Cashfree Payments appoints Sameer Gandhi as CFO

Cashfree Payments has appointed Sameer Gandhi as its Chief Financial Officer, as the company looks to strengthen financial discipline and accelerate its path to profitability amid rapid expansion in India’s digital payments sector.

Gandhi joins the company with more than two decades of experience across corporate finance, mergers and acquisitions, and financial planning. He most recently served as Head of Finance at Visa India, where he oversaw financial operations and planning. His prior roles include senior finance positions at Vodafone and ING Australia, as well as earlier stints at CRISIL and Citigroup.

At Cashfree Payments, Gandhi is expected to lead financial strategy, improve operational efficiency, and support revenue planning as the company scales its business and works towards profitability in the coming quarters.

The leadership change comes as Cashfree Payments strengthens its position in India’s highly competitive payments infrastructure market. The company is among the first in the country to hold all three major licences issued by the Reserve Bank of India Payment Aggregator (PA-PG), cross-border payments (PA-CB), and Prepaid Payment Instrument (PPI). This regulatory coverage has enabled it to expand into high-growth segments such as cross-border payments, which the company said has grown by 250% year-on-year.

Cashfree Payments processes over $80 billion in annual transactions and serves more than one million businesses, ranging from startups to listed enterprises. It recently raised $53 million in funding from investors including KRAFTON and Apis Growth Fund II, managed by Apis Partners.

The appointment also aligns with the company’s broader push towards AI-led innovation in payments. Cashfree has introduced proprietary infrastructure, including MCP servers designed to enable AI agents to process invoices and execute transactions autonomously, alongside tools that allow businesses to embed payments within AI-driven interfaces such as chatbots.

As FinTech firms increasingly prioritise profitability and operational efficiency following years of growth-led strategies, leadership hires in finance are becoming central to aligning expansion with sustainable business models. Cashfree’s move reflects a broader industry shift towards tighter financial governance while continuing to invest in next-generation payment technologies.