500 million people across the country during five months of the ISL season. The campaign will leverage print, radio, OOH, in-Stadium and digital activation initiatives to amplify the messaging and reach its consumer base beyond the 10 ISL cities and across the country.
The TV commercial is the first in a series of three that highlight DHL’s core proposition of ‘Excellence. Simply Delivered.’ through rich visuals and use of light-hearted humour. Each TVC showcases a different scenario in a football match and is a metaphor for describing the challenges faced by businesses and how DHL as an expert enables them to overcome these hurdles. The use of humour is intended to provide a mood break to the viewers in between tense football matches and, at the same time, convey DHL’s brand message.
DHL express India country manager RS Subramanian says, “The single line brief for the campaign was to position DHL as an enabler that helps businesses overcome challenges in the marketplace and win. The creative treatment given to the campaign highlights our brand promise of Excellence, Simply Delivered.”
Williams Lea Tag India managing director Amit Chandra adds, “We have designed the campaign to create brand resonance for DHL by communicating its message linked to football, which the ISL’s target audience will relate to. We are confident that the use of humour and exaggeration through the match scenarios showcased in the TVCs will strike a chord with the audience.”
This year’s campaign is set to be bigger in scale and aims to reach an even larger audience through sustained outreach over the extended ISL season.
Brands
Rakesh Menon joins Paytm as avp – lending
Fintech product leader takes on new role after building digital lending, payments and credit products across fintech ecosystem
MUMBAI: Rakesh Menon has joined Paytm as assistant vice president – lending, taking on a new role focused on strengthening the company’s lending and credit products.
Prior to this, Menon worked at Profectus Capital Pvt Ltd as chief manager – payments based financing and digital lending.
At Profectus, he designed and launched digital credit products for merchants with variable cash flows, including overdraft-linked and revenue-share lending models. He led end-to-end LOS–LMS API integrations with payment partners and aggregators, enabling real-time underwriting, disbursal and repayment workflows.
He also worked on funnel optimisation initiatives using journey analytics, improving onboarding, KYC and disbursal conversion by 35 per cent. He developed ecosystem partnerships for transaction-data-based credit assessment and automated settlement systems, and collaborated with credit and data science teams to strengthen risk models and early delinquency detection.
Menon standardised partner onboarding and API frameworks, reducing go-live timelines by 40 per cent and improving digital scalability.
Before Profectus Capital, he worked at PayU as senior manager – presales lead – enterprise business from August 2022 to August 2023. He set up a national presales function for fintech and digital commerce clients, aligning solutions such as EMI, BNPL, BBPS and offer engines to merchant requirements.
He also helped improve conversion rates by around 15 per cent through merchant persona mapping, demo frameworks and structured sales playbooks, working closely with product and go-to-market teams.
From April 2019 to July 2022, Menon served as business unit head – SMB – direct acquisitions at Worldline, where he built the SMB online payments vertical from scratch. The business scaled to Rs 2,500 crore in annual transaction volume, growing at 45 per cent year-on-year.
During this period, he introduced paperless onboarding processes including eKYC and eSign, developed partner dashboards and CRM automation systems, and integrated platforms such as Shopify, WooCommerce and Tally to expand merchant adoption.
Across roles, Menon has worked across digital lending, payments and merchant financing, with experience in product development, ecosystem partnerships, API integrations and fintech-led growth strategies.
At Paytm, he will focus on scaling lending products and strengthening digital credit infrastructure within the company’s financial services ecosystem.
His appointment comes as fintech firms continue to expand their lending and embedded finance offerings in a competitive market.
