Cashfree CFO Piyush Anchliya quits months after taking charge

Anchliya, who joined in April, was tasked with steering Cashfree’s financial strategy and guiding it towards sustainable growth. He had over 15 years of experience across finance and mergers and acquisitions.

“It was a rare instance and for personal reasons that cannot be shared," said Akash Sinha, founder and chief executive of Cashfree, while confirming the development to Mint.

He added that the company is scouting for a replacement as it focuses on improving profitability and scaling newer business lines.

Revenue recovery

Sinha expects Cashfree to clock at least a 45-50% increase in revenues in 2025-26 after reporting a marginal decline in the previous fiscal year.

The startup has benefited from a strong revival in volumes and expansion into newer business lines and is also aiming to turn profitable in the current year, he added.

The Bengaluru-based company’s operating revenue remained largely flat at ₹640 crore in 2024-25, as against ₹643 crore a year ago, while its net loss widened 14% to ₹154 crore from ₹135 crore, according to its latest filings.

The slowdown was largely driven by a regulatory pause that restricted growth for payment aggregators. The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) had barred fintechs, including Cashfree, Paytm, and PayU, from onboarding new merchants for nearly a year, even as they faced stiff competition from players such as BillDesk, Juspay, and CCAvenue.

In December 2023, both Razorpay and Cashfree received final RBI approval to operate as payment aggregators, lifting the embargo and enabling them to resume onboarding new merchants, a key growth driver for their payment gateway businesses.

“After the embargo, we had to go back to the market and rebuild awareness. The embargo lasted a long time, and people were unsure about what had happened, so we had to explain and re-engage with them," Sinha said.

“From the second half of last year, we started seeing a revival, and the results began to show this year—our e-commerce portfolio alone grew by over 50% compared to last year. Enterprise and small and medium business clients are now focusing heavily on large e-commerce opportunities, and our next area of focus is SaaS."

Return to profitability

Sinha said the company expects to return to profitability this fiscal year as transaction volumes have bounced back in the first half and the momentum is continuing into the second. The fintech reported a profit after tax of ₹25.3 crore on revenue of ₹228.9 crore in 2020-21.

“That is the challenge with the payment aggregator industry. For a few payment methods, charging is not possible. The regulators have made it clear—they don’t intend to make it easy. Still, we’re hopeful," he said.

“At the same time, we are expanding into other product categories like risk and fraud management and prepaid payment instruments," he added.

Cashfree’s renewed focus on SaaS-based offerings, cross-border payments, and risk management solutions is expected to cushion the impact of the real-money gaming (RMG) crackdown, which affected several payment gateways.

“There might be some impact, but luckily, it was not a significant part. It was less than 10%. We are seeing that gap being filled by two other lines of business, like Secure ID and cross-border. We are also about to launch something on PPI very soon," Sinha said.

Cashfree received its PPI licence in 2024 and is currently running a beta pilot for its PPI product. The official launch is planned for the end of October.

Sinha said the company’s newer verticals are already seeing traction, and the improved business mix should help offset margin pressures in the traditional payments segment. “The revenues for this fiscal year would be at least 45–50% higher than 2024-25," he said.

Founded in 2015 by Akash Sinha and Reeju Datta, Cashfree helps businesses collect payments online, make instant payouts, verify customer identity, and detect fraud during KYC and onboarding. The company claims to process up to 12,000 transactions per second during peak demand.