Ladies and gentlemen, good day. Welcome to the CAMS Q4 FY 2023 results conference call organized by Orient Capital. As a reminder, all participant lines will be in the listen-only mode. 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 touchtone phone. Please note that this conference is being recorded. I now hand the conference over to Mr. Nachiket Kale from Orient Capital. Thank you. Over to you, sir.
Yeah. Hi, good morning, everyone. Welcome to the Q4 and FY 2023 earnings conference call of Computer Age Management Services Limited. Today from the management we have with us Mr. Anuj Kumar, Managing Director, Mr. Ramcharan S.R., who is the CFO of the company, and Mr. Anish Sawlani, Head of Investor Relations. Just before we proceed to start the call, I'd like to give a small disclaimer that this conference call may contain forward-looking statements about the company, which are based on the beliefs, opinions, and expectation of the company as on date of this call. These statements are not guarantees of future performance and involve risks and uncertainties that are difficult to predict. A detailed disclaimer is also published in the investor presentation, which was released to the stock exchanges. I hope everyone had a chance to go through the presentation and press release.
I will now hand over the call to Mr. Anuj Kumar, Managing Director. Thank you everyone, and over to you, sir.
Good morning, everyone, and thank you, Nachiket. Very pleased to be amongst all of you for this Q4 earnings call. We will follow the standard order. I'll take you through a short summary of developments and highlights in Q4. You would have had the opportunity to download this presentation anyways by now and should be able to see it, and I'll hand over to our CFO, Ramcharan, to talk a little about financials. We will have enough time left to take Q&A from you guys. To begin in terms of key highlights for Q4, all of you are aware that Navi Mutual Fund, which is a digital-first mutual fund, one of the leading digital-first AMCs in the country, is now on the CAMS platform.
This was announced as a competitive win by us in 3 Q and migrated to the CAMS platform by end of 4 Q. From an AUM perspective, we were just above 28 lakh crore in Q4, so it was a muted under 1% asset growth, mirroring the rest of the market from Q3 into Q4. Our quarter-end assets stood at about 28 trillion INR. Within this, we saw an encouraging trend in equity assets, where equity contribution of the overall assets grew about half a % from 64.8 to 65.3. This was largely on the back of growth in net sales, which grew by a substantial margin from about 63% to 73%. These are 1-quarter numbers.
We've got to continue watching them to see whether this will hold over the medium to long term. I think the first signs are extremely positive. Really an increase in equity net sales led to the growth of about 0.5% in equity AUM. On the alternatives business, I'm very pleased to share with you and report just consistent financial performance. Consistent succeeding financial performance over several quarters and now over the second successive year. On an annual basis, revenue grew 26%. This is just all around growth and consumption, which means the installed base buying more from us. New launches of clients in the installed base coming back to us. Almost everyone who launched a new scheme came back to us. That's expansion in the installed base through new schemes.
A slew of very, very strong new logo wins for both AIF and PMS, largely dominated by AIF. On the digital side, some of you may have seen the media releases and stuff on our website, which says that, just basis our pioneering effort, which we started about two years back, almost 20% of investors, and this, like I said earlier, was the last standing bastion of where investors did prefer an in-person relationship manager kind of meeting. 20% of that traffic has now been converted into a e-franking, e-signing, completely digital flow. CAMS itself now has over 75 sign-ups. Imagine that, out of the 1,000 of AIFs in the country, almost the top 70, 80 are going digital on our platform, and a lot more are expected to join the platform within the year.
From a FinServ perspective, which is the account aggregator and TSP offering, we continued to gain momentum with several sign-ups in the quarter. You may have read that we were also the first ones to test a new use case of doing bank account validation. You know, bank accounts get validated largely through the INR 1 per drop facility which banks offer and payment aggregators offer. A slightly richer information stack is available off account aggregator where you can see second holder details and NRI account details, et cetera. This is a pioneering effort by us. The acquisition of Think 360, which you know is a very strong player and perhaps one of the two or three in processing SMS data to gain consumer insights. That will continue to bolster the offering.
In fact, for the bank statement analyzer which Think360 has built, we now have 4 sign-ups along with the CAMS team, this is what has happened in the last 1 month. You know, we announced the acquisition about 1 month back in the beginning of April. That will continue to bolster this entire offering. CAMSRep from a repository perspective, you know that a mandatory demat in insurance policies was announced as a forward-looking step by the regulator, as a proposed forward-looking step back in September.
The necessary regulation has still not got passed. What we continue hearing is that there is a very active dialogue in the marketplace between the regulator and key ecosystem entities to take this forward and then create the, I would say the background to amend laws wherever laws have to be amended. Within that, the one thing that we saw was that because of the active media and press and our efforts, consumers' preference to push their policies into Demat and their preference to open EIA accounts was almost 2x. Both in policy growth, which grew 2.2x and platform transactions at 2x. I think we saw very, very positive numbers in FY 2023.
What we expect is that just given the consumer sentiment, this momentum could well continue into FY 2024 even without the specific announcement kind of taking shape. If it takes shape, of course, the shape of things will be very, very different. Just the consumer-led and our foundational effort in the market, I think is yielding a lot of results here. From an NPS perspective, we continue to hold the number two position in eNPS with a 9% market share. Our PoP retail relationships are now in place starting about February this year. The large four or five PoPs are now doing business with us. You can see our name on their websites when you try to create an account and buy an NPS policy. That part is going on well.
Of course, it's a slow climb, as we've always said in the NPS CRA business. On CAMSPay, another great year, 27% revenue growth, largely riding on transaction volumes. I must also say that from a merchant sign-up perspective and from a new product offering perspective, this was a very strong year by CAMSPay. We'll talk a little more about it. We received RBI as in principle approval to be a payment aggregator. We will now be pushing all of this business into the subsidiary, that should happen sometime during the year. From a digital perspective, myCAMS continued to hold fort among the top two Fintech apps, MF Fintech apps, with close to over 6 million 60 lakh downloads. MFCentral continued to gain popularity.
I will just quote 1 metric for you where daily API hits, and most of them are CAS, the consolidated account statement hits. We haven't yet industrialized and gone into production with partners on an API architecture for either financial transactions or non-financial. Just this is 20,000. We're expecting this to scale at least 2x during the year. For a lot of heft to be added as sometime in this quarter, we should be able to go live with both NFTs and financial transactions. Also a very interesting offering in a single API across the mutual fund industry to service loan against mutual funds has now been developed and is being offered just to create a much easier consumer journey.
Collectively amongst all of this, we believe that MFCentral has a lot of real growth scope. One, of course, is just the traffic that comes to the app and the website, but also all the traffic that will come to the partner app. You will recollect in the first week of April, we had announced a strategic investment upwards of 50% in Think360 AI. This is a part of a 100% buyout, which will play out over the next three or four years as we have the call option to invest 100% into the company.
From a relevance perspective, while I'm sure a lot of you have read about what we released in our reports and have seen the website, Think360 has been active in both the India domestic market and in the international markets, especially the U.S., in several areas. From a product perspective, Algo360, which is you can think of it broadly in a rough way as a precursor to Account Aggregator, not using the Account Aggregator architecture, but using Android SMS inboxes to give insights on the consumer. They've been the leading producer with some of the largest banks, NBFCs, et cetera, on the platform. Similarly, KwikID, which basically does, it started as a Video KYC tool, is now very active for onboarding across the marketplace.
you will find very, very large consumers like Central Bank, Bank of Baroda, Bajaj, et cetera, on the platform. there are other video-based use cases in terms of consumer interaction, et cetera, that are possible on this platform. very, very popular two platforms. Algo360 is a complementary offering to Account Aggregator. like I said, in addition to Account Aggregator and DSP, the bank statement analyzer product is now in the market, is going live with several brokerages and a few NBFCs. the BSA comes from Think360. similarly in FlowXpert and AAmaze. AAmaze, of course, is the data analytics platform for Account Aggregator. FlowXpert is a low-code platform which helps integration of APIs and various other forms of SDKs through minimum coding.
All of these B2B products being actively sold in the Indian markets with a very, very strong position in terms of franchise, existing base franchise and pipeline. We see complete complementarity and a joint go-to-market between the CAMS FinServ and Sterling teams between Think360 for the various offerings related to account aggregator. On the services side, just pure data analytics. This is basically business intelligence modeling, various kinds of data engineering, storage, warehouses, those kind of things. Think360 has been selling both in the major markets on ground in the US in a services model and on ground in India in a services model.
We believe that this will have a lot of complementarity with the, with the data richness that the Indian consumer part of capital markets has, especially mutual funds and AIFs. We are, we are creating packaged offerings to take to the market collectively. You will continue to hear from us from time to time on how this is shaping up. Overall, and I spoke about this a little, I'm on chart number eight. From an AUM growth perspective, I spoke that the annual growth was in the range of about 6%-7%. The quarterly growth was under 1% in assets. The salutary occurrence, of course, is expansion in equity AUM share and in the equity net sales share going up by almost 9.5% during the quarter, and again, a metric to be watched.
We believe what is a very strong underpinning, a demonstrated strong underpinning is SIP registrations. These are gross numbers. They obviously have to be netted for iterations. Just look at the gross numbers. Whatever be the state of the market, 37 lakh SIPs gross registered, climbing to 37.5, crossing 38 and touching 40 in the January to March quarter, I think is a fantastic foundational metric for the industry as you've seen. This has obviously led to an expanded market share for us at 62% of new SIPs registered.
An equally important number is to see that the monthly SIP collections, which for us crossed INR 8,000 crore and are nudging in the distance in the direction of INR 8,500 crore, is again a strong foundational metric adding up to about just INR 1 lakh crore of gross SIP-led inflows in the year. You know last year, the industry has seen almost INR 200 crore-INR 300 crore at a growth at a market level. We've seen growth of INR 150 crore-INR 200 crore every month from a CAMS RTA level, and I think those are just great numbers.
If they consistently perform for another one or two years, this will continue to impact and grow the foundational participation in the market and obviously will be very accretive for the AUM numbers. NFO again, very pleased to share with you know, a growing 71% share in industry collections. Our clients, as you would have seen almost throughout the year, but specifically in the fourth quarter, going on overdrive through new offerings. These were across various areas and I think have consistently assisted us in keeping market share and growing it in this emerging area. Chart number 9. I'll talk about the numbers. You've seen this all, about a 68.2% market share based on quarterly AUM.
INR 28 lakh crore of overall assets, absolute assets of CAMS, just over INR 13 lakh crore or INR 13 trillion in equity AUM. Equity AUM did grow 18% year-on-year, although a very small growth quarter-on-quarter. Again, what we are seeing in the initial months, these are just green shoots, of course, and using the same numbers. I think those numbers have to hold and the interest rate regimes have to turn friendly towards equity investing overall. That could lead to maybe some perceptible change during the year. From an industry perspective, the industry just crossed INR 41 lakh crore overall industry AUM and just over INR 19 lakh crore for equity. You can see transaction volumes, et cetera, on chart number 10.
I think just consistent retail participation metric, whichever way you look, just consistent retail participation metric. The transaction volumes are obviously led by SIP triggers. You see a quarter-on-quarter 6%, annual 8% growth. The SIP book I spoke about what was a gross metric, not a net, but the net metric is the SIP book. You need to look no further than to see the 18% year-on-year growth. You saw 40 lakh SIPs being registered with CAMS service funds in the fourth quarter, which was a gross metric, the net metric. What this leads to after the proportionate take is a 18% year-on-year growth in SIP book for CAMS service and CAMS service mutual funds.
SIP transactions processed 16% up, which means most of the SIP book holds similarly live investor folios 11% up in the year. From a unique investor's perspective, close to 260 lakh at about 12% up year-on-year. Similarly on chart number 11, you have the same numbers for the entire year. I'm sure all of you are familiar, so I won't spend too much time on this, and I'll move forward. I'm on chart number 13. We spoke about the alternatives business, 21% year-on-year growth for the fourth quarter, 26% for the year-on-year growth overall for annual revenue. We spoke about, you know, every other metric that you see here.
Of course, INR 1.5 trillion of assets under service is a brilliant number, I think it will go up and will continue to go up just with the increased interest that we are seeing in AIFs. You've seen that new AIF registration with the regulator in the year has been at the bottom of our 45.25 at the top of our 75. That's almost like one AIF seeking registration, every day in the best of times during the year. Not everybody has launched, and launches are a little slightly slow, but all of that should come back as the market, kind of, turns back and their ability to produce alpha over alternate, I mean, over mutual funds and other modes of investment continue to get demonstrated. Move to the next.
Similarly, I spoke about account aggregator and TSP and about the new, the new use case of bank account validation. All of that has gone well. We are continuing to be under 10% market share right now, but building up consistently, and I'm sure we will have better numbers to report to you as we progress during the year. Move to the next. From a payments perspective, again, very pleased to share with you greater than 50% market share. In our mutual fund ecosystem, you will remember three or four years back, this was a much smaller number. Just consistent, I think, tying the product very closely to the needs of the mutual fund market and very intense client engagement has led to this number.
We have over 140 million active NACH mandates, almost INR 500 crore of monthly transactions. You will see all of these numbers consistently going up. Of course, UPI AutoPay, which is now being used as an alternate to the E NACH mandate to just place a fresh SIP and allow for auto debits, has been very, very popular already. 2 lakh plus cases, this will grow during the year too. From an industry presence perspective, we have spoken about a significantly deep cut expansion in merchant base and a large number of merchant additions. Like we said, we have received the in-principle approval from RBI to set up a subsidiary and move this business there under the new license, which we will be doing now. CAMSRep, I spoke a little.
I'm in chart number 16. You can see some of the numbers. The only thing that I would like to add that there will be more excitement during the year as we reimagine the platform for doing transactions, and those transactions will be around the premium payments, valuation statements around loan against insurance policies, which you know for one or two of the public sector companies has been a very popular mode for investors to raise money. That will go live sometime in the second quarter and create a special place for us overall in the industry. We continue to build in the market as KYC becomes mandatory for insurance both for life and non-life.
We continue to facilitate this service for our for our insurance clients and to make sure that they're riding on our technology as they do, you know, live validation and KYC for more and more of insurance consumers. I spoke about CRA. I will just restate that, I mean, kind of reemphasize the numbers a little. Gross NPS registration just under INR 3 lakh for the industry, about INR 2,86,000. CAMS standing at about just short of 25,000 at a number two position. From a POP perspective, nine POPs, think of them as nine of the top 10. Those are the kind we have onboarded. Now continuing to add traffic to overall NPS CRA volumes for CAMS.
I will take a pause here and hand over to Ram Charan so that he can speak to you about financials. Ram, over to you.
Thank you, Anuj. I'll take five minutes to take you over the broad numbers financials. From a quarter basis, we ended the quarter at INR 249.2 crores in revenue, which was up 2.5% year-on-year and 2.3% quarter-on-quarter. The comparable number for the sequential as with the last year quarter was around INR 243 crores. This is on the back of growth in MF revenue. MF revenue for the quarter was at INR 222 crores versus INR 217 the comparable quarter last year and INR 220. The growth broadly mirrored the growth in, on a year-on-year basis, the growth in AUM, as you saw in the earlier part of the presentation.
The AUM for the quarter, the average AUM was at INR 28.03 crores, which was up 5% when compared to the last year same quarter. Sequentially, there was a very minimal increase. The assets did not grow. It was at INR 27.83 lakh crores in the sequential quarter that went by. Overall, the MF revenue grew 2% on a quarter-on-quarter comparable last year basis and 0.6% on a sequential quarter basis. We generally break this down into asset-based and non-asset-based revenue. The asset-based revenue, again, broadly mirrored the increase in AUM or the stagnation AUM as the case may be. The sequential quarter, there was no change in this, almost the same number in terms of the asset-based revenue.
It was INR 187 crore. The non-asset-based revenue, which was up very smartly quarter-on-quarter of 5% and but down 5% year-on-year. The sequential quarter increase in 5% was on account of the increased billing that we are doing on adjacencies and allied services. For example, the MFCentral or the other other application services that we give to our customers. There was some increase in the allied services like anti-money laundering, et cetera. That contributed to a smart increase in the quarter-on-quarter non-asset-based revenue. Overall, the transaction remains static, transaction revenue and the call center revenue also remains static over the year-on-year and quarter-on-quarter.
From a non-MF revenue perspective, we've seen the earlier presentation would have kind of shown you that we are seeing green shoots in some and smart growth in a few of the verticals where we have placed our bets. It was up 7.7% year-on-year. The current quarter non-MF revenue is INR 27.5 crores, comparable to INR 25.5 crores in FY 2022 Q4 and INR 23 crores in FY 2023 Q3. Which means that, you know, there's been a 7.7% growth year-on-year and 18.6% growth on a sequential quarter basis, driven largely by the growth that we are continuing to see on the AAF vertical. You know, year-on-year, we grew about 21% AAF.
Payments continue to show a strong performance in terms of additional mandates as well as transaction processing, even from a digital as well as from a NACH and ACH perspective. The payment revenue grew 24% year-on-year on the back of the increased mandates and transaction processing. We've also seen some uptick in the CRA revenue. CRA, as you know, we are the license holders for the KYC verification in the securities market. We have onboarded some new customers on a quarter-on-quarter basis. The CRA revenue has shot up by almost 50%, and we continue to be bullish on the CRA revenue going forward also. Overall, you know, the asset-based revenue is muted in keeping in line with the growth or no growth in the assets under management.
The non-MF revenue continues to show an uptick. For the first quarter after many years, we've had the non-MF share of business to be more than 10%. It's 11% in the current quarter, and the remaining 89% is the MF revenue. We are slowly seeing, you know, the target state of 15%. You know, slowly we are coming towards that state. With the acquisition of Think360, I think, we will get to that place, as planned and as communicated to you earlier. In terms of yields, which is the obvious question that a lot of people may have and how have the yields behaved and what is the reason for it. On a year-on-year basis, our yields have been static.
You know, 2.72 is the yield that we have seen. One thing to note is the asset mix. You know, over the last year, we had a tremendous growth in the equity component of the asset mix. It was around 46.5% for the quarter and 46.4% earlier quarter, almost static. On a year-on-year basis, you know, we had kind of grew. End of last year, it was less than 40%. Even on a comparable quarter last year, it was only 41%.
Over the period of the year, the increase in the equity component has had a favorable impact on the mix, and that's kind of nullified to a large extent the depletion that's happened because of either the telescopic base pricing or in a very few cases, some price remission that's been given for long-term contracts. That trend has held out even in the current quarter. There is a small depletion yield that we have seen in the current quarter. Given that the equity component has remained almost same from overall mix perspective. We've seen a small depletion in yields, but that is something on expected lines, and we continue to watch that number as we go forward. I'll now go into the profitability numbers.
As you know, we've always guided that our profitability will be in the early 40s, and we have kind of consistently retained that number as guidance. Even in the current quarter, we have clocked an operating EBITDA of around 44%, 43.9% to be precise, at INR 109.30 crores, which is our operating EBITDA, which is up 0.9% quarter-on-quarter, but down 2.6% year-on-year on the back of increased spending and investments that we have done on the various initiatives that we spoke about, including the AAF, TSP, CRA, the Reimagine platform, and the re-architecting our current platform also.
ns continue to be stable, continue to be in the same range as what we predict it will be. From a PBT perspective, we ended the quarter at INR 98 crores PBT, which is 38.4%, which is almost flat quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year, and PAT of 29% mirrored the same thing. Our return on network continues to be very, very high at around 39%, and we ended the quarter with a cash and cash equivalent of around INR 482 crores, at a very healthy balance of INR 482 crores in excess cash.
The board was pleased to propose a final dividend of INR 12 per share, which will be paid subject to the approval of the shareholders in the AGM. This is also the financial year-end, just a couple of minutes on the revenue and profit numbers for the year and how it compared with the earlier year numbers. We ended the year with a revenue of INR 972 crores, which is up 6.8%. The comparable number last year was INR 910 crores. It's a INR 62 crore increase in revenue in the current year. On the back of predominantly the increase in assets and the increase in the asset-based revenue and mutual fund revenue. The assets under management grew 7% on this year-on-year basis.
The increase in fee also mirrored that, and we actually grew our asset-based revenue at 7.3%. The non-asset-based revenue grew marginally at 2.7% on a year-on-year basis for the full year. It was around INR 133 crores, mainly because of the, you know, transaction and the other miscellaneous applications that we built, including MFCentral. The non-MF revenue, keeping, you know, with the numbers that we saw for the quarter also, for the entire year there was a growth of 9.3% year-on-year, which is more than the asset-based revenue. Predominantly driven by the AAF and the payments growth of 26% and 27% respectively. Overall, the yields on a year-to-year basis remained stable at 2.7%.
We have seen a reduction in the yields over the last couple of quarters, and we'll continue to watch that number. From an operating EBITDA perspective for the year, again, we ended the year with our operating EBITDA of INR 422 crores, almost INR 421.75, which is marginally down when compared to the last year. On a year-on-year basis, our profitability remains same. No big growth in profitability in INR 287 crores. That was INR 285 crores in the current year. The return on network continues to be very high at 40%. These numbers are after considering non-cash ESOP charges, which was at INR 26.7 crores for the year.
That's kind of included in these numbers, the operating EBITDA, PBT and PAT numbers that I spoke about. With this, I will kind of end the commentary on the financials and hand it back to Nachiket, if you want to open it up 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 touchtone 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 Swarnabha Mukherjee from B&K Securities. Please go ahead.
Yeah, thank you, for the opportunity. Three questions from my side. First one, again, just to get a little bit more clarity on the yield part. I understand that there is a telescopic pricing, but between the last quarter and this quarter also, given that equity has, slightly, you know, share has marginally gone up and yield has slightly come down. I just wanted to understand if there were in fact any, renewals that happened during the quarter that kind of resulted in this.
Then going ahead, in the next fiscal, given that, you know, there has been regulatory development and taxation related development on the debt mutual fund side, wanted to know your views on how you think this whole yield part will develop, and how would the asset growth be on the debt side. Those are the first two questions. Third one, wanted to understand also on the insurance repository side, what is your market share currently? From your point of view, in terms of their revenue for all the players together, what could be the opportunity size that we might be eyeing if, you know, things pan out the way we are expecting? Thank you.
Sure. What I'll do is, I'll try to answer your questions and then perhaps Ram Charan will chip in on the yields. On debt MF and, I'm just classifying this into two parts. We are not talking of the corporate treasuries, which come into basically overnight and liquids. I'm not talking of that money, but just pure debt, where a lot of times the intention of the investor is to hold out for long-term capital gains. When this announcement came, even till today, you've been reading articles and coverage that this segment will become unattractive for retail investors because of the tax rollback. What we've seen in reality is counterintuitive and does not align to this line.
Between 20th of March to end of March, our debt portfolio grew almost 8%-9% in those 10 days on the back of intense selling. Very easy to understand because every mutual fund was up in the market and all the CIOs were doing webinars just to tell investors that this is your last chance to book yourself into this money before the tax rollback happens. On 1st of April, the sales should have evaporated completely. In the first five weeks from 1st of April up to last week, we have seen net sales of another INR 9,000 crores-INR 10,000 crores, which is a very good number. It's almost, on our portfolio size, almost 2% up in one month from a net sales perspective.
I think the reason for that, there are two reasons the industry feels about it. One, intense selling had not happened so far in debt. In those 10 days, the amount of consumer communication and push that happened at the level of every intermediary was just significantly high. Consumers almost rediscovered this asset class and have started to come back, and they haven't stopped coming back on 31st of March. They've come back all this while. Now, will this play out for the whole quarter or the whole year? For us to see. It's a counterintuitive trend, which is very important. The second part of this is that you know, if you go back to December, January, the markets were expecting that the interest rate increase regime is coming to an end and it did not come to an end.
It hasn't come officially to an end yet. It played out in the January, February, March, April time period also. As that happens, the expectation from medium-term and long-term investments in debt is that, once the fall in interest rates begins to happen.
The NAV increases and capital gains there will be in addition to whatever else consumers will gain. I think a part of both of these, one and two of what I spoke, have come to play. I think we just got to watch this marketplace carefully for this entire quarter and coming days on whether this momentum will go away or whether this will continue. That's that kind of encompasses the thing on debt funds. As everybody was expecting that this will evaporate as an asset class for retail investors immediately as we cross over into FY 2024, that hasn't happened. I'm moving now to insurance repository where... Sorry, go on.
Sir, sorry to interrupt. Just one quick follow-up on this. Out of this INR 9,000 crore-INR 10,000 crore of net sales that you mentioned, any color you can give on how much is coming from, say, corporates and how much is coming from individual investors?
Well, I can give you an approximate estimate that a lot of this money is coming from retail. We will try to pull out the number and give you more specifics. My suggestion will be just hang in for another month or so and see whether this plays out completely in May. Just think of it that this is not so much of corporate treasury money, this is more of retail money.
Got it, sir. Thanks. Yeah, please go ahead, sir.
Moving to the next. Moving to insurance repository, we've spoken to you in the past that the size of the opportunity is about INR 2.5 crore policies which are under Demat, growing to over INR 50 crores. The size of the opportunity is 25x. Honestly, what did all of us expect? We expected that, starting September when those announcements were made, there would be in the next four to six months almost a regime that would come into play. What's happened is that we continue to hear from the regulator. Of course, we are working closely with them to make sure that once the regime happens of mandatory Demat, then we have the capacity and the ability to service consumers if the market and when the market grows to the 25x, 30x, which it will.
We also hear that they are in close discussions with all the ecosystem participants just to make sure that everybody's view is accommodated as they turn this into a statute and turn this into a mandatory position, which is something which is taking time. From an overall industry perspective, there are various views that you know. There are people who believe this could be a INR 500 crore per annum revenue industry opening up. Our own view is that it will go through some pricing depletion and therefore a more reasonable size could be a INR 150 crore-INR 200 crore industry which will open up, and there will be growth on top of it at between 35%-40%.
We are typically around 35% in terms of, EIA accounts and upwards of 35 in terms of policies. Like we've said in the past that if we, if we hold that position for the next few years, we can see a very interesting and large size market opening up for us. Even without that, you would see that, just by themselves, just given the increased coverage in the media and all the efforts that we're making, EIA accounts and policies have almost grown 2x. The new inflow has grown 2x during the year, and we're expecting this momentum to continue, during FY 2024 also. I'll change the topic to yields. Ram, if you wanna take this.
Sure.
Yeah.
Just abroad, and then I'll answer your question specifically for the quarter. Broadly, I just try to recap for everybody's benefit that the yields could be impacted by three things. One is the, one is obviously the telescopic pricing that we spoke about. The structure of the pricing with the customers is telescopic. The second is the mix that happens in terms of equity and others and even within debt, you know, what happens between liquid and debt matters to the mix. The third is the price reductions or remissions that happen to the customers when they come up for periodic negotiations. You know, in this particular quarter we have seen a small depletion yield. You know, in terms of specifically, I think it will be around 0.02 basis points is what we are seeing.
Now two things have happened. One is, you know, telescopic pricing has played a part. Of course, you will say that the assets have not grown, so how could telescopic pricing play a part in this? you should also understand during the quarter, a couple of our major customers actually merged and got into a single entity. This does have, which means that the slab-based pricing for them gets automatically reset to a lower rate because the combined AUM becomes higher than the slab that was there earlier. There is some impact of that. secondly, there was in the last quarter we also said that there is some price negotiation that's been concluded with our major customers.
Most of them got rolled over barring one or two, and one was a renewal after a five-year period. That has got a structure whereby progressively some discounts are given. That's also having an impact on the fourth quarter. These are contributed to both telescopic as well as the small price reduction we given for one customer does contribute to this. However, you know, what has been mitigating so far has been the equity which, as you rightly pointed out, there's not much of a difference. You know, 0.01% difference in equity does not make a very big difference from the overall mix realization perspective.
Overall the pool that is the decrease or increase was so small that even one small change here and there could have made a difference on the yields. 'Cause overall almost I said it remains stagnant. You know, 0.67% was I think the growth in assets itself for the entire quarter-on-quarter. That's what has played out in the current quarter.
Got it, sir. Very clear. Just quickly, if you, if you could highlight should we expect any kind of such, more, negotiations happening in the coming fiscal or over the next couple of quarters? If you could, quickly provide your comments on how to think about the other expense as well as the ESOP costs for FY 2024?
Sure. In terms of, you know, it's, it is not a right conclusion to come that every customer contract will have a price reduction. It need not, it won't. A very few exceptions like what we saw last time, which is, you know, there was a reset of rates after five years for a particular big customer. The general trend is not to give a price discount. I do not think that this is going to be repeat itself in the future frequently. Infrequently, there could be situation where this may happen, but that's not going to be the norm.
While the telescopic pricing will see the price, you know, yield under pressure to some extent going forward, we are not for a moment saying the yields will improve dramatically or will remain static if there is telescopic impact. We do not see a situation where, you know, the exceptional price reductions or something is going to be given to the customers, which will have a one-time impact on this. We'll have to wait and see as and when the contracts come up for renewal. As I said, last quarter, most of the contracts have been closed for a two or three-year period in the last year. Having said that, there will be a few customers that do come up for renewals, and we'll have to wait and see what happens from a PER perspective also.
On the other expenses, the other expenses are the fixed expenses that you see, you would have seen a increase of probably INR 3 crores in the current quarter, that's what is prompting the question. A couple of things. The other expenses also include the legal and professional fee or deal-related expenses that we have incurred on the Think Analytics and Fintuple acquisitions. The increase in business promotion costs that we are doing for the new businesses, for example, the CRA, the ad that we do for the NPS, what we do for the events for the account aggregator, TSP, and the increased, you know, travel and all those expenses that come into it play a part in increase in other expenses.
There is also the BCP-related drills that we do, you know, mandate-based services become very frequent, including an announced drills for which we incur a lot of expense on travel, on accommodation, et cetera. All these things are adding up, you know, to the increase in the other expenses. It's more kind of a fixed expenses that we see. There is some one-off in this. There is some one-off of INR 40 lakhs-INR 50 lakhs, which is the deal-related expenses that we incurred for the acquisition, which accounting standards will want us to write off in the particular period which we have done. That's basically the breakup of the other expenses in terms of what you see in the P&L. Sorry, what was your third question, if I may ask? Please sir.
Sir, the ESOP, sir.
ESOP, as I said, in the current year, we have taken a charge of INR 26.72 crores of ESOP costs in the current year. The last year it was around INR 25.3 crores. We have four batches or four plans now valid grants, and we expect the cost for this in the next year to be around INR 14 crores. That's INR 26.7 crores in the current year going to INR 14 crores the next year. However, the only caveat I will give you is in the course of the year, if the board does grant additional options, then the cost will flow into the P&L.
As of now, as things stand today, the current year cost was INR 26.72 crores, and the next year cost is expected to be around INR 14 crores.
Thank you. Sorry to interrupt. Mr. Swarnab, may we request that you return to the question queue for follow-up questions, as there are several participants waiting for their turn. Ladies and gentlemen, in order to ensure that the management is able to address questions from all participants in the conference, please limit your questions to one or two per participant. Should you have a follow-up question, we would request you to rejoin the queue. Our next question is from the line of Prayesh Jain with Motilal Oswal. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Hi. Good morning, everyone. just a couple of questions. Firstly, just wanted some view on this. You mentioned that, you know, this size of the insurance repository could be INR 50 crores and in terms of number of policies and the overall revenue potential is INR 250 crores. We're talking about just a INR 5 per policy kind of a take rate, which to me seems to be much on the lower side, especially with, you know, services like we're talking about loan against policies or interest, or, you know, reminders for policies. There's so many things that can be activated to INR 5 per policy. you know, is that, is that a conservative number, or how should we think about that?
Secondly, on the core mutual fund business, could you give us some clarity on as to what is the flow market share in terms of your, on the equity side in particular? What would be your, you know, net flow market share in the industry and how it has shaped up in the, say, past one year or so?
Sure. On the insurance repository, just like we've seen in many other markets here. I think the way I'd sum it up is it's okay for you to take it as a conservative answer. Like I said, different people have come in with different views of the size, potential size being between INR 200 crore-INR 500 crore. We continue to believe that in all such markets which are multi-participant, when markets open up, some degree of price depletion will happen. It's not been a very competitive market so far. If, for example, depletion does not happen, then you will easily just from a Demat perspective, looking at a INR 500 crore market, but unlikely that no depletion will happen.
If prices deplete to 50% of where they are, you could be looking at an INR 200 crore-INR 250 crore market. Take it as a conservative answer. Let it play out. I think it is best to estimate with conservatism and let it play out and the upside will all be ours. That's one. Secondly, from a transaction revenue perspective, we aren't projecting much into this yet. The reason we are not projecting much into this yet is that there are various forces at play. You know that digital transactions from chargeability perspective
It's both a yes and a no. I mean, if you just look around yourselves and see the number of platforms which offer free services, you will see several of them, and therefore we believe that digital transaction charging is first to be inserted in the marketplace. The value has to be delivered to the consumer and to the insurance principle. All of that will be on top of this. That is not arising out of the Demat alone. That's the way I would like you to kind of picturize this entire thing. On part two of your question on what you should take as equity market share and equity net flow. You did see that equity net flow, and it's there in the presentation, grew from about 63% odd to 73% odd percent. It's a steep increase.
I agree it's a steep increase. Can you read a lot into this or one or two of a large mutual funds and their schemes gaining back-end rankings, etc? A bit of that. A bit of that, and the rest, I think, has to play out over at least a couple of quarters before you and I kind of draw meaningful conclusions from this. The share of equity AUM went up 0.5%, riding on this, riding on SIP inflows, etc. I think we'll have to watch it for some time. The numbers look good right now, and improving. You know that a couple of large mutual funds have been building out their position in terms of market rankings, etc, for the last year or two, and some of that has to show up now.
I would much rather watch it for another quarter or two before I come to a real conclusion on whether the direction is firm here. Does that answer your question?
Yeah, it does. Thanks.
Okay.
Thank you. Before we take the next question, a reminder to all the participants that you may press star and one to ask a question. Ladies and gentlemen, you may press star and one to ask a question. Our next question is from the line of Sahej Mittal from HDFC Securities. Please go ahead.
Hi. Hi. Morning all. Just one question from my side on other expenses. You alluded to the fact that INR 40 lakhs-INR 50 lakhs of expenses are one-off, right? Even X of that, there's some INR 2.5 crores increase on a sequential basis, right? If I look at first quarter and second quarter, the run rate, the quarterly run rate was at about INR 19 odd crores, which is now at about INR 23 odd crores. How sticky these expenses are because the operating leverage will not play out given the kind of growth which we are seeing in our top line, right? The growth has been soft, the expenses continue to grow, right? For FY 2024, if you could give us some guidance in terms of expenses, that would be great.
Yeah.
Thanks, Sahej. Yes, you know, apart from that, there is a 2.5 crores increase. I'll just give you some perspective on this. You know, some of these expenses I'll kind of split it into four or five things, right? One is the legal professional expenses that we see, the deal related. You should also understand that there is a lot of requirement from us from a SEBI perspective. You know, there are several audits that we are doing now, which we did not do in the past. For example, a VAPT audit is something that we're doing for the first time as CAMS PSP. Regular ISMS audits, internal audits. It is a highly regulated entity requiring a lot of spend, and everything is on, you know, top-notch firms or empanelled firms who are kind of doing it for us.
This is an expense that we will continue to incur in terms of, you know, the audits. This is not a small amount, you know. Just to give you a perspective only on the, you know, the capital market related, you know, security audit, IRDAI audit, ISMS audit, VAPT audit, cybersecurity audit, etc. In the last quarter alone, we would have spent more than INR 50 lakhs, right? It's not an insignificant amount any longer. We also spent money on marketing, and this could be, you know, something that could be the flavor of the future. For example, the market research for the Reimagine. Reimagine, Anuj was mentioning earlier, is the platform that we are launching for the insurance repository, which has got huge benefits and upside to it.
We did spend a lot of money on thinking through the platform, working through market surveys, you know, spend on media from a CRA perspective, including radio ads. These are things that are the incubation of the business we feel and we are very, very, very approval about spending on this. It's not as if we go and spend several INR crores on it. Wherever it's absolutely required, we do spend money on this. You know, then there is this travel expenses, you know, and there is this, you know, various communication and other expenses. Admin infra are... This is, you know, for us to host the software engineers technologies like the account aggregator, TSP or CRA, requires a different kind of an infrastructure which we have built, you know, and the increased cost for all those things.
Having said that, you know, this is not something that you will see a corresponding increase every quarter. That's not going to happen. I think we have hit the limit in terms of our admin and part of our expenses and the other expenses. What you could see is some inflation led increases that may happen. I do not foresee a big decline happening in any of these expenses. Probably a marginal decline could happen going forward, but a big increase is ruled out. It will not happen.
Right. If you could spell out the marketing spends for this quarter and full year.
What we have done in the current quarter is around INR 60 lakhs of marketing spend is what we have done in the current quarter. For the year, I'll have to get that amount and give it to you.
Sure. On staff expenses, X of ESOPs, are we looking at further investments into staff costs? What kind of growth are we looking at for the next year, X of ESOPs?
As you know, the biggest driver for cost increase there will be the annual increment, right? You know, we have rolled out an increment for the current year also from April, for almost the entire organization. Going forward, the investment perspective, just to give you a, from an OpEx perspective, we have spent almost INR 12 crores for the year only on initiatives that we feel will give us revenue going forward, which is your AA, TSP, CRA, et cetera. We do not see that investment going down. You know, what we could see is the revenue coming up from these things to a larger extent than what it was in the last year. However, from an investment perspective, we'll continue to incur this money. We don't see a drop in investments.
We do not see a big increase in investments either on the new initiatives from manpower or a software development perspective. That is also not budgeted in the current year. We would be status quo on the investments that we are doing on the current resources who are involved in this development of these new platforms, including the Reimagine, but we do not foresee any big increase in the investment that we are doing. The increase in the salary cost will be what is driven by the wage increase. Obviously, we will try to offset a lot of that based on a productivity and process improvements. The increase for the current year would be muted, and we are confident of delivering that number.
Got it. Got it. Thanks. Thanks and all the best.
Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question is from the line of Mr. Anand from White Oak. Please go ahead.
For the opportunity. Two questions. One is that you mentioned about a reset after five years in one of the clients. The new rates applicable, is this again for another tenure of five years? If you can give us some sense of the typical tenure for most of our clients, is that in the similar range? That is one. Second is from the reset perspective, this is the first quarter of impact. Fair to expect that this shall play out through the next three quarters as well.
Anand, typically, generally the contracts are two years and three years, but not five years. That was kind of one of that we did five years back. This is not going to be a five-year contract. Having said that, you know, without commenting on specific customer contracts per se, we will see some impact of such negotiations going forward, but it will not be as large as what we are seeing in the current renegotiation simply because it came up after five years, right? There is no other reason for this other than the fact it came up after five years. In that five years, a lot of growth has happened, and hence there was some amount of reset that happened.
You would see a continuing impact of this contract going forward to the next year also. I know this is not unnatural or different from what we see in other contracts also, which is always the rates are predicated on assets growing and the rates coming down. The same dynamics will play out in this contract also. You will see depletion in yields on this contract if the assets grow going forward also.
Sure. Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question is from the line of Mr. Jatin Jadhav from Sahasrar Capital. Please go ahead.
Hello, good morning. Am I audible?
Yes, sir. Please go ahead.
Yes. My question is, quietly, it's the question is regarding business understanding. I'm seeing this since March 20 to March 27 2022. Your CS went up from approximately INR 700 CR to INR 910 20 CR. That was also the time of the bull rally. I want to understand during, let's say, another rally comes in, the market picks up, how will you generate more money or how will you generate more revenue? Like, I wanted to understand that. How is the correlation between the markets when more money is pumped into the mutual funds and how that is translated to sales?
It's actually quite straightforward. You just need to watch our AUM because the AMCs are known, monthly AUMs are known, that number goes up. I mean, it's a multiplication of A by B, which is yields multiplied by assets. Like Ram Charan said, over a period of time, yields may contract a little because mutual funds follow telescopic pricing. That's how it works. If you see the real rally which happened in FY 2022, we saw a revenue increase in the range of INR 200 crore in a year on about a INR 700 crore base. In an extremely active year where markets and indices and assets go up, in that year, assets grew up by almost upwards of INR 6 lakh crore, we saw that impact.
Whenever a bull rally happens and whenever assets go up, you can expect that revenue will go up by the extent of 70%-80% of how much the assets are going up, mutual fund average.
Okay. My second question is regarding since CAMS also acts like a repository, we already have that infrastructure. Do you see any kind of business opportunity or any kind of opportunity on the ONDC platform where your skills and your basically the tech can be used?
You're speaking about ONDC?
Yes. Your CAMS, the entire business setup or your capabilities can be used over there. Any business opportunity you see or have thought of?
Right now, one of the obvious things is that when ONDC wants mutual funds as merchants, then obviously they need an integration with us. They need an integration with the entire MF industry. Those kind of dialogues are kind of being contemplated and are under underway, as we say. Is there something bigger than that, which means can we play a more user central role for ONDC, et cetera? I won't comment on that exactly, but yeah, I mean, possible, but we haven't tried any of that yet.
All right. That's pretty much it. Thank you. Thank you very much.
Thanks.
Thank you. As there are no further questions, I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. Ram Charan SR, Chief Financial Officer, for closing co-comments.
Thank you, Nachiket. I thank all of you for taking time off and attending this earnings call of CAMS, and thank you for the continuing interest that you're showing in CAMS. Please do reach out to us, to Anish Sabhlani or to Orient Capital in case you have further questions or queries, and we'll be happy to assist you. Thank you once again for joining this call.
Thank you. On behalf of Computer Age Management Services, CAMS, that concludes this conference. Thank you for joining us, and you may now disconnect your lines.