Ladies and gentlemen, good day, and welcome to the Q3 FY 2024 Earnings Conference Call of Computer Age Management Services Limited, hosted by Orient Capital. With us today, we have Mr. Anuj Kumar, Managing Director, Mr. Ram Charan S.R. CFO, and Mr. Anish Sawlani, Head Investor Relations. 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 touchtone phone. Please note that this conference is being recorded. I now hand the conference over to Ms. Shivani Karwat from Orient Capital. Thank you, and over to you, ma'am.
Hi. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the Q3 FY 2024 earnings conference call for Computer Age Management Services Limited. Before we proceed to this call, I would like to give a small disclaimer that this conference call will contain forward-looking statements about the company, which are based on beliefs, opinions, and expectations of the company as on date. These statements are not guarantees of future performance and involve risks and uncertainties, which are difficult to predict. A detailed disclaimer has also been published in the investor presentation, which was released to the stock exchanges. I hope everybody had a chance to go through the presentation. I will now hand over the call to Mr. Anuj Kumar, Managing Director. Thanks, everyone, and over to you, sir.
Hi. Good morning, everyone, and thank you, Shivani. Good morning to everyone who's joined this 3Q earnings call of CAM. I appreciate you taking your time out. We will follow the standard format for this call, which means that there is a structured presentation. I'll take you through that, seven, eight slides, hand over to Ram Charan for his commentary on financials, and then we should have about 20-25 minutes available for taking Q&A. So I will begin, and on the charts, if you've downloaded the pack, this is chart number six. I'll start by sharing with you that CAM has won the mutual fund RTA mandate of Unifi Capital. As you know, Unifi is a very prominent PMS provider based in Chennai, and has aspirations to operate a mutual fund.
They were one of those 10 or 11 entities which had applied for a license in the last about 18 months. So very happy to share with you that this has recently got announced and adds to the set of significant and marquee new logo wins in the mutual fund arena in the last 18- 24 months period. So this makes it 5th of the last seven new mutual fund mandates which have been declared in the market. Overall, from an AUM perspective, you are aware that we've scaled significantly during the last 9 months. And mutual fund assets stand at about just short of INR 34 trillion, INR 33.95 trillion. This is a 22% growth year-on-year you would have seen in the release. Our overall market share stands at 68.2%.
What is significantly happening is that equity AUM has scaled much faster, which means it has scaled ahead of the market, and it has scaled ahead of our normal base growth. This now stands at INR 60.9 trillion. It has registered a 31% growth, and when you compare it with the rest of the industry growth, equity AUM to our equity AUM growth, the 31 is significantly ahead of the 24% that the industry has achieved. From a market share perspective, equity AUM market share, we grew by 140 basis points on an annual basis and about 40 basis points quarter-on-quarter to touch 66%.
So you know that this number has been creeping up steadily for the last about 2.5-3 years, but at 66% is a fairly significant number to quote. Also, I'm sorry. You are aware that SIP collections and SIP registrations are really the formative elements which are driving the growth of this market from a SIP live book perspective. Which basically covers the count of SIPs that we have. This grew 29% year-on-year, again, at a significant delta. Industry grew by 19%, we grew by 29%. And as you're aware, that this really adds heft to monthly collections, net sales, AUM growth, and all of that. So again, a fairly foundational number to continue watching.
As I come to collection numbers et cetera, you will see how this number of SIP registrations and live book are really influencing asset numbers. Also, the fact that of the I quoted five out of seven wins, out of those five wins, Helios Mutual Fund and Zerodha both went live during the quarter. Again, in a fairly, you know, racing away towards the finish line, Helios grew to about very close to INR 1,000 crore AUM number. Now, you know that for a new mutual fund to grow to INR 1,000 crore, it sometimes takes years, not just 1 year, but sometimes even longer than that. For them to achieve this in a short time, again, a fairly significant milestone from an achievement perspective. Both these mutual funds went live during the quarter.
If I move a little to beyond mutual funds, which is the non-mutual fund businesses, you are aware that we've had a sustained focus on expanding share of non-MF in the overall book, and also we've stated to you that we will continue scaling non-MF at a rate ahead of the MF book. Again, very happy to share with you that, year-on-year, this has grown about 3.3%, so 330 basis points. Share of non-MF is in the range of 13% now. What comprises non-MF and what is significantly scaled? One, of course, is alternatives, and I'll talk about alternatives as we move forward. But at a broad bullet level, grew 21% year-on-year, added significantly large number of new mandates, which is 32. This includes four in GIFT City.
So again, from a market win perspective, a very satisfied quarter, from all respects. The other business which has done extremely well and where we have sharpened our offering and also sharpened our go-to-market route, is CAMS KRA, where you've seen that we've declared over 100% revenue growth at 129%. From our entity, which used to largely cater to CAMS service mutual funds, we have gone to beyond CAMS service mutual funds across all of them. But not that alone, you know, from a Fintech, brokerage, wealth advisory perspective, all these entities, you know, need KYC and KRA services, and CAMS KRA has brought in a large number of customers in the last 12 months to both broaden our clientele and scale revenue.
Which is why you see that, of course, it's on a smaller base, but that notwithstanding, the revenue has grown over 100%, in the year, in the quarter year-on-year, is a very, very significant achievement. Moving forward from an insurance repository perspective, we have declared that CAMS Rep has gained entry, and you know that, the non-life segment also now has, KYC, as a mandatory step before you purchase insurance. So we won mandate from Oriental Insurance to do KYC for them. This for KYC. This is a joint go-to-market and a joint offering between CAMS Rep and Think360. As you know, Think360 has had this product called Kwik ID, which was selling quite well in the financial services, which is NBFC and banking arena.
But this is a nice entry into insurance, so that is what CAMS Rep has won. And also very pleased to share with you that, this broadening of the business for CAMS Pay, we have won an exclusive partner status from LIC, to execute customer account authentication. This is largely third-party verification of accounts of, people who wanted to buy insurance and are stepping in digitally. But again, a fairly healthy contract and it's an exclusive partnership. Riding on all these wins and all the tailwinds that we have faced from a, SIP growth, MF AUM growth perspective, the financial highlights are pretty good. CAMS, the overall revenue book grew just short of 19% at 18.9%. Within this, MF revenue grew 14.6% year-on-year. Non-MF grew a staggering 59% year-on-year.
If I take out the effect of Think360, which is still a one-time addition to the book, we still grew about 41% year-on-year on a non-MF basis. Four out of the six non-MF businesses grew by more than 20%, so that's a significant achievement, four out of the six growing by over 20%. Riding on the revenue growth, EBITDA grew 19.7% year-on-year. EBITDA percentage is historically at the highest. You would remember a number of 44.5% in the last quarter, and a year back, that number scaled up to 44.8%, so that's about 30 basis points up. And profit after tax grew in absolute terms, 21%. In percentage terms, we grew 40 basis points year-on-year.
So that's a very solid set of financial metrics, just riding on strong sales and operating performance almost across the board. I will move forward. You would have, once you downloaded the facts, you would have seen that there is significant financial data. I will just cover chart number seven, and then what is there on eight, nine, 10, 11, I will leave it to you for reading. But in chart number eight, you would see that we saw historic highs in transactions, and there was a continuing lift in SIP numbers, equity AUM, and new investor account, all of which, like you know, are foundational metrics. And our overall SIP registration was a lifetime high of 43.9%.
So broadly, a 9% transaction volume growth, growing from just short of 141 million to 153 million, vindicating all the activity which is happening in the market. Equity AUM, like I said, grew significantly ahead of RBS growth and the market growth of equity too grew 31%. Equity AUM from 12.9% in last year, third quarter, to 16.9% now. Equity net sales, which is a good measure of what is the fraction of net sales coming to us through CAMS service funds, was in 3Q 2023 73.2%, still holding quite well at 72%. Absolute growth of 26%, but holding share.
Like I said, our equity AUM market share is 66%, so long as the net sales share is 5% or 6% ahead of that. It simply means that equity AUM share will continue to grow, so that's a good number. SIP registration, new SIPs, we crossed the highest single month number of 2.5 million, INR 25 lakh SIPs were registered in December of 2023. And from a SIP registration perspective, we were at a 61.8% market share in 2Q, which grew up slightly by a small margin to 62%, but still holding up quite well. Live SIP, you know, net of cancellation in 3Qs, this number was 3.3 million, which is again, the highest ever, and again, bodes very well for future collections and future SIP-related growth.
2Q, the absolute number of live SIP was 40.5 million, like I said, grew to 43.9% in this quarter. And then SIP gross sales, which is the number you end up reading about every month as the releases come out, was INR 283 billion in the second quarter, grew to about INR 312 billion. So it's crossed what is a magical number of INR 10,000 crore a month, and is heading in the direction of INR 11,000 crore. And from a market share perspective, SIP gross sales was just over 60% in 2Q, and that scaled to 60.5%, so grew about 0.4%. So all of those are nice growth numbers to continue backing us in the story beyond this quarter.
And like I said, they are all foundational numbers, which will perhaps continue defining growth as we move forward. After these two, I'm just skipping chart number eight, nine, 10, and 11, assuming that you have a copy and you want to bounce through it. I will take you through individual businesses, just chart by chart, maybe about a minute on each. Starting with alternatives, where we are reporting a revenue growth of 21% year-on-year. I spoke about the 32 new wins during the quarter, which is a very sustained new logo onboarding performance. CAMS WealthServ continues to herald the digitization you know momentum in this industry and has over 110 signups.
There is now enough trends to see that over 30%, some, in some cases, 40% of new customers in AIFs and PMS are coming through the digital route. So that's just revolutionizing the way onboarding happens in this, in this asset class. In GIFT City, we now have over 15 clients. We added 4 new during the quarter. And then, with Multifo nds, because we brought in the multi-country, multi-currency fund accounting capability, moving some of the existing and new clients onto that platform, just to gain experience and gain help, in that class. Also, from a Fintuple perspective, you know that Fintuple has been building these large, platforms, connecting custody programs of large banks, with domestic PMSs and then followed by domestic AIFs.
The first of these programs has with a very large bank, has just gone into live. They are onboarding the PMS, AMC is now on to the platform. And all of this is now growing beyond just AIF and PMS, and is growing into things like FPI, forex, and treasury services. So Fintuple has been able to, although it's taken them some time, has been able to build these bespoke platforms which have multiple components of assisting large custodies to integrate with FPIs, to integrate with AIFs and PMSs. And we believe that the off-take in terms of onboarding will now start building momentum. Also, overall, we've declared INR 2.2 trillion assets under service for our alternative platform.
From a CAMS Pay perspective, I spoke about LIC onboarding CAMS Pay as an exclusive partner to execute customer authentication services. CAMS Pay registered a strong revenue growth year-on-year. Onboarded a significant number of new clients for UPI Autopay. UPI Autopay is now emerging as a preferred mode. It has got significant strengths and risk qualities over the traditional NACH and eNACH. So that portfolio continues to grow. And from an overall volumes and revenue perspective, it's been a strong quarter for CAMS Pay. I'll go to the next, which is CAMS KRA. This we have said has performed, I mean, has delivered a very strong performance, growing over 100% during the quarter over last year.
You would have seen enough news and PR around our 10-minute KYC, which I think is the foundational component which has helped us penetrate brokerages and fintech. So a large component of new banks or, which is really the gunpowder that KRA survives on, have started coming from all these other sectors outside of domestic mutual funds. Also, from a AI-embedded offering perspective, with assisted face match, OCR, liveness check, liveness APIs, et cetera, we are finding that CAMS KRA is now getting accepted across the board as a superior product in the marketplace, and the growth then just vindicates all of that. There are 25 new financial institutions of various colors, hues, and sizes, which have now commenced business with us, which is signed up.
The onboarding journey now, the front end of the journey is powered by Think's Kwik ID. So that's a product which has earned its spurs across banks and NBFCs. Now we're using it as a standard front-end onboarding journey, while CAMS KRA then provides all the backend services that a KRA wants. Going to the next on CAMSRep. We spoke about CAMSRep's entry into KYC and of the vehicle rental insurance to do all the, like, execute the entire digital KYC process through CAMSRep. This again is powered through Think's Kwik ID. Also from a Bima Central perspective, although progress isn't as fast as we had expected, the first few insurance companies are now fully integrated onto the Bima Central program.
This, this app is now available in the App Store and the Play Store, and this is something you can try. From a EIA perspective, we continue to maintain a market share of 39% for policies and 31% on the, EIA accounts. As I move forward, I will jump to 16 on CAMSf inserv. We've shown a sustained expansion in market share. You would have seen that we had started with single digits, and now happy to share with you that we've grown to over 13%, in the AA ecosystem in terms of share. We are the preferred, AA partners. When the account aggregator thing started, very few people expected that things like F&O account opening would become a large use case.
We are now the preferred partners in the industry, servicing multiple number of brokerages, for this particular use case, where a bank account has to be refreshed every year, for all live F&O accounts. Twenty-five FIU clients were live, in Q3. And then we continue to report a number of new deals, both from an AA, T SP perspective. So a solid quarter, still small revenue. But, from a market share, total number of pools, penetrating various segments, demonstrating new use cases of things like FNO and now personal finance management, I think a very satisfying, period for the team. I will move forward from a Think 360 perspective. You will remember that we had declared that for the flagship product, which is Algo 360, we had signed a deal with, SBI Card.
That engagement is now live, which means usage has begun, and this is a very marquee customer for usage of this product. So we're expecting clear dynamics to now continue showing a sign of progress. Similarly, from a digitalization perspective, we now have contracts with three of the top 10 public sector banks in India for overall digitalization. This is largely the digital KYC journey. This is now fully signed up with Canara Bank, too. We won; these are both analytics and risk management contracts, one with CreditAccess Grameen, and the other with DCB for augmenting their overall risk analytic expertise.
CAMS and Think360 have also built a product called Influence 360, which is a geographic data product, which helps businesses strategize in terms of understanding buying power of the consumer and how the consumer differs across cities and PIN codes. So that product is now ready for the market. And lastly, I will talk about CAMS NPS. We've seen a 2x growth in overall subscriber count year-on-year. We continue to hold the number two position in overall new ENPS sales. Our overall innovations in terms of making the CAMS enabled UPI Autopay, all of those things, continue to be playing out in the market. And then from a POP perspective now, we are linked with several POPs, and almost 3/4 of the overall traffic is now getting contributed by these.
Q4, as you know, is season for NPS, so we're expecting to continue broadening out and expanding the numbers as far as NPS is concerned. So I will pause here, hand it over to Ram Charan for his commentary on financials, and then once we are done, then we will take questions.
Thank you, Anuj. The financials, which touched upon the highlights in these, in the earlier part of the presentation, I'll just try to get into one level detail of this. From a revenue, as indicated, we have kind of had a strong revenue growth during the quarter, 18.9% year-on-year, on the back of a growth in assets and the mutual fund revenue. The mutual fund revenue grew by 15%, almost 14.6%, again, on the back of growth in assets. On a quarter-on-quarter basis, our revenue grew by 5.3%. And from mutual fund, on a quarter-on-quarter, grew 5.4%, which is again backed by high growth in the AUM. This is actually a good point to us.
If you remember, over the last few quarters, we have been indicating that from a yield pressure perspective, it was a common question from a lot of people, you know, that, the one-time reset of the yield, one-time large reset of the yields with one of our major customers has been completed, and you will see the impact of this in the next few quarters. Happy to say that it's played out like that in this quarter, and you will see the, yield compression in this quarter. And thanks to the equity mix being favorable, the equity mix for CAMS is 50% almost, 49.9%. We are, in fact, on a quarter-on-quarter basis, seeing a very, very marginal increase in yields, you know, which is again, playing out the way that we anticipated.
Going forward, we also do not see any large depletion yields other than what will be driven by the telescopic pricing. So, from a revenue perspective, the asset-based revenue, which is a major part of the mutual fund revenue, grew 13.2% year-on-year and 5.1% quarter-on-quarter, and this is INR 212 crore of asset-based revenue. The non-asset-based revenue on the back of good lined up in transaction revenue, as well as some miscellaneous and applications value added that we sell to our customers, both had a very smart growth rate. So which means on a year-on-year basis, we grew 23% and on a quarter-on-quarter by 7%. So our non-asset-based revenue is currently at INR 40.8 crore.
So, INR 212 crore and INR 40.8 crore, the overall MF revenue stands at INR 252 crore for the quarter, again, up almost 15%. The non-MF revenue, I think the earlier slides were, kind of, getting into the detail of individual business lines that we have. But the highlight is being that we continue to deliver on non-MF growth, which we had kind of projected. A big increase of around 60% is what you saw on a year-on-year basis of non-MF revenue, which includes the revenue of Think Analytics, which we acquired at the beginning of this year.
Even keeping that aside, the overall revenue growth is of course 40%, which is again tracking to our entire projection of, you know, getting the non-MF revenue to a 20% of the overall revenue within the next few years. We are well on track to achieving that. On a quarter-on-quarter basis too, the non-MF revenue grew by 4.5%. Individual components, Anuj touched upon in the earlier slides. Good growth on a quarter-on-quarter basis, on a AIF, on a payment perspective, KRA grew more than 100% and the AA, TSP. So we had four businesses which grew more than 20% quarter-on-quarter, with KRA doing very well with more than 100% growth, when compared to last year, the same quarter.
So, all in all, a very strong revenue growth of almost 19%, driven by growth in MF, as well as in the non-MF segments, which again, leads to our profitability. We, over the last seven quarters, this has been kind of the highest profitability that we have seen. In operating EBITDA, we entered the quarter with almost INR 130 crore, INR 129.6 crore of operating EBITDA, which is almost 20%, 19.7% growth over the same quarter last year. And sequentially, just a growth of almost 6%, 5.8% growth. The margins creep up again, as we had indicated, you know, as and when the revenue starts flowing into the non-MF as well as some amount of operating leverage.
We will have an operating EBITDA creep up, which has again played out in the current quarter too. As opposed to 44.5% in the earlier quarter, we are at a 44.8% operating EBITDA. PBT is in line with it. It's almost at 40%, 39.9%. And PAT, we entered the quarter with INR 89.29 crore of PAT under 29.8%. Good growth of 21% in PAT on a year-on-year basis, and a 5.7% quarter-on-quarter. As I said, if you take the last seven quarters, this is the highest margins that we have seen, not only in terms of absolute numbers, but even in terms of margin percentages, which again indicates to a very strong financial performance.
As you know, we are used to the 40% kind of return on network, which we are continuing to see. And we entered the quarter with a healthy cash and cash equivalent surplus of around INR 580 crore in our balance sheet. The one item on the cost that I would like to highlight is the cost, comparable cost for this year. Just like we eliminated the revenue for Think, there's a comparable cost of almost INR 5 crore for the year. Hence, you would see some increase in the individual expenses. But that, that is a one time. That is, that is the inclusion of Think for the first time in our consolidated financials.
Also, we had the final tranche of the current ESOP scheme rolled out during the quarter. So you had a non-cash charge of around INR 4.3 crore that is coming into the current quarter books, which was INR 1.7 crore more than what it was in the last quarter. So if you see overall from an expense creep perspective, if you, if you consider the non-cash charge of ESOP of INR 1.7 crore, and if you consider there is an increase in out-of-pocket expenses or OPE, both from a KRA as well as MF perspective, to the extent of INR 2.5 crore, the expense growth quarter-on-quarter has been extremely muted, which is, which is the reason why you see some amount of creep up in the margin. That is also playing out on a year-on-year basis.
Year-over-year basis, you had the OPE expenses grow by almost INR 5 crore. You know, if you actually take that out, you will see a strong transmission of the increase in top line to the bottom line. That's the broad commentary on the financials. I will now hand it back to Tushar, and he may open it for Q&A.
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 phone. 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'll wait for a moment while the question queue assembles. The first question is from the line of Supratim Datta from Ambit Capital. Please go ahead.
Thanks a lot for the opportunity. So my first question is, you know, you gave some color on how costs have tracked in this third quarter. But just if you could give us a split between, you know, the cost, how much of that is for the core MF RTA business, and how much is for the non-MF business, that would also help us understand, you know, how the profit or, you know, the profitability is tracking in those two segments. That would be my one of the questions. The other question is on the KRA business. You indicated that you have, you know, entered into 25 new relationships with Fintech. Now, I wanted to understand that, you know, what is driving your, you know, this ability to enter into these new relationships with Fintech?
Is it a product differentiation that is helping you here? Because from a KYC record perspective, you are still significantly lower than the market leader. So wanted to understand what's your, you know, differentiation point. Those are the two questions. Thank you.
Okay. There are two parts to it. I will take the first part on the non-MF profitability expense, and then Anuj will come in on the KRA and what's happening in that for us to grow this much. See, I will give you broad guidelines in terms of how the non-MF is used. And we had indicated in the earlier quarters, too, you know, from an investment perspective, we are investing in Bima Central, which is the CAMSRep new platform. We are investing in the AA, TSP. We are investing in the CRA platform. And we are also kind of trying- continuing to make enhancements from a payments platform perspective, and AIF, we are launching new products.
So what we had indicated was in the last year, that the investments that we are making, and, we do not kind of capitalize or amortize, we kind of take most of it to the P&L. On a, on a quarter-on-quarter basis, our spend was projected to be INR 3 crore or INR 4 crore. So for the current year, for all these initiatives put together, we have spent more than INR 5 crore, okay? Now, what has changed is the top line growth. So what used to be a very minimal, less than, you know, very small revenue component from AA, TSP, is now almost tracking to INR 70 lakh per quarter. What is happening from an MF Central perspective is tracking to over INR 60 lakh-INR 70 lakh per quarter.
You know, so things like that, our AIF, you know, is growing 21%, a lot of it is because of the new ramp-up that's happening on the products, right? So from a cost perspective, I don't think it's very different from what it was in earlier quarters. We continue to spend around INR 5 crore-INR 6 crore on these platforms that we are building out. But the revenue has crept up, which means that the profitability from a non-MF perspective, considering it, it's, it's not a homogeneous bucket, but just from an easy to understand perspective, if you take the bucket of non-MF business, the profitability has crept up, and it will be in the high single digit - high double digits, or less than 10.
So it'll be around 10%-15% of the bucket profitability, which is higher than what it was in the earlier quarter. And as we get more and more revenue from a top-line perspective, this will kind of get closer to the profitability. That's, that's basically the understanding that we have. Whether it will happen in two quarters, three quarters, four quarters, it's how, how fast the revenue will ramp up, but that's, that's the trajectory that we are foreseeing. On the KRA perspective, Anuj?
Yes, sure. So, when you look at the KRA business, think of it as, it serves the entire capital market. In the capital market, the large participants are brokerages and depositories, who you know, that, they add customers at a pace which is significantly ahead of what the mutual funds add, new customers at. Historically, we had rooted this business and designed it to serve CAMS service mutual funds, so a subset of the total. In the last year and a half, especially after we brought in Navi as a customer, we have now been, going after the entire set of mutual funds, but also, large brokerages and large Fintechs. Some of these Fintechs are selling mutual funds, a lot of them are, are just registered brokers.
So we have expanded the game to, let's say, the playing arena is 3x or 4x of what it used to be. And within the brokerage business, as you know, there are significant lumps. There are 5 or 6 entities which are very large, and then there is a there, there is a medium-sized set of entities, and there's a long tail. So as you go after these, and you just can't go after these through a sales effort, because your product and your overall servicing, turnaround times, quality of onboarding, time taken, et cetera, has to be world-class. We have built all of that, which is why we've seen gain in share. Now, are we going to become the number one very quickly? The answer is no, because it takes a period of time. The delta between the number one and number two today is significant.
There is an incumbent number one. But what I can certainly assure you on is that this is not a flash in the pan performance. We've grown revenue 100% on the back of onboarding new PAN. When these investor PANs are reused, either in the MF market or through, you know, for brokerages or for opening demat accounts, that is really revenue accretive. So we are doing the right foundational things for the business. This year's revenue growth is one indication, but my expectation is that you will continue to see this sustained in the same manner. You will see the gap lessening between the leader and us. When do we scale up to really challenge the leader, et cetera?
That may take some time, but I think the initial metrics of onboarding high-potential customers, expanding the number of PANs in our armory, and being able to sell them to reflect in revenue, I think those are great momentum-causing events which have happened in the last four to five quarters.
Got it. That's clear. Just quickly follow up on another first question on investing. So, you know, on the non-MF side, I understand that you are spending INR 5 crore-INR 6 crore additionally, you know, for some of these initiatives that you listed. Now, going forward, should we continue to see these new investments, new initiatives and spend around the new initiatives for the year?
If I may ask, can you just repeat the question and, you know, because I was not able to hear you fully because the voice was not very clear. Is your question on mute, or if you can please repeat it for us?
Yeah, yeah. So I will—on the, just this is a follow-up on the first question. So on the investment, so you said INR 5 crore-INR 6 crore towards new initiatives. Just wanted to understand, how should we think of it going forward? Should it continue at this level? And what would be those initiatives that you would be spending on, the INR 5 crore-INR 6 crore? And on the MF side, if you could list, you know, how we are thinking about investments, what would be some of the things that you would be investing in on the MF side? That, that would be my question. Thank you.
Thank you. So, what we have, kind of said consistently and we continue following, is that the investment amount would not go down. You know, while this is a journey, this is not, we've not reached the destination in terms of where we want to be in terms of the product. So basically, we will continue to invest in new products. In AIF, we already have rolled out the onboarding platform, we are doing the wealth track, and we are doing the fund accounting platform. Similarly, from other businesses, the CRA platform will get further embellished. You know, we are doing various journeys on that. We will get, you know, we have started the POP, we will get the government in and, other, other schemes and flavors into it. And from, AA, TSP, it's, it's several use cases are emerging.
You know, we are reallocating a lot of these things. So, the investments in this will not slow down. We will continue to invest this money in the platforms that we are speaking about, and we will see the beneficial impact in terms of ramp-up in the revenue. But, you should assume that the same amount will continue to get invested on a quarter-over-quarter basis, adjusted for obviously some inflation and salary costs as we go forward. On the second question of investments in MF, on what we are doing.
So, like Ram said, you can't win in the marketplace till you build cutting-edge products, until you've taken them to market. So sales and product development and some degree of, you know, just PR and spreading the news around are just natural investments.
We've said in the past, non-MF, that'll be in the range of, you know, INR 15 crore-INR 20 crore a year, which I think continues. The point that Ram has made is that against that, there used to be small offsetting revenue. As increasingly the offsetting revenue increases because, those markets are growing. You've seen that in CRA, in AIF, and in, account aggregator, definitely. We will see that offsetting revenues grow, and therefore, the, one term of the investment remains constant, but it becomes revenue accretive. On the mutual fund side, there is a significant amount of work, that we continue to do to, you know, scale up and add leadership, which is, of course, leadership and, and manpower.
But from a, you know, risk, anti-fraud, cybersecurity, BCP, just the way we treat data and we are able to organize data and, you know, get analytics and insight from them, those are standard, I would say. Now, you can count them as run rate investments. They're inside the P&L. They continue to happen all the time. The sophistication that we need, let's say, from a security perspective, continues to scale up in this world where you have to guard your perimeter very effectively and make sure there is no intrusion. So that will continue. That's inside the P&L. I don't think you should read it as a separate line, which is kind of asynchronous to the growth of the business. It is synchronous to the growth of the business, and will continue. Did that answer your question?
So I think he's disconnected. We'll move on to the next question.
No problem.
The next question is from the line of Sanketh Godha from Avendus Spark. Please go ahead, sir.
Yeah, thank you. Thank you for the opportunity. Anuj, my question is just if you can give me an indicative number. Since today we are at a EBITDA margin of 44.7%, if I want to split the EBITDA margin of MF and non-MF, how it is? And as Anuj highlighted, if the growth starts picking up in the non-MF business, then how you see the overall EBITDA margins to play out from the current levels? Or what the numbers we are looking at are like peak numbers, significant expansion we don't expect to happen. Just some outlook on that. And second question is largely on non-MF revenue.
If you look at AIF business or CAMSPay business, it seems to be plateauing on sequential basis. It's around 74-75 million rupees, and even CAMSPay. Just wanted to understand how to see these numbers to pan out. Though on year-on-year basis, this looks healthy, but on sequential basis, it seems to be holding up at best numbers. Just if you can give a little better outlook on these businesses will be helpful. And lastly, on fund accounting, I think your competitor is little aggressive on that particular piece.
So if you can speak a little more on fund accounting as a new source of revenue, how you want to build this, it will be great.
Oh, got it. So, I'll answer the question on margin first, Sanketh, and, I think there are three questions that you asked. I'll just take the margins one first.
Okay.
So, yes, we have seen a creep in our non-MF margins. What used to be, you know, even as a single bucket, and I would like to clarify again, they are not a homogeneous business or a unit. But for the purpose of ease of understanding, suppose we kind of club them under a single bucket and say it's non-MF bucket. Our margins now on an EBITDA perspective are less than 15%, right? What used to be a single-digit number has now kind of gone up to close to 15% on a per se. And so the MF is kind of much more than the 44% that they're paying. Mathematically, that's when your average is 44.8%.
Yeah.
Now, going forward, the trajectory, again, this is again, consistently what we've been saying for the last few quarters, is that we will get the margins of the non-MF business creeping up as and when the revenue starts ramping up. Whether it happens rapidly over one or two quarters or over four or five quarters, is what the market will tell us. But our trajectory of the non-MF margins, even that is spent, is going to be plateauing and the revenue is going to be increasing. We expect that, you know, they will get 10 towards the 25% in our, in our next few quarters for sure, right? There is not going to be no dilution in margins as is from a Pay perspective. Because of some investments, AIF margins could come down a little.
But rep, once the Bima Central starts and some revenue starts kicking in, and the other AA, TSP businesses and the Sterling Software external businesses could actually give us an incremental 10% increase in margins as we go forward. So that's the expectation. But obviously, I would just like to caution you with one thing, which is that the April quarter has always traditionally been the quarter in which we have had a close 2.5% increase in cost because of the annual appraisal. Now, whether that is 2% or 3% or 2.5%, and when that will happen, is obviously a decision to be taken when we are closer to April.
But I know the long-term trend suggests that an increment on quarter one, this is across industries, not obviously unique to CAMS, is going to be around 2.5%. So keeping that in mind, I would not kind of predict that our operating EBITDA will go to 49%-50%. But what we are confident of doing is see this creep up in the EBITDA, and we will keep aside the salary increment for a moment to see this EBITDA creep up by what we are thinking is 20-30 basis points over the next few quarters for sure. So that's the expectation. And we will see. We obviously hope and you know think that the revenue ramps up further, we will see a further ramp up in EBITDA.
I would still not suggest that we will be close to 50% anytime soon.
Perfect, yeah. Yeah. And now, yeah.
Sir, you have a follow on on that, or should we go to the next question?
I mean, so basically, my simple point is that by means, if I include even the annual appraisals, yeah, in FY 2025, then you are saying that current margins can potentially be at least if 20-30 basis point improvement in the per quarter, then we can see probably a 1% better margin than what we can expect in FY 2024, is what I wanted to just check.
So, you know, historically, Sanketh, you've seen that operating EBITDA has grown by about 1% a year. That is irrespective of the puts and takes, whether we've made investments, whether revenue has grown or not grown at the same pace. So just extrapolating the past into the future, you, you know what to expect, right? Which is what you said, is 30 basis points in the quarter. Can the 30 basis points repeat itself in all the four quarters? I think the only point Ram is saying is, is the first quarter always tough to repeat the act.
Mm-hmm.
But we are at it and expecting about a 1% increase in a year, just from a historical perspective, is just par for the course, right? It's happened for the last four, five years, likely can happen the next year, too.
Probably the next, yeah.
Yeah. On CAMS Pay and AIF, I think the formative metric you should look at is what is the pace we are winning at? Are we able to hold our prices? And are we introducing new products into the market? Because if you're doing these three or four things consistently in any marketplace, and in AIF, you know that we come from a place of leadership, then it is not tough to expand revenue. You can always have a quarter which may not look the most stratospheric. But I would just encourage you to look at the numbers that we've shared. We said that core of the non-MF businesses grew over 20%. Alternatives on a large base at about 21%, pay even higher.
So an annual comparison, just in terms of overall growth, I think is a good number to look at. We've shown you that, the AIF business won almost 32 new clients. Look at the scale. Our digital onboarding now has over 114 customers, and these are all revenue-yielding contracts. Of course, revenue per, per sale isn't. It's in line with what it used to be in the past. So I'm quite confident that we will continue delivering the, growth numbers that we have, spoken about in the past for non-MF. Non-MF as a lump, we want to keep it over 20%. And from what I see coming, I think there is, there is significant confidence that that will continue happening. On fund accounting, today, we service, almost 70-80 unique consumers, from a fund accounting perspective.
Earlier, this was done in a certain way. Three quarters back, we decided to bring in the Multi Funds platform, which is now going into production, and about three or four of our clients are going to migrate on that. So again, very confident that we have the right offering, the right go-to-market strategy, and the right teams to continue scaling this. That is how I would characterize fund accounting. I'm personally very excited with the alternatives business, both what the CAMS team is doing and what the Fintuple team does. And collectively between them, we are quite positive about the acceptance of the products in the marketplace and how it will scale.
Got it. But, I think, Sanketh, if I may just add, I think, from an AIF perspective, the quarter-on-quarter growth, you know, is not bad. You know, it's I think upwards of 10%, if I'm not mistaken. So I think, the foundational metrics, as Anuj said, is scaling up. You know, number is also decent from a quarter-on-quarter growth of AUM.
Got it. Got it. And last one, given this Multifo nds platform, I'm believing it is built completely in-house. So if we try to cross-sell to more AIFs or other funds, then do you expect the revenue realization from the existing funds, I mean, given the cross-sell opportunity? I believe you are largely in TA, transfer agency, I mean, RTA business in AIFs. Now, fund accounting, do you see this will play out much better than what you are anticipating or the run rate could be little better because your ability to cross-sell?
So cross-selling was always happening. Like I said, we have about 80 unique consuming entities-
Mm-hmm.
-which were buying fund accounting. The gap in the offering was that we did not have multi-currency. So think of someone who's trying to, you know, re-domicile themselves from an overseas location into, let's say, GIFT City, et cetera. We did not have multi-currency reporting, et cetera. Multifo nds, therefore, closes out that gap. So it is a niche, it is a part of the overall fund accounting offering. Will it create revenue scale of its own? The answer is yes. Will it make us more scalable? The answer is yes. But from a base perspective, that business will continue. Any domestic pure single currency asset work will continue the way it is continuing.
Perfect. And which largely will be catering to AIF, right? Or you want to expand this platform beyond AIF?
Yeah. Right now, I think one thing at a time. You know our approach, right? We don't-
Yeah.
-deploy into 100 places at the same time, one thing at a time. We, we want to make it a success. Have a number of massive customers talking good things about us, and then if you're thinking of pension and MF, et cetera, it's a natural sequel, but we just want to get it first, right in the base, amongst the AIF and then move forward.
Perfect, Anuj. Thanks, thanks for the update.
Thank you. The next question is from the line of Abhijeet Sakhare, from Kotak Securities. Please go ahead, sir.
Good morning, everyone. My first question is coming back to the non-MF businesses. Just putting all of them together, how would you kind of, you know, characterize the recurring or annuity nature of revenues versus, you know, something that is driven by, you know, volumes or transactions? If you can kind of give us some sense, broad sense, on that piece of the business.
So, if you are asking whether there is a, connected to sale or recurring sale component?
Yes.
I would say some of Think's businesses, which are, more project-based, you win a 6-month or a 12-month analytics outsourcing contract, will perhaps, characterize for that. But I would say that, that's under 10%. If you want to see the annuity character, KRA is the best example, where once I have, let's say, a base of INR 2 crore PANs, these individuals can go and open accounts anywhere, but the exchange of the PAN information or the KYC information that I store is revenue accretive. So theoretically, even if I stop selling, for a day or a month, that revenue continues. Similarly, if you see, CAMSRep, and you see the insurance policies that we have on the base, they continue to be revenue accretive because we continue charging an AMC, even if theoretically I were to stop selling for some time.
So a similar trajectory goes through in payments. For example, if I have, let's say, a few crore SIPs in the base, those SIPs have to be triggered every month or every week. If I theoretically stop selling to new clients or stop onboarding new SIPs, that remains in the base. So the project-based, non-annuity, sell, sell, sell revenue, which I would characterize it as not more than 10%-15%. The rest of it is base revenue. Once you've got a logo in, and once you've masked up these basic metrics, yes, most of it is not AUM related, most of it will be transaction related. But those transactions are so recurring in nature and the prices are fixed that, I see it as annuity revenue.
Got it. That's helpful. Secondly, you know, I think Ram mentioned a couple of times, on the account aggregator business, something like, you know, reworking of the platform. So if you could, you know, talk a little more about it, because I, I thought, I mean, this was anyways, sort of a fresh investments that has happened, in the past couple of years. So, from a, from a monetization point of view or from a, you know, revenue accrual margin point of view, do we see this platform sort of the monetization getting right-shifted, because of whatever investments that are happening?
So, let me, let me clarify. So what I meant was, you know, with the several use cases and onboarding of various customers, we're just kind of making changes in the platform, which will make it easier to onboard new customers. And there'll obviously be a rationalization of code as we go along, in terms of scalability, in terms of capability. So it's not as if we are taking and trashing the platform and building a new platform. I think, it's more kind of an enhancement that we do and make it more efficient to keep onboarding or adding. You know, for, for us currently to take a customer go-live is when things start getting interesting. Sign-ups are okay, but go-live is when we start getting revenue.
So this entire go-live process with all the disparate IT systems of so many people, would require some amount of reorientation from a platform perspective. That's what I was mentioning, and it was in the context of. You know, why further investments would be made in these? I think that was the question. So in that context, I was saying that this could be what we are doing. However, we don't intend tracking the platform, building a new platform and all the things. It's a cloud-based, scalable platform that we have. We continue to enhance that platform. And there is no. In fact, we are at a very interesting place from a monetization perspective. The rates are sort of stable. The sign-ups are happened, and now the go-live is happening for many customers. Use cases are evolving.
So there's no change in the model of monetization or the trajectory that we foresee from monetization. We've grown 100% quarter-on-quarter, and there's nothing that prevents us from repeating that feat in the next few quarters. So it's in a good, good shape now. The usual investments will continue to happen in tweaking the platform and making it more efficient for onboarding.
Got it. That's helpful. One couple of, again, smaller data point questions. Would you have the period and AUM handy, by any chance, overall and equity?
Oh, period end, so can I, can I just look at that and get back to you, the period end AUM? Yeah.
Yeah, yeah. Not a problem.
Increasing trajectory. If your question is, if you're going to search it, I think, the numbers will show that, the average AUM is much less than the period closing AUM, if that's your question, but I'll get back to the exact number.
No problem. No problem. And then one more, again, sort of a clarification. When I look at the non-MF revenue breakup for AIF, particularly, the 21, the, the, the 21% number seems to be higher than, you know, what we get when calculating the number using the, you know, the mix that you've disclosed. I think the calculated number seems to be somewhere around, you know, 14%-15%. So, are you missing something?
So I'll just clarify. So in, from our perspective, you know, the segment is AIF, we will probably make that change in the presentation. So Fintuple t ech service to the same segment.
Okay.
That put together is the 21% that we are talking about.
Understood. Understood. And then last one is that, under insurance repository, the EIA piece that you mentioned, that that's not coming. That doesn't make money, right? It's the other piece, which is where you make revenues on a per policy basis, right?
So, I'll just take a minute. Yes, on a margins basis, I think the entire insurance repository business is close to breakeven. It's not making money. The insurance repository, which is your EIA account and the per policy billing that we do, is not at a critical stage where it's starting to make money. That is accurate. The other business, which we have in the, is the outsourcing business, which is a more pure outsourcing kind of a play, where we do some policy servicing, persistency, calling, feet on street, et cetera, and the implant of resources. So that's the thing that is kind of making a small margin.
But, the EIA segment, which is the AMC for the policies that we have, the policy conversion charges that we have, and the transaction charges that we have, currently is not making money. And that's where we're looking to the Bima Central platform, which will—it should already started integration with a couple of, three of, three of the insurers, and one has gone live. By April first, when that's kind of a little more rounded in terms of an offering and transactions start flowing in, we hope to kind of see breakeven and start making money from the first quarter of next year.
Got it. Thanks a lot.
Thank you.
Thank you. The next question is from the line of Santhosh Kesari from Kesari Finance. Please go ahead, sir.
Thank you for giving me an opportunity. Am I audible?
Yeah, yeah. Please go ahead.
Okay. So I have two questions. One is about one question and one permission, actually. So the question is about EIA business, and your alternative business. So if you can share with us, what is the total addressable market that you are trying to handle in terms of two years down the line, three years down the line? It will be very helpful in valuing this business. That's one.
Secondly, in terms of permission, now that the company has a lot of businesses, if you can share data points around these businesses in the PowerPoint itself, in the presentation that you have, wherein the profitability of the different businesses and the operating drivers are also faced, it will be very helpful in terms of consistency of the information that is coming from your team, and we being able to, you know, look up quarter to quarter, year to year, what is the progress?
Okay. So from a EIA perspective, think of it that you'd seen in the past some statements made by regulators of there being a compulsory demat regime potentially to be ushered into insurance. That is when the entire effect of EIA and you know electronic policies will kind of play out. That count of policies in the country is close to INR 55 crore, which means if you want to look at the base of business, which at one time could accrue to insurance repositories, that's about INR 55 crore policy. What accrues to them today is about INR 3 crore, so that's about 5% of potential, which means about 95% is not been realized.
Also, the fact that because it has not become as popular as it could have, and, and the level of integration with insurance companies, et cetera, is what it is. One's ability to transact, which is to, to either select a new policy or to make a claim, or to pay premiums, or to look at a single screen and look at all your maturity values, et cetera, it isn't where it is, and that is why the transaction revenue has also not kicked in. So that market is potentially a 15x-20x market compared to what you're seeing today. Take it with a pinch of salt that, as a normal consumer movement, it has been going at a certain pace, making it mandatory at a regulatory and industry level will have a completely different impact. When will it happen?
We can all collectively guess. So that's one. AIF, on the other side, have been significantly embracing outsourcing. You will see that from a total registered count perspective, there are almost 1,000 AIFs in the country. Everybody may not have launched. We service about 200 of them. A lot of them may have outsourced, or may have bought outsourcing services only for onboarding and TA kind of services. Now, of course, you know, the demand has become mandatory, so that, and then fund accounting and other fund administration services. I would still say that the non-outsourced part is still quite large. It is sitting there.
Most of the new funds, when they get launched, are getting launched in a captive manner, which means that they are right there, not coming to us till they scale to, let's say, beyond 100 investors or beyond a critical mass. So that, again, from an outsource versus non-outsource revenue perspective, you can say that we perhaps touched less than 50% of what is out there. Most of the large AIFs, of course, have outsourced, so they are customers, but there is a significant number, several hundreds of them, which can potentially become clients over the coming years. That's really the addressable market for you.
Okay. Okay, great. Thank you so much. And regarding my suggestion on the giving information in a tabular format for different businesses in the PowerPoint.
So, yeah, thanks for the suggestion. So we will give a tabular format of the revenue and the other part of it, we will definitely have a look at it at the end of this quarter. Yeah.
Yeah. Okay. Thank you so much, and wish you all good success.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you. That was the last question. I will now like to hand the conference over to Mr. Ram Charan for closing comments.
Yeah, thanks, Tushar, and thank you for the participation and continued interest in CAMS. We appreciate your time spent on this, and for any clarification, please reach out to our IR agency, Orient Capital, or Anish Sawlani, and we'll be happy to answer any questions that you may have. Once again, thanks for your time.
On behalf of Computer Age Management Services Limited, that concludes this conference. Thank you for joining us, and you may now disconnect your lines.