Ladies and gentlemen, good day and welcome to the Infibeam Avenues Ltd Q2 FY 2026 earnings conference call hosted by Go India Advisors LLP. As a reminder, all participant lines will be in the listen-only mode, and there will be an opportunity for you to ask questions after the presentation concludes. Should you need assistance during the conference call, please signal an operator by pressing star, then zero on your touchstone phone. Please note that this conference is being recorded. I now hand the conference over to Mr. Rajat Gupta from Go India Advisors. Thank you, and over to you, sir.
Yes, thank you, Fathak. Good evening, everyone, and welcome to Infibeam Avenues Ltd earnings call to discuss the Q2 FY 2026 results. We have on the call with us today Mr. Vishal Mehta, Chairman and Managing Director; Mr. Vishwas Patel, Joint Managing Director; and Mr. Sunil Bhagat, Chief Financial Officer. Also joining us on the call today is Mr. B. Ravi, who's advising Infibeam on corporate and financial strategy as an independent consultant. We must remind you that the discussion on today's call may include certain forward-looking statements and must be therefore viewed in conjunction with the risk that the company faces. I now request Mr. Vishal Mehta to take us through the company's business outlook and financial highlights, subsequent to which we'll open the floor for Q&A. Thank you, and over to you, sir.
Thank you, Rajat. A very good afternoon, everyone, and a very warm welcome to our investors, partners, and all those who have supported the Infibeam Avenues journey since inception. This quarter marks a defining moment for us: our best-ever performance with record revenues and profits, the highest in our history. During the quarter, we also transitioned into becoming a hybrid B2B and a B2C organization, combining enterprise scale with direct consumer engagement. This evolution gives us a very balanced portfolio across both ecosystems and firmly positions Infibeam Avenues at the intersection of payments and artificial intelligence. We are now approaching an annual revenue run rate of nearly $1 billion, something we had talked about in 2023. Back then, we had suggested by March 2026 we expect to hit a billion dollars on an annual revenue run rate basis.
We are happy to report that we were able to achieve nearly that run rate in the second quarter of 2025. Based on this current trajectory, we expect to close FY 2026 at the higher end of our guidance range. I want to spend a few minutes talking about strategic transformation. The past few quarters have been about re-architecting Infibeam Avenues from a multi-platform enterprise into a focused, future-ready ecosystem anchored on two strategic pillars. The first one is AI-driven fintech infrastructure solution, and the second one is AI-powered consumer and merchant platforms. Let me tell you a little bit more in detail about what I mean. Together, these platforms form a dual-engine model: one powering India's digital payments backbone, and the other one is building next-generation AI-native consumer and merchant experience.
In the first one, where we are talking about AI-driven fintech infrastructure solution, our long-term vision remains clear: to build India's most trusted AI fintech infrastructure, which is regulated, intelligent, and globally scalable. This is led by our flagship brand, CC Avenue, and our investments in Phronetic.ai , our dedicated artificial intelligence arm. This forms part of Infibeam Avenues. Following our strategic portfolio realignment, Infibeam Avenues Ltd will now operate as a pure-play fintech and AI payments company, while Rediff.com will drive our AI-first platform strategies spanning commerce, content, and consumer engagement. Rediff's mission is also very clear: it is to build India's first AI-native consumer ecosystem, reimagining digital engagement through three pillars. The first one is Rediff One, a unified suite integrating communication, commerce, and productivity platforms. With over 100 million registered users and 20,000+ merchants, Rediff One anchors our consumer base.
The second pillar is Rediff Pay, which is our upcoming consumer UPI app, which is approved in principle by NPCI and marks our entry into direct-to-consumer financial services. The third pillar is Rediff TV, or content. It is currently in beta. This is India's first fully AI-driven content streaming platform, which is multilingual, automated, scalable, and practically with minimal manual production. Together, these platforms make Rediff a super app ecosystem where communication, commerce, and payments converge. Let me also spend a minute to give you an update on the progress of the AI roadmap. Through Phronetic.ai, we are embedding intelligence across the digital and financial stack. Our key highlights for this quarter include the launch of PayCentral.ai. It's India's first agentic payment platform built on Google's agent payment protocol, enabling AI agents to transact autonomously on any site, which is, in some ways, global-first.
The second one is the Agent Operating System, which is a next-generation orchestration layer connecting reasoning, vision, language models, and enterprise workflows. It allows AI agents to perform financial tasks like invoicing and reconciliations independently. Agentic.ai, which is a global AI agent marketplace where developers and enterprises can build, buy, and deploy autonomous digital coworkers. The last one is the MOU with a company called Nawgati, which is where we deploy our video large language models and agentic AI for real-time reasoning and automation in industrial environments. We believe this is not incremental adoption; it is architectural AI integration, building a sovereign, compliant, and scalable foundation through our edge data center. With that, I will now hand over the call to Vishwas Patel, our Joint Managing Director. Vishwas, over to you.
Thank you, Vishal. Good afternoon, everyone. The second quarter has been a pivotal one for our payments business as we have strengthened our leadership in India while expanding rapidly across international markets. Let me begin with some key developments in this quarter. We have expanded some of our regulatory capabilities. We have received, in principle, authorizations from the Reserve Bank of India to issue prepaid payment instruments, PPIs, under our new brand, CC Avenue Go. We will also roll out digital wallets, prepaid gift cards, travel, and transit cards, fully integrated into our merchant ecosystem. These follow our earlier license from the RBI regarding the payment aggregator and the Bharat Bill Payment Operating Unit. Completing a full regulatory stack, acquiring, issuing, and billing, making us one of the few Indian fintechs with end-to-end authorization and license from the Reserve Bank.
We have also received IFSC, in principle, approval for our subsidiary, IA Fintech IFSC Private Ltd, to operate as a payment service provider at the GIFT IFSC. That license includes cross-border money transfer and escrow services and merchant acquiring. This expands our presence in the key international IFSC financial corridor, addressing trade finance, remittance, and high-value cross-border transactions. We've also launched CC Avenue Commerce AI, which is integrated with our PayCentral.ai, creating the world's first agentic payment framework where verified AI agents can initiate and process payments autonomously. Domestically, we continue to see robust merchant onboarding and TPV growth, supported by a favorable card mix and a vertical expansion across travel, entertainment, utilities, recharges, and services. Our strategic focus remains on absolute profit and cash flow generation while maintaining discipline on take rates.
Internationally, our operations in U.A.E. and Saudi Arabia are scaling rapidly, processing billions of AED annually, with Oman set to launch next. We expect international payments to contribute double-digit net revenue within the next 12-18 months. Now, some of the key partnerships in this quarter: so we have partnered with Sree Narayana Guru Cooperative Bank to power its merchants with advanced digital payment solutions, expanding CC Avenue's reach into the cooperative banking segment. This collaboration strengthens our merchant acquisition pipeline and deepens penetrations among SMEs and local businesses. It further enhances transaction volumes and recurring revenues. CC Avenue also integrated its net banking platform with TJSB Sahakari Bank, India's fourth-largest urban cooperative bank, enabling seamless online payments for the bank's customers. This integration broadens our access to a large digitally active customer base and strengthens our net banking facilities.
At CC Avenue platform, we have also gone live with the NPCI's Bharat Bill Payment's Bharat Connect, onboarding Bajaj Finance Ltd to deliver next-gen net banking experience at scale. This breakthrough removes friction from digital loan payments and large merchant payments by offering fast, secure, seamless bank link and QR flows of debiting a bank account across all the banking partners. By powering this high-volume premium partner, we are reinforcing our payment ecosystems, deepening our stickiness, and unlocking higher transaction volumes and fee income potential. With these advances, CC Avenue is evolving into a payment gateway into an AI-powered financial network, which is intelligent, trusted, and globally scalable. Now, with this, I'll hand over to Sunil Bhagat, our CFO, for the financial overview. Over to you, Sunil Bhagat.
Thank you, Vishwas , and good afternoon to everyone. Our quarter two FY 2026 results underscore strong execution, discipline, growth, and sustainable profitability. Our gross revenue on a consolidated basis went to INR 1,965 crore, which is the highest ever in the history of the company, which is up by 53% sequentially and 93% year-on-year, which is driven by higher TPV and our Rediff.com's performance. The net revenue we have reported is INR 153 crore, which is also up 14% year-on-year, reflecting our improved monetization. Our adjusted EBITDA we have reported is INR 94 crore, which is also up 32% quarter-on-quarter, supported by strong operational leverage, and our PAT went to INR 65 crore, which is also up 18% year-on-year, and driven by our margin expansion in AI services and cost optimization.
Our EBITDA margin stood at 61%, and PAT margin at 42% of net revenue, underscoring profitability even as we invest aggressively in AI infrastructure and consumer expansion. The balance sheet remains strong with robust cash flows and minimal leverage. Our focus remains on absolute EBITDA growth, sustainable cash generation, and long-term shareholder value creation. We expect to close FY 2026 at the higher end of our guidance range, supported by momentum across both our fintech and AI-led businesses. As we look ahead, one thing is certain: the fusion of AI, payments, and consumer ecosystems will define the next decade of digital growth. At Infibeam Avenues, we are not just participating in this transformation; we are building the rails for it. Our mission is to create India's intelligent, sovereign, and globally scalable AI fintech infrastructure, and through Rediff.com, shape India's first AI-native consumer ecosystem. Thank you for your trust and continued support.
We'll now open the floor for questions.
Thank you very much. We will now begin the question-and-answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star and one on their touchstone telephone. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, you may press star and two. Participants are requested to use handsets while asking a question. Ladies and gentlemen, we will wait for a moment while the question queue assembles. Our first question is from the line of Pratna from Neo One. Please go ahead.
Hello.
Yes, ma'am, you are audible. Please continue with the question.
Thank you for the opportunity. I have a couple of questions. First is, after the platform divestiture to Rediff.com and the rights issue, how has the capital allocation framework evolved? Specifically, what is the long-term split between funding AI infra versus new payment rails versus consumer platform expansion?
Basically, as far as the capital allocation is concerned for the rights issue, it is part of the objects of the rights issue. In terms of objects, primarily the main objects were investments in AI, which is where we are building out Phronetic.ai . Some of the updates that I talked to you about, but we are going to invest further in terms of build-out. It is a horizontal layer. It also has products, and it essentially allows us to create and continue building out the digital ecosystem. That is the primary objective of the rights issue. We also had some other specifics as an investment in Rediff. Rediff is a consumer ecosystem that we are building out, and Rediff Pay and other things that we are building out along with it. Recently, we have received NPCI approval.
We are going to go and launch it as soon as we get the final approval from NPCI to launch. We believe that that becomes important. We've also launched Rediff TV and others. If you look at the objects of the issue, these are the primary objectives with which we will invest into the growth of the company.
Pratna ma'am, you weren't audible. Could you please repeat?
Hello.
Pratna ma'am, your voice is not clear. Could you move to an area with better connectivity?
Hello. Is it?
No. No, ma'am. Sorry to interrupt. You are not audible. Pratna ma'am, I request you to rejoin the conference and then get back in the queue. Meanwhile, we will take the next question.
All right. Okay. Sure.
Our next question comes from the line of Rahul Jain from Dolat Capital. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Thanks for the opportunity, and congratulations to the management for very strong numbers. Firstly, I could see some of the things pretty exceptional in terms of credit card volume growth, which has also led to significant TPV growth as well as better take rates. Any colors on all these aspects would be great. I can understand a little bit of advantage of an early festive season in this particular quarter. What is driving this kind of a momentum and improved take rate? Color on that would be of great help.
Sure. I can go first, and then Vishwas will add to what I have to say. Basically, Rahul, you're right. The mix turned towards credit. We were not focused too much on credit cards. Credit cards have a slightly lower take rate compared to some of the other options that we carried. Rather than optimizing on the net take rate, we started optimizing on absolute profits. That is a conscious decision from the company to actually focus on larger volumes and larger transactions while the absolute profit should grow. If you look at the numbers, the TPV increased. We were able to—we already have a significant amount of merchants who started earlier. We were not processing credit cards as much for them. We started processing a lot of credit card and other transactions with them as well.
Rather than optimizing just on the net take rate, if you look at the net take rate, it has gone down from 11.2 basis points to 8.2 basis points. What we realized was that we will monitor the take rate, but we want to make sure that we optimize on absolute profits. We build out a much larger ecosystem based on that. I think what drives the volume, you're right, is also some amount of pre-holiday commitments. I think so far also this quarter looks very strong for us. We think that with the right approach and the right kind of optimizations that we would like to continue building upon this. We believe that we may be able to get to much larger numbers and a higher range of guidance to even beating the numbers annualized. Vishwas, anything to add?
I think more or less you have summed it up, Vishal. Credit cards and other things, we have gone for scale, and some of the big wins are there. We have taken on merchants at a little aggressive rates and other things to get scale. At the same time, take rate has gone down, but overall volumes and profitability has increased. We are going for scale, and certain big wins have been powering it, specifically in the telecom utility and as far as hospitality, the big change and others. That is why the credit mix is working for us.
Yeah. Thanks for that color. Vishal, you in your opening thought, and you guys have mentioned about the multi-pillar strategy that you have. More color in terms of something that you're looking in a near-term driver for the growth point of view. I think some of the licenses that we have received, prepaid payment, and the other one which in IFSC. Any monetization opportunity or timeline that we have for that?
Thanks, Rahul. I think the monetization is pretty huge as far as prepaid instruments are concerned. Vishwas, you want to throw some color on that in terms of timeline as well?
Yes, sir. Yes, sir. What we have got on PPI is just the in-principle approval right now. In one to two months, we should get the final approval. In essence, what is there is that we do PPI today has become as good as a payments bank or any other bank account since it has become interoperable with any bank system. From our perspective, we had the ecosystem ready. With that PPI license, now we can directly connect to the core and issue prepaid and hold balances, right, up to the same enable payments. On one side, to get full-sided this thing, we do have a lot of full KYC, the customers doing DMT and other things, millions of customers that we will be onboarding. Plus, we have a good base in Rediff.com also where the new customers will be coming.
On the other side, for the acceptance piece, we already have the whole ecosystem ready of millions of merchants and other things where we can have this CC Avenue wallet as a payment option there. We can also power the Rediff wallet. There are a lot of monetization strategy and detail we will come out as and when we are ready to launch on the PPI, most probably in the next quarter. Around January, February, if our final approval comes in from the RBI, we'll be ready to do. That's on the PPI. That's as far as IFSC, GIFT City is concerned. We have got basically three licenses there in in-principle approval from IFSC. One is to do our normal payment aggregation merchant acquiring business. We also have got the cross-border money transfer remittance business there.
We have got escrow services license to hold money to take on big government merchants where we can put the money in escrow till the other part is fulfilled, whatever that tender element is there. The three core licenses in GIFT City, we expect a lot of cross-border transactions happening there and a lot of this thing which IFSC is also getting where dollar settlements and everything is instant, right? We see a huge opportunity there and GIFT City is within our reach. Once that final approval also comes in, we will come out with the strategy and everything. Monetization is instant and deliverable because the merchant acquiring piece we have from everything within the group right up to AI-powered payment systems and remittance also.
We do have our earlier incubated company, and some say can remit Payable fintech, whoever does remittance for nine out of the top 10 banks. Using that, also we'll be doing a lot of cross-border. That is, monetization will be easy once you get the final approval. We see big opportunities in both these space, and hence we have got into this. Rahul.
Yeah. Thanks, Vishwas. If I got you right, with PPI, the first few products that we would like to play out would be the prepaid card. It's more like branded like a Myntra gift card. Is that the kind of a product that you're talking about?
It's a prepaid wallet. White labeling, of course, and doing co-branded cards is just one of the many opportunities that is there. We'll definitely be doing a lot of co-branded card with NPCI, RuPay, as a, this thing to get that acceptance for those things. The bigger part is it's like a bank account. It's like a wallet is a balance where you, on any given day, where thousands of crores are lying in the wallet with us, right? That's where and the acceptance mechanism where money transfers from, say, a CC Avenue Go wallet from one merchant to another. For us, it's left pocket, right pocket, and there's a good MDR to be made in that, right? The acceptance is that's the base. A lot of this thing with the interoperability with various banking systems which RBI has allowed on the PPI makes it very attractive for this thing.
As I said, we have where we can get millions of customers to onboard on that. On the other side, we have already the ecosystem where millions of merchants can accept that card at just one click. That is the whole opportunity, Rahul.
Sure. Sure. When you say on the wallet side, then I'm assuming it has to be on the Rediff Pay side. Any timelines on when we want to go big on the consumer side of it? Because if we have this kind of instrument, it would be pretty relevant that we should have the consumer side app also to really scale this kind of proposition.
Yeah, absolutely. Back in the quarter, we announced that we have NPCI approval. Rediff Pay app is technically a super app on top of Rediff Mail. It's already, in some ways, downloaded by millions of customers. As soon as we open up Pay, we expect that it'll happen in Q4 timeframe. If we get the permissions from NPCI sometime this month to launch Rediff Pay, then we should be able to launch it full scale by Q4.
Thank you. That's heartening to hear. Thank you. That's it from my side.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Grishma Shah from Envision Capital. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Hello. Thank you for taking my question. My first question is, with regards to the Rediff Pay, Rediff Mail, and Rediff TV, how will the monetization year happen? What are the kind of investments that we have already put in and we plan to put here?
Grishma, this is Vishal Mehta. Basically, Rediff Mail is already live. It is live across, we call it Rediff One as a platform. Each of these are going to be interoperable. They need to work with each other. If you look at Rediff Mail, there is an enterprise email client which is going, and it is already live across more than 20,000 enterprises. We send out about more than 1 billion emails every month. That is the complexity and the scale at which it operates. The commerce framework is also now part of it as part of Rediff One.
It's an integrated ecosystem because we need to think about a service now kind of a setup which enables workflows and many other frameworks to sit so that if anyone wants to build out an AI-first low-code prompt, they can perhaps do most of the activities without having to invest time and effort. A very beta version of that, in fact, went live as of yesterday called apps.rediff, whereby you can just prompt it, and it will build out applications inside integrated with CC Avenue Payment Gateway. We think that all of this will be interesting, but the UPI payment will be through Rediff Pay. As far as the Rediff One platform is concerned, we call it an integrated platform where we will invest into building out, in some ways, for mid-market and large market ERP, CRM, HRMS solutions, commerce along with mail and others.
You can think of it as what Zoho has done with Zoho One. I think the vision for Rediff One is actually a Rediff platform that we talk about as a combination of all the suites that are interoperable, and they're closely, in some ways, integrated with the AI-first approach because we'll need to think about how AI plays a role, and you can build it out much differently compared to how you would do it otherwise. That's Rediff One. As far as Rediff Pay is concerned, you see we always had the merchant side as far as CCAvenue is concerned because Infibeam Avenues is actually now the infrastructure for fintech with CC Avenue and AI together. From a B2B perspective, Rediff Pay is going to focus on the consumer part and not the business piece, which is focused on the UPI piece.
Once you have the consumer and the merchant, it becomes a dual-engine ecosystem, which is what I talked about earlier because if you power India's digital payments backbone as well as build a consumer-first framework, you would have both sides of the equation, and there is both that can be monetized. Today, we monetize only the merchant. We do not monetize the consumer as much. Rediff has more than 100 million registered email users. I am not talking about the Rediff One platform going to 20,000-plus merchants, but there are 100 million registered email users. While not all of them are active, we are talking about 5-10 million users being active on a daily basis. These are free email users, and they can easily be migrated to Rediff Pay as a UPI option. In other words, we will invest in Rediff Pay.
There are a lot of incumbents. We realize that, but we think we will work more on the brand side to be able to enable brand to reach out to consumer using Rediff communication channels because Rediff by core is a communication channel. If we are able to build out an ecosystem based on that, it works out somewhat very interestingly. We think that Rediff Pay will, because it's a consumer, so you will think about fintech products to be given to consumers. One can think about the kind of monetization that someone like a Paytm or a PhonePe or Google Pay or so on and so forth have, same opportunities Rediff Pay should have. Those will be the monetization channels for Rediff Pay.
When we talk about TV, we think it's streaming content, and there it is ad revenues because I can see why Rediff News, Rediff Profit or Money and so on and so forth can potentially because it's a good, strong brand. We will build out on that thesis and hypothesis, but there its video monetizations are 10x more compared to text monetization, and international monetization is 10x the value as India monetization. We think we need to build out that thesis. A combination of that thesis is what we think will work. We think this dual engine where we have merchant payments powered by CC Avenue and consumer payments through Rediff will be a good combination to work on.
What kind of investment?
Just one second. Vishal, we can probably do that to Rediff. We will also be having a very low or minimal customer acquisition cost because they are already sitting there through the migration. That will be an added advantage when you go to B2C.
You're right.
Yes. Yeah. Yeah. That's the question.
To answer your question, we will be investing further in Rediff.
Yeah. So what's the investment, say, over the next two to three years then?
I think I can see that Rediff will perhaps invest upwards of $75 million-$100 million in the next three years. So I'm talking about INR 500 crore-INR 700 crore.
Okay. Okay. The other question that I had was on PayCentral.ai and Commerce.ai, those agent-to-agent payment. What's your view on whether these agent-to-agent payments will evolve into core revenues like what UPI became? I mean, do you envisage any disproportionate share coming from here? People highlight.
Yeah. So just to give you a little bit of color, when we looked at payment agents, which is where payment gateway comes in, and every payment gateway, in some ways, will have to build out their own MCP servers for agents to communicate in some ways with them. The way it works is that a transaction, and you've seen Atlas and many others that have browsers and many others that have come in as well. The way it would work is that you would have an intent mandate. Theoretically, a human will have an intent to, say, for example, purchase a ticket. I need to go from, say, Bombay to Bangalore, and there is going to be an agent that does search and discovery that essentially gives you the lowest cost option.
Based on that option, then the human will mandate the agent to close the ticket. It will go through this whole process, and then they have to relay it out to a payment agent. The payment agent will take that mandate. They will close the transaction, give it back to the site agent. The site agent will communicate back to the human. I think there is an orchestration layer. We have the capability of actually building out these agents. It is actually an agent developer platform. In other words, you can develop, and the orchestration seems very easy, but it is fairly difficult. It is like you have got N number of airplane parts, but you do not have an airplane. One can theoretically argue that I have an engine, but they do not have the full orchestration of how to build the whole thing up.
The beauty that we have cracked is that we can do on-prem deployment because the biggest concern that we think most companies have is that, "I do not want to give my data or something to an agent without my control." You would want to, I mean, every bank, every financial institution, every, I mean, in some ways, company would want to have on-prem. Can you deploy it on-prem and still run it so nothing leaves the premises? You can build out these agents that potentially do these autonomous tasks. I think while a lot of people claim that they have this framework and there are cloud frameworks, nobody's got on-prem, in my opinion, cracked yet.
We think that if we use that setup, the first thing is that you would want to actually charge for every agent, every activity of an agent because you are essentially now, whether it's a subscription or a result, pay per result, it's different. It's a monetization framework, but depending if it's high volume, then you'd want to make it slightly more results-oriented. If it's low, then we would make it subscription-based. There are ways to monetize. That's the agent piece. Theoretically, you can think of agent also doing fraud detection and many others. Every activity that a human does is actually an agent for us. There is, of course, a gateway charge that potentially comes through along with it.
To make it very concise, as a site owner, you can decide to actually build out your own agent that can do search and discovery and then pass it on to the next agent, or you can use our framework and do it for yourself, which is completely integrated. In both ways, these are possible. I think, yes, it's going to be big. I think this is the future. We've debated that quite a bit. We are somewhat within the ecosystem. We are, of course, slightly more bullish, but we see a lot of activity in the space and looking at different protocols. The thing is evolving so quickly, so we think that we need to be on top of it. By the way, I do believe that there'll be more agents than humans in the coming year.
Every agent will also need an email box, by the way. I think that we can actually build out a very interesting ecosystem if this pans out.
Okay. Okay. Fine. This was really helpful. Thank you and good luck.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Deepesh Sancheti from Maanya Finance. Please go ahead.
Hi. I'm on.
Sir, you are not audible. Could you please repeat?
Hello? Am I audible?
Yes, sir. Go ahead with your question.
Yeah. I just wanted to know, Vishal, what do you think about the Rediff TV? Are you planning to become a content creator, or is it just going to be like a platform for other contents?
No, we'll be a content creator. So we already create content with news, and the same news is being read by, theoretically, a video agent. And we can mix with quite a bit of multimedia. Historically, you would want to have a production studio or something. I don't think that you need all of that, but we may want to invest into such specifics. I think it's going to be a hybrid model, a combination of humans and agents. To test it out, we just launched Rediff TV in beta, which is fully AI-driven. The early signs are that we are, in some ways, looking at something very interesting here. The agents are not 100%. We are at maybe 85%-90% of where we think we want to be. We think that this has a lot of potential.
Most people, they would want to see video content more than text content because that is how the world is going. Plus, monetizations on videos are much larger than monetization on text. The thing we realize is that Rediff is a big brand, and we think that there could be potentially opportunities to work on building content and being able to offer streaming channels and make sure that content not only because if you look at Rediff.com, even today, it is the top 1,000 traffic site in the world as per Similarweb. There are more than 120 million unique visitors coming every year, which means that if you go to Rediff 100 times, you are still counted as one visitor. I think from that perspective, we already are a content creator. I think it is somewhat using technology, we can open up streaming channels.
Net of streaming cost, I think you can still come out ahead, much ahead.
Great. And so basically, you're going to use Rediff, I mean, the brand Rediff as a medium for your entire B2C connections, right?
You're absolutely right.
Right. That's great. When do you think the Rediff Pay will be launched? What is the marketing budget you've kept for that?
Rediff Pay, we already have NPCI approval. We expect that it should come in a matter of weeks, not months. I think we'll hopefully be able to communicate that only once we get approvals to launch. What launch is, so that you know, launch means that you would need to go through rigorous amounts of testing and so on and so forth and approvals and certain CSAR certifications and many others before you get validated to launch fully because UPI is the backbone of this country. We think that that becomes very interesting. As far as the budget is concerned, we've budgeted about INR 40 crore.
Right. So this Rediff Pay will be a similar app or a similar, it'll be like a wallet, right? We have got a, I mean, just like Paytm had a wallet or Airtel Money has a wallet. Similarly, Rediff Pay will be like a wallet where people can keep their money. Or will it be only UPI-based payments?
It'd be a combination of both.
I'll just explain. Look, Rediff will have two things. Rediff TPAP means that it will have a UPI kind of functionality where you can scan any QR code and pay any merchant or transfer money. That is the Rediff TPAP part. From NPCI, what we have got the license, right? That is one part where you can pay from your bank account by UPI, just like send money, everything that you do normally from any of those other things. The Rediff wallet is the PPI license that we have got from RBI, where it will be white-label PPI wallet where people can store in that wallet and then use that wallet money to do payments across any merchant or any other things.
Now, what this helps is that instead of having 100 transactions reflected in your bank account via UPI, if you transfer once into the wallet and then do the transactions from the wallet, that also does one single entry in your bank account. There is no complication. Rediff wallet also has some benefits. UPI also, Rediff TPAP also has some benefits. Rediff Pay entails both. It entails both the UPI TPAP as well as the wallet. I hope I am able to.
Yeah. Great. So the point is a lot of financial solutions and everything. I mean, it can almost act like a small payment bank.
Yes. It is, as I said, PPI today is as good as any small finance bank or this thing because it can hold money, and it can be used to do this thing, except lending or taking deposit. Rest all we can do within these systems.
Are you allowed to even get, I mean, issue cards, which I mean, you're allowed to issue PPI cards?
Yes.
Can you issue cards which are directly linked to your wallet?
Directly linked to the wallet, yes. That is where the close, this thing, semi-close license comes in. You can do it directly through your wallet, or you do it co-branded with any of the networks, be it the NPCI, RuPay, or MasterCard or Visa. They are already there.
Great. Vishal, just one more question. How big is the opportunity of the net banking for financial institutions, especially small payment banks? The point is, even when you have the approval from RBI for issuing prepaid cards, I mean, you can give a basket of services for these banks to have full-fledged financial services.
We do work. One arm of ours is acting as a TSP, a technical service provider, to all the banks that are there. All the solutions that we build, be it on merchant acquiring or the wallet or the B2B platforms, a lot of big banks are using it. If you see Kotak Pay is CC Avenue, then there is a lot of ICICI Pay too, which is CC Avenue in the backend powering it. All the banks require tech. That is where we come in. That is also a very big arm for us to sell this technology, to license this technology, and earn money as a TSP for the company.
Are these all flat fee products or transaction-based?
Different schemes, different options, different ways the banks want to work. There's no one strict rule that it does a fixed fee or this thing, or even for support, there's man-hour cost or anything. Some are transaction-based, some are this. It is very different, different mechanism. You're talking about 80-100 kind of different payment options, credit, debit. There are 70 plus, 75 plus banks nowadays. Different opportunities are there, which we are encasing.
Okay. Now, this is a question for both of you. Recently, Paytm also launched an AI-powered POS device. Are we also looking in that direction, or we are not? I mean, we already have that product.
Look, we already have a Soundbox Max product, almost 50,000 odd deployed, where you can do credit, debit, apart from a normal speaker sound, speaker UPI, where it announces the transaction result. It also accepts credit, debit, and other things. Those are there. Adding an AI element is just not a challenge because you're anyway putting a SIM in it with a mobile internet filled in. That's how the transaction comes to us through the Soundbox, right? We just add an AI element because the speaker system is already there. You understand that, right? If you have internet connectivity and others, adding an AI element is something, okay, we can ponder, we can activate. It's not a challenge. That's the least of the things which is a challenge in a Soundbox Max.
To add to what Vishwas said, boys, AI has evolved quite a bit. I think it supports multiple languages and so on and so forth. I mean, the thing that we were waiting for earlier was the cost of device had to come down tremendously. I think it's now at a point where you can actually perhaps acquire a device for $20, $30. What used to be a much bigger number before, and there was a cycle, and banks used to, and many others, they used to charge the merchant a certain fixed fee to amortize the cost of the device. Now the device cost has come down tremendously. I don't think there's much room to go further down. There may be some, but not a whole lot. Whereas the form factor and other things will change.
Yeah, that's when Vishwas said we've launched our own POS devices, not to the scale that we think we can, but we test it out with 50,000 odd devices. And then if it works out, we'll go into, we'll pour gasoline on the fire and make it large.
Right. I mean, it's similar to an Alexa in a POS. I am sure that you can always incorporate that. Thank you, guys. Thank you so much. If you can add in something, then it'll be great.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Amish Kanani from Knowwise Investment Managers. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Hi, sir. Partly the question on monetization is answered. Sir, given that a lot of investments in infrastructure and brand building will be there, and there are lots of players in this space where we are entering and jostling, my question is, one, you know at a Rediff level, you mentioned some CapEx. How would you kind of fund this? We've already done some rights issue there. If you can give us some sense of how much of investment versus free cash flow that we can generate in the sense that do we have a discipline in terms of capital allocation? Are we CapEx? If you can give us some sense there. On the IFSC provisional license, if you can give us some sense, are we early there? In the sense, how many players have got the license that we have got?
Because I understand the transaction and amount of investments flowing through that GIFT City is huge. If you can give us some sense there, are we early there? Thanks.
Sure. I'll take the CapEx question on Rediff. You see, as far as the rights issue, we had put in about INR 870 million in Rediff. And we think that there's a lot of opportunity to actually build up this brand. The brand is very strong. If you look at apples to apples, now, NPCI Avenues can be compared to apple to apple with any payment company, whether it is a Pine Labs or a Paytm or whoever is out there, because you essentially are into digital payments and some of the AI frameworks that we talked about. Yes, it will require that kind of capital because I mentioned some number out there, but you see, Rediff will have its own accruals, and they'll reinvest back into the business. If there's additional capital that will be required, then Rediff will have to raise that capital and spend that capital.
Of course, that's a decision for the board of Rediff.com to make in terms of how to think through capital allocation and so on and so forth. Yeah, I mean, mota mota, you'll have to think about being able to spend on technology, which is the Rediff One platforms to build out. You'll have to think of investments in branding and marketing that is out there. You'll have to invest in some of the best tech developers and others that you need to build up. Also the infrastructure, which is the hardware. We are storing petabytes of data. Just so that you know, we've launched something called Rediff Genie, which means that it will, today, practically draft things for you should you want to. We've opened it up for enterprises, not for free consumers.
We think that the use of AI is going to be crucial. The fact that we will build out all the solutions that we think about in an AI-first world will make all the difference. Even when we talk about consumer apps, we cannot just go and fight with the incumbents. We do not want to do that. We think that we will build out solutions that address problems. I mean, some of the things that we think about is that how do we work with brands to offer communication channels to reach out to their audiences through Rediff? That pay and communication will work very well, in our opinion. That is where we will spend that setup. I do not know whether that answers your question, but I mean, that is where we are going to spend the capital for. It will go through the same process.
Historically, also, we've not been, we've been appropriately conservative. We're not, but we think that this is a time to go slightly more aggressive because we know that we can build out a very defensible business going forward. We're not saying we're right or wrong. We just think that it's our philosophy. We'll figure out how to make it work. Yeah, there is, of course, inherently risks associated with getting into a space which is slightly crowded, like you mentioned. As far as IFSC is concerned, I'll tell Vishwas to take it up.
Thanks. Okay. As far as IFSC, I already explained the three kinds of licensing that we have got in principal approval. One is merchant acquiring, one is cross-border money transfer, and one is escrow services, right? Right now, I am not aware of anyone else doing merchant acquiring in GIFT City as of now. I do not know how many they have approved or anything. That data will have to check, but I am not aware how many else have got it. We are among the first, and we do have a big infra already set up in GIFT City. We are headquartered out of there, right? And hundreds of people working out from our offices there. We are looking deeply into the opportunity, and all the three key licenses in principal approval is a big thing for us.
Let's see once we get the final licenses and how the business turns out, we'll let you know.
Sure, sure. Thanks. One last follow-up on this. Rediff, if they needed more capital, is the option of listing there on table for them?
That's for the Rediff.com board to answer, but yeah, I think they would want to look at all options that are available.
Thanks. Thanks a lot. On the best side, thanks.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Kaushik Poddar from KB Capital Markets. Please go ahead.
This is more a conceptual question in the sense that everything you're saying that you are building with AI. How is it different? In fact, at some point, you said that this is AI-first approach. How is it different from the traditional way we have thought about it? In fact, when you spoke of the comparing with Zoho, you said that it was Zoho-plus AI. Can you please flesh out this AI-first, whatever you're trying to say?
Sure. So basically, what I meant was that when you think about traditional software, you always think of software first or process first. But when you think about AI-first, you want to put AI at the core of the business model or any product design or any decision-making. I mean, in some ways, these are all evolutions. But any approach that you would want to think about, you would actually manually code the business logic. You will actually do rule-based automations or whatever it is, and then you will think about structured workflows along with that. That is how you would think about traditional approach. But in this AI-first approach, you would actually look at merchant data automatically. You'll look at predictive sales. You'll look at fraud patterns. You'll look at real-time insights, and then you'll optimize the payment routing using predictive algorithms and close it.
I think in comparison, these are very different approaches. I mean, the best way to describe it is it's data-driven. It's not rule-based. And it is humans are validating it. AI is leading it. You'll think about it gets stronger and stronger with more and more data. You don't have any, theoretically, you will think about, in some ways, adaptive conversations and not necessarily static interfaces that drive it. These are the few things that I can talk to you about. I mean, I can go on and on for a long time. Theoretically, I mean, there are some inherent challenges also because if you have bad data, then you'll get bad output in AI-driven approaches, AI-first approach. The earlier question about being disciplined on CapEx also comes up because you can actually go slightly more overboard.
I think that when you look into this in practice, initially, what would you do? You would actually augment your traditional systems with AI, correct? That's how most people think, saying that, "Let me actually augment it with a horizontal AI layer so that it becomes more productive." I think you essentially take the old workflows and you put the intelligence AI layers on top of it and you try to get insights. These are very good approaches. I don't see anything wrong. I think you can fundamentally change the way you can think about ecosystems. That's where the opportunity lies, in our opinion.
With your AI-first approach, if things go haywire with bad data, how do you build a filter to take care of such kind of situation?
That's a little solved problem. You can actually define guardrails. You can implement that.
Yeah. Those are slightly solved questions because, I mean, theoretically, you will have to think about guardrails.
Absolutely.
You will have to think about how to ensure that, I mean, theoretically, an agent can also go rogue. Unless you have guardrails and monitoring and quality assurance on top of it, I think if you think about AI agents that we've launched, actually, there's inbuilt measurement of monitoring that enables you to control the agent in some ways. I think those things will have to be, it's like what safety is to airline. You'll have to think of it that way.
Okay. Okay. I mean, whatever you're trying to do, I mean, it's something different. Hopefully, it will work out. I'm also hopeful. Thank you.
Thanks.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Athar Syed from Smart Sync Services. Please go ahead.
Hello, sir. Good evening. Thank you for the opportunity. I have a question related to this Rediff app. Right now, I downloaded it from Play Store. I read some feedback, like reviews. There are some reviews from customers, like my users. Same review, many people have a problem with the, we can say, outdated UI. Many people are facing this problem in our app. They did not get emails. What is the problem in this Rediff app?
The app had a legacy. So we actually inherited the app about a year ago, and we've upgraded. In fact, if you see the app, it has a brand new UI now. In other words, whatever reviews that you have, we upgraded the app rather than deploying a new app because there are already millions of users actually utilizing the app. You would start seeing quite a bit of difference going forward. In fact, we upgraded the app just three, four months ago. It comes with a completely new, clean UI and many others. Hopefully, you'll see that ratings and so on and so forth are from years ago where people would have downloaded and utilized it. The majority of them, they're free email users. Theoretically, you will see that it's getting somewhat upgraded. Actually, it's re-engineered, not even upgraded.
It's re-engineered to become a super app. Yeah, there'll be a few whenever we are deploying something, we'll keep on listening to what customers have to say, and then we have to correct. Even today, the usage is significant because you'll have 5-10 million users coming on through the app every day.
Okay. Sir, do we have any plans to get an NBFC license or enter into banking sector in the future? Do we have any plan?
We do not have any plans to go into banking or NBFC at all. What we may end up doing as we speak is we are evaluating opportunities because we will connect the NBFCs and banks to consumers and merchants, much like some of the other UPI-based apps do. That is a source of revenue. Vishwas talked about PPI license. I mean, I think we are going to stop at PPI. We are not getting into lending ourselves. I mean, we will allow the banks and NBFCs to do what they know best. Today, we do not have any plans to get into banking or NBFC.
Okay. And one more question related to this Rediff case. In previous questions, you explained about the Rediff case. It is like a payment app also, and we have a feature of wallet, right? We also have these features in other UPI payments apps, like Paytm or PhonePe or GPay, whatever. What differentiates your app compared to other UPI apps?
I think we'll build out workflows around the app for brands to reach out to consumers. A classic example would be an FMCG company who want to utilize. And if you have shopped in one of the stores, then they would not know the customer. But given that the customer has interacted using Rediff Pay, we will white-label the brand to reach out to the consumer, and we'll allow the consumer to be able to opt out on any messaging from the brand. The fact that we give the control back to the brand, we believe, will be a good differentiator to begin with.
We'll build out a lot of workflows around that that enable, and that's where the no-code, low-code platform and frameworks come in, where you can build out, in a matter of minutes, the entire workflow that enables the brand to reach out to consumers and offer rewards and loyalty and many other solutions. Rather than thinking traditionally through being a UPI app and doing everything ourselves and burning capital and trying to retain the customer, we think the biggest opportunity is for the brand to retain the customer. A customer may have a pairing with multiple brands. We already have a customer-to-brand pairing. We think, given the framework and the ecosystem we sit with, those communication channels do open up. Hopefully, this explains in a simple language how our business model will be slightly different compared to how others think.
Of course, there'll be a lot more that we'll learn as we go through.
Yeah, sir. One last question related to this CC Avenue payment gateway. Many times, I personally use this payment gateway. What I face problem in this payment gateway is whenever we try to pay directly through UPI, we are not able to pay through UPI directly. We have to put our UPI number or UPI ID. Then we get a pop-up or notification in our app. We have to go to our UPI app. Then we have to pay. Why many times our app, like website or app, crash in this case?
No. Okay. I understood. Basically, it's the integration the merchant has done. If they have integrated an intent flow, they could just select the particular app they want to pay, say, Google Pay or Paytm or PhonePe, and automatically that app opens up, which carries the transaction there. Almost all our merchants have integrated the intent flow. One or two who might be on the traditional one where they just have to put the UPI ID and then approve it through the particular app, that's long gone. Maybe the site you may be doing, maybe one or two must have not upgraded it. Almost all our merchants, the intent flows automatically come in for a long time now.
Okay. Okay. Got it. Thank you. Thank you so much, sir.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, due to time constraint, that was our last question for this conference. I would now like to hand the conference over to the management for closing comments.
Thank you all for joining the call and looking forward to keeping you updated on the progress of the company. Thanks for the participation.
On behalf of Go India Advisors, that concludes this conference. Thank you for joining us, and you may now disconnect your lines. Thank you.