India moved a billion people to digital payments through UPI, building one of the world’s most advanced digital ecosystems. Yet its highest-value online commerce still runs on card payments, secured by OTPs, two-factor authentication, where checkout, even today, pauses. Friction was normalised. “SaveTheCards” was born inside this cultural acceptance of friction, & challenged the last five seconds of checkout as a design responsibility. So, in a country comfortable with retrying payments, we asked “Why lose revenue to errors you can control?"
This campaign marks a radical shift in fintech storytelling by humanizing the problem of preventable checkout failures. Inspired by the Japanese principle Poka-yoke, we dramatized how Razorpay CardStack future-proof errors. The two films personified the card as a cinematic protagonist facing preventable friction. We turned technical errors into emotional consequences, staging a funeral for a failed transaction & putting a card in therapy. We compelled Product Managers, the architects of a payment checkout, to emotionally experience user friction, urging them to see how fixing the smallest friction can ripple into recovered trust and revenue.
The objective was to center on perception building: to shift the narrative from customer blame to brand accountability by transforming dry RTBs into high-stakes storytelling. The goal? Make them aware, expose the five-second blind spot costing commerce billions, while shifting Success Rate from a KPI to a human moment they design, own, and fix, while cementing the perception that a solution existed!
To bring SaveTheCards to life, we didn’t just launch a fintech campaign, we engineered an AI-native storytelling by humanising preventable checkout failures and personifying the payment card itself.
Using generative AI, we created a cinematic “Janhit Mein Jaari” (Issued in Public Interest) PSA. Set in a stark noir black-and-white world, the aesthetic heightened drama and reframed backend breakdowns as deeply human stories - shifting the narrative from “user error” to design responsibility.
This was not an automated output. Every frame was directed, refined, and iterated.
1. The Films:
We orchestrated a multi-model generative workflow:
Midjourney, ChatGPT and Adobe Firefly were used to build detailed card characters, textures and environments. The core challenge was tonal: the cards had to feel human without becoming comical. They needed to remain instantly recognisable as payment cards while carrying emotional weight. Through iterative texture mapping, we developed matte and gloss “skins” that preserved material authenticity, while ensuring movements felt grounded and cinematic.
A key innovation was a custom ChatGPT character-mapping workflow built to solve a complex character system challenge: how do eight unique personalities exist within the same rigid card geometry without breaking brand recognisability? Each character was carefully crafted with subtle, humanising details. The prompt architecture layered wardrobe logic, age coding, micro-details including asymmetry, wear marks, even a mole on the grandmother character, to give individuality without breaking the visual logic of the card.
Runway and Kling were used to generate nuanced facial expressions and gestures, allowing the personified cards to convey genuine pathos. ElevenLabs delivered authentic Indian-accented voiceovers with carefully tuned pitch and pacing, and Topaz Labs provided high-fidelity upscaling for final polish.
2. The Microsite:
The SaveTheCards microsite was built on a simple truth: product managers don’t change decisions because of marketing claims, they change when they see cause and effect.
Its uniqueness lay in transforming an abstract backend metric, Success Rate, into a visceral, human experience through a live-action TOGGLE. With a single switch, visitors could witness the exact same checkout journey collapse in one state and succeed seamlessly in the other. Invisible losses became impossible to ignore.
The toggle revealed two parallel realities:
This interaction mattered because the problem itself was invisible. Teams were optimizing dashboards while crores leaked through simple customer mistakes. The toggle closed that perception gap instantly.
Generative AI accelerated the process, but the creative direction defined it. By combining cinematic craft, systems thinking, and iterative generative workflows, we transformed overlooked payment errors into emotionally resonant, design-led storytelling, redefining how AI can elevate not just content production, but category perception itself.
The result was a new storytelling grammar for fintech, where infrastructure became character, friction became narrative, and AI became a co-director rather than a shortcut.
Razorpay’s SaveTheCards achieved its core objective: shifting the narrative from customer blame to brand accountability, and reframing Success Rate from a backend KPI into a human moment Product Managers design, own, and fix.
Industry Impact: The campaign sparked industry-wide conversation across India’s product, fintech, and startup ecosystem. Leaders including Praveena Rai (MD & CEO, Multi Commodity Exchange of India Limited) engaged publicly, elevating checkout performance from an operational metric to a strategic business discussion.
The impact was measurable:
Global design recognition: The SaveTheCards microsite was featured on One Page Love, earning global design recognition for innovation in storytelling and interactive execution.
Engagement translated into intent:
Critically, we reached the audience that mattered:
Beyond awareness, SaveTheCards cemented perception: the five-second blind spot was real, and Razorpay had the solution.
