With Jonty Rhodes as ‘Cashback Catcher’, super.money aims to stand out in crowded UPI arena

When Flipkart's UPI payment app super.money unveiled its latest digital campaign featuring legendary South African cricketer Jonty Rhodes, it did more than just rope in a sports icon. The campaign, which casts Rhodes as a “Cashback Catcher”, seeks to blend sport, culture, and finance into a quirky narrative aimed squarely at India’s Gen Z and millennial audiences.

For co-founder Premanshu Singh, the choice of Rhodes was instinctive. “If you look at the kind of values we embody — making each payment a feel-good experience, ensuring rewards are instant, real, and valuable — Rhodes seemed a natural fit,” he says.

“He was always at the top of his game, consistent, dependable, and high on energy. These are exactly the qualities we wanted to reflect through the campaign.”

The campaign was conceptualised by super.money’s in-house marketing team in collaboration with creative agency BrainDad, led by Vishal Dayama. The project took over three to four months of back-and-forth storyboarding. 

While it began as an internal launch vehicle for the brand’s new co-branded credit card, its timing aligned perfectly with the festive season and the Asia Cup. “We realised it was the right moment to go live,” Singh notes.

Cracking a cluttered space

Launched in 2024 by Flipkart, super.money entered a hyper-competitive UPI ecosystem dominated by entrenched incumbents like PhonePe, Paytm, and Google Pay. Yet, Singh points out that the brand has quickly scaled to become the fifth-largest UPI app in India in terms of transaction volume, processing upwards of 250 million transactions a month. For context, in the month of August, 20 billion UPI transactions worth Rs 25 trillion (about $293 billion) were processed by the UPI system.

It claims about 10 million monthly active transacting users, with 14–16 million opening the app each month. “We grew 100x in one year, from two-and-a-half million transactions to nearly 250 million,” Singh says. “We are the fastest-growing UPI app in NPCI’s history.”

Did you know? Flipkart acquired PhonePe in April 2016. However, Flipkart later completed the full separation of PhonePe as a separate entity by December 2022, meaning Flipkart no longer owns PhonePe or holds shares in the payments company. 

But breaking through wasn’t easy. Singh recalls the questions that dogged the team at launch: What was the brand's strategy going to be to win in a saturated market? The answer, he says, lies in rethinking the product experience from the ground up.

“Most legacy payment apps are cluttered. Their homepages are overloaded with options. We took the opposite route,” he explains. “We made our scanner occupy half the homepage. When a user stands in front of a QR code, we want super.money to be their subconscious first choice.”

The app’s design philosophy, he adds, is rooted in minimalism and functionality — what Singh describes as “artist-like thinking” applied to fintech UI/UX. This focus on seamless user journeys has been coupled with a clear value proposition around rewards.

“Others give loyalty points, coins, vouchers, or scratch cards. We thought it sounded gimmicky. We said we’ll give real cashback on every transaction, directly into the bank account,” he says. “It’s your money; you should be able to use it.”

Speaking Gen Z’s language

Super.money’s early traction, Singh believes, owes much to its sharp focus on younger cohorts — especially Gen Z users and first-jobbers in their mid-20s. He argues that the older user bases of legacy apps, developed a decade or more ago, are not representative of this audience.

“Most of those platforms have users in their 40s or 50s. Gen Z doesn’t want to resonate with anything old. They’re very purpose-driven and straight-talking. Everything for them is a vibe,” says Singh.

This thinking extends to the brand’s media strategy. Super.money has largely eschewed traditional advertising and offline media, opting instead for a digital-first, social-first approach. “Our first 100,000 users came through social influencers. The next million did too,” Singh recalls.

“Even for this campaign, we are going heavy on Instagram, YouTube, and X. Offline or BTL will only play a minor supporting role.”

He adds that influencer marketing has been central to the brand’s growth playbook. “When we launched, we didn’t spend any marketing dollars. Yet within days, there were 28–30 YouTube videos from micro and local influencers who had just discovered the app organically. They gave us our first few lakh users for free,” he says.

“If you build something valuable, users will tell others about it.”

Building beyond payments

While UPI scan-and-pay is super.money’s core use case today, Singh outlines a roadmap aimed at deepening engagement and broadening the app’s financial services portfolio.

“We’re always going to be anchored on three pillars: simplicity of scan-and-pay, straight communication, and predictable cashbacks,” he says. “But we’re building new features around these same philosophies.”

Recent additions include a “SuperPay in 3” product on Flipkart, allowing users to split purchases into three interest-free installments without fees. The company has also launched two co-branded credit cards, with a third set to roll out soon. 

Singh reveals that super.money is exploring secured credit cards — an emerging category that he believes could see significant demand. A secured credit card is a credit card that requires a cash deposit or a fixed deposit (FD) with the bank as collateral, serving as a security deposit for the credit line. 

“We launched India’s first Rs 100 secured RuPay credit card, where you make a small FD and get 90% credit. Just on this proposition, we’ve become one of the top two RuPay credit card issuers,” he claims.

Beyond credit, the app has recently launched flight bookings and is working on refining its ledger and search functionalities, as well as driving higher frequency of use.

“Our average user does about 30 transactions a month. We want to see them using the app more than once a day,” Singh says. “On average, we plan to launch either a major feature or a product every six to seven weeks.”

Positioning for the next wave of fintech

Looking ahead, Singh believes India’s fintech sector is entering a phase of verticalisation, where broad payment layers give way to specialised, context-driven use cases.

“Every industry grows horizontally first, then verticalises,” he observes. “Payments will follow that path. There will be specific tools for doctors, creators, equity traders, along with other industry-specific UPI use cases.”

He is also bullish on credit-on-UPI, especially after the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) recently enabled the feature.

“It’s going to be a game-changer in how Indians consume credit,” he says. Alongside this, Singh sees opportunities to build affordability-linked financial products for the e-commerce ecosystem, particularly through the Flipkart network.

For now, though, super.money’s focus remains on consolidating its differentiated positioning in a space where incumbents enjoy enormous brand equity and distribution muscle. Singh argues that their youth-focused, experience-first strategy gives them a viable edge.

“We don’t feel the need to copy others’ playbooks. The market is large enough, and India’s payment problem is still not fully solved,” he says. “We think we’ve found our audience — and they’ve been responding.”

As Rhodes dives across screens as the “Cashback Catcher”, Singh hopes the campaign will not only entertain but also crystallise what super.money stands for: speed, dependability, and rewards that are as real as the money itself.