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It.
Ladies and gentlemen, good day and welcome to Computer Age Management Services Limited Q2 FY 2026 earnings conference call. As a reminder, all participant lines will be in 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 touch-tone phone. Please note that this conference is being recorded. I now hand the conference over to Nikun Sek from MUFG. Thank you, and over to you, sir. Sorry to interrupt, Nikun sir.
Good morning everyone and welcome to Q2 and H1 FY 2026 earnings conference call of Computer Age Management Services Limited. From the management today we have with us Mr. Anuj Kumar, MD and CEO, Mr. Ram Charan Sesharaman, CFO, and Mr. Anish Sawlani, Head of Investor Relations. Before we proceed to the opening remarks, I would like to give a small disclaimer that this conference may contain certain forward-looking statements about the company which are based on beliefs, opinions, and expectations of the company as of date. These statements are not guarantees of future performance and involve risk and uncertainties which are difficult to predict. A detailed disclaimer has been published in the investor presentation. Now I would like to hand over the conference to Mr. Anuj Kumar. Thank you.
Thank you Nitinj and good morning everyone. Welcome to this Q2 earnings call of CAMS . Like we've done in the past, the format remains the same, about 20 minutes- 35 minutes covering this deck by myself and Ram, and then we'll have enough time left for questions. As you would have seen the results yesterday, we had about a minute in one night. It was a very strong quarter for CAMS. We achieved the highest ever quarterly revenue in Q2, driven by what I would call strong performance across the entire base, both MF and non-MF segments, and within non-MF across all the key business lines. Despite the fact that we had a large price gap given in the early part of the year, we scaled back quickly, and the size of our quarterly revenue is a strong testimony to that.
Just as a derivative, MF revenue grew. I think quarter-to-quarter numbers are perhaps more indicative of what's happening year-on-year. You will see them muted, but QoQ over first quarter, MF revenue grew 6.4%, non-MF grew 17.9%. You will recollect that Q1 was slightly muted in non-MF given what was happening to account opening and the right activities which impact our KRA business. A very strong QoQ growth, 6.4% MF, almost 18% non-MF. Of course, year-on-year a little more muted. MF at 3.2%, non-MF I think is holding clip at 50% year-on-year. Growth number two, overall from a mutual funds perspective, I think it's a very nice milestone. We crossed INR 52 lakh crore AUM in the month of September. The way I look at it is that we crossed INR 50 lakh sometime during the quarter, then crossed INR 52 lakh by September.
On the best day in October, we touched and crossed INR 55 lakh . In close succession, those are very nice mood-building numbers. Market share remains at about 68%.
Overall.
AUM grew 16%, broadly mirroring the industry, may have gained share a little. I think the good news, the great news is the equity side where equity net sales crossed about INR 1 lakh crore in the quarter. That's not a very common occurrence. It's the highest ever number for U.S. net sales market share, which is like I keep saying is a very foundational, formative element of our overall mix. Net equity sales market share grew to 69% from 65%, just riding on the overall net sales number. Equity assets were INR 28.7 lakh crore. Inflows continued to remain sustained. The markets of course started doing well again. You're still far away from the all-time peak, but the markets overall did better. Equity net sales, both market shares in absolute numbers, I think is a great indication to what is happening.
SIP collections, this is again another solid foundational metric which has held on its own last six, seven, eight quarters, despite the markets having been soft in a large part of that time period. This collection grew 21% year-on-year. When you look at it, this is perhaps a very large formative number. Again, this number grew 21% year-on-year. Live SIP market share improved almost 2 percentage points, 63.4% quarter-on-quarter over 61.5%. New SIP registrations continue to remain very healthy at over 1 crore, so about 1.14 crore registrations in Q2 FY 2026. I think the other parts, when you look at equity net sales, I think fantastic number. When you see SIP collections, a very sustained strong number. Nice SIP market share improvement, again a great indicator. I would say NFO sales is another thing where we saw just a fantastic action.
33 schemes launched during the quarter, 80% share of NFO collections. I know that this number is typically between 65- 80%. There are rare instances where it's crept above 80%, but 80% is a great market share gaining moment for us. That's something that we achieved. SIF product category, which has now been under discussion for a year, you know that for the MF segment it will be a 3 payoff that will be accretive because it will take away some of the share from the less organized segment to MF companies. We launched the first one with SBI and got INR 1,000 crore for a brand new segment, for one of the schemes to just garner INR 1,000 crore and several thousand investors. Where your start is about, we want to commit a 10 lakh to be present. I think it's a very good start.
For the first three or four months, let's say back in September to December 2024, the reaction to AIF was muted. Now we are expecting that at least 8- 9 of our AMCs' CAMS-serviced funds, the biggest names that you've heard of, are very interested and you will see launches from now to March. You'll see launches from now to March. Very healthy new product class, whether you want to call it asset class, and building up inside of the AMC businesses, which is heartening for us from a new RTA mandate perspective. Again, two great wins. You all know ASP Asset Managers. For a long period of time they ran the largest PMS in the country. Even today one of the largest ones, PMS run, that was once they've chosen to come to CAMS, they've already been our customers for AIF.
AlphaGrip Asset Managers, which is a relatively newer entity, has also decided to come to CAMS. This will take the AMC RTA client count to 28, the second migration in three years. Actually the third in five by count, FT in 2021, Navi in 2023, Taurus in 2025. The third successful migration of Taurus happened. We've gone live recently in the last four to five weeks. That got accomplished. I think another very, very foundational metric, vindicating the maturity of the organization we built and the strength of all that we are doing. We had onboarded several AMCs, six of which are live. For those of you who download the presentation, you can see all of this has happened within this calendar year. I'm talking of every event having taken place within 2025.
Amongst our AMCs, and we typically have the track record of launching one in a year because that's as many licenses as used to come on. You would have launched, let's say, Pramerica in 2015, Mirae in 2017, Yes Bank in 2018, things like that. In one year we've taken live all very, very remarkably well-known names. Angel One, we all know. UniFi, Jio BlackRock, C Bank Srilanka , which is a migration, and Choice, which is a very large salient broking house. All these AMCs have been taken live within the year. I would say from maturity and resilience perspective, this is 6x the workload that we did as a company or anyone else did five or six years back. All of this is live.
These are performing AMCs, collecting money, servicing investors, paying the distributors, and doing thousands of things that are needed to continue keeping an AMC operation vibrant. You will see most likely three more of them going live because that is the number of one AMC mandates that we are sitting on now. We are towards the end of October. Whether someone launches in December or January or February, that's a matter of timing. You will see for us as a company we have a fantastic track record of having taken live six already and maybe another two or three in the next four to five months. That's like I said, a great indicator of how we build the organization. What are the next in the beyond mutual funds? I'm just flipping over to the next chart. Non MF revenue.
Non MF revenue which you know we are focused on, we're building out salient business lines, making investments and building scale. Last 5 year compounded revenue growth of non MF has been, you stated 25 but the actual number has been 28. It's a very hard thing to scale that. From a quarter perspective, CAMS' non MF revenue share improved 14.4. This is total non MF revenue divided by total enterprise revenue was 14.4. CAMSPay, which has been one of the leading lights, grew 26% quarter-on-quarter. Continue to see momentum in the UPI and UPI out of pay businesses. You know that's the flavor of the season. Continue to scale in natural NACH processing because that's the spine on which the SIP business is built. We went live with the payment gateways and are seeing significant ramp up in that business.
We expect this momentum to continue in the coming quarters. The leading line in non MF alternatives again delivered the highest of our quarterly revenue. Continue to underline the market leadership with the overall assets under administration now reaching close to INR 3 lakh crore. Added a significant number of mandates, 40 + during the quarter. We entrenched our footprint in GIFT City. You know that we service over 30 clients from there. The first outbound retail fund, which is a mutual fund scheme, went live, which is DSP's global equity fund. You will see again just like I was talking about SIP, you will see multiple SIP schemes go live from GIFT City. I think the moment is coming when both investors, manufacturers, sellers are beginning to focus on that administrative territory and make sure that the scale comes up.
I'm sure you've seen this on our website, you've seen this on many social media posts. Bima Central won two very, I would say, exclusive recognitions. One at the GFF, but it was according to status of the most promising suretac in the country. Cumulative user count in Bima Central went up to over 12 lakh. Transactions continued to scale. We also won one new contract for end-to-end servicing for the service. KRA revenue rebounded, and look at the rebound. We had a dip from 4Q to 1Q. 1Q you saw depressed metrics for obvious reasons. There was a slam down on F&O accounts. Opening markets were soft, and therefore new entrants to the broking community were limited in number. QoQ we've grown all the way back. We still do not have the highest ever revenue in KRA. I think in the next two quarters we'll get there.
45% revenue up in the quarter, indicating very strong recovery. Added 38 new plans. Also, we announced, as you know, that we would be buying out, through a business transfer, the NSE KRA business. This is completely on track. We need an NOC. The NOC has been received, so we are expecting sometime in the month of December we would have completed the entire operations transfer, including client contracts. Whatever novation has to be done. We, by the way, have contracts with all those clients. Rebadging for employees. All the IBM assets and contracts will move our way. You will see net revenue accretion. It's not very large, but whatever it is, maybe under INR 1 crore a quarter, will start coming to us from Q4, which is done for March of 2026. Think continued to scale back its scale.
Its business required two new analytics clients in the U.S., but for Algo 360, which is the SMS insights product, won some new contracts including PayNearby, SmartCoin, and a few others. That part has done well, but I think on a sustained basis, between pay alternatives and KRA, KRA was a rebound, but strong sustained growth, and from a product and customer participation perspective, I think great things from insurance too. Those banks continue to perform well. I'm personally very pleased with bringing everything back. You would remember a conversation in 1Q and 2Q, sorry, 4Q and 1Q of this year. We were expecting that after whatever revenue adjustments happened in the initial quarters, we wanted to kind of jump back to highest ever revenue state quickly, which we have done as a company.
I think for CAMS to scale back to its peak revenue, perhaps take this quarter, 3Q, and from an perspective our excellent focus continues to remain on key business lines and we will continue to see scale ups. I will now hand over to Ram Charan Sesharaman to talk a little.
Thank you Anuj. I'll just add some numbers flavor to what Anuj said in terms of the overall business. If you remember from a yield commentary perspective for the last few quarters, we had to guide everybody saying that there is a price change that is happening with one of the largest customers and the impact will be felt across two quarters. 90% of the impact has been taken and you will see some small tail impact in the current quarter. Happy to say that's how it's actually played out also. If you see in the current quarter, the yield, we had said that we expect the 0.03 to 0.04 kind of a yield compression quarter-on-quarter. That's exactly how this turned out to be. Bear in mind this is on the back of no change in the equity mix.
Also, generally higher equity mix gives us some benefit from a yield perspective. In spite of a stacked equity mix, we are still at a very moderate dilution in yields, which means that what we have guided in terms of the yield movement has kind of played out exactly the same way. On the back of 7% growth in AUM quarter-on-quarter, we have grown the asset-based revenue more than 5%. The overall revenue has grown 6.4% quarter-on-quarter and 3.2% year-on-year. Non-asset-based revenue, there is some weakness. As I said, non-asset-based revenue is a separate bucket that we showed to you because there are some drivers to it which are not exactly AUM based, like OPE, which is more a function of the campaigns that we do, the statutory changes that happen, or NFO that gets launched.
Both of this was little muted.
Hence, you will see some mutual fund growth and non-mutual fund growth as it is.
Overall, from a mutual fund.
Perspective we have grown 4.7% quarter-on-quarter, and as Anuj mentioned, it's kind of we are back on track in terms of almost tracking to the highest ever mutual fund revenue, which we hope to obtain in the next quarter. Non-mutual fund revenue has, again, last quarter we said that there could be some dip in pay, but we expect that to come back to normal. This quarter, again, happy to say that the growth rates are back from a payment business perspective, and the KRA and payments together, quarter-on-quarter, we have almost 18% growth on revenue, in fact, to the higher growth rates that we are projecting from a non-mutual fund perspective. We are on target overall to broadly reach the 20% growth year-on-year that we are projecting from a non-mutual fund perspective.
From all this, from an excellence perspective, we had a good quarter. Again, the beginning of the year in our projection, we said that we will try to keep the cost increases on a year-on-year basis to around 10%- 11%. Happy to say again we are on track for that. There is some one-off expense that's happened from other expenses perspective for a.
Couple of crores, which is more a.
Provision made for a delayed collection which we hope will get reversed in the next quarter. Overall we are on track. In fact, barring depreciation, the quarter onward expense growth has been much less than 5%, which is a very muted growth in expenses. Expenses are broadly in control, and on a quarter-on-quarter basis we have seen almost 60% of the incremental revenue flow to the bottom line, which means that the profit margins are back to more than 44% on an EBITDA basis. We've got almost a 90 basis point increase in EBITDA in the current quarter, and from a PVT we are at almost 40% PVT and a PAT of almost 30%, 29.6%. All the metrics are trending upward this quarter, and we think the next quarter could be stronger than this if the assets inflow sustains.
Overall, the performance was a batch 100 good performance, a strong performance in the quarter, and the board was pleased to declare an interim dividend of INR 14 per share from the reserves of the company. This is the summary of the financials. I now hand it back to the moderator for opening 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 the Touchstone telephone. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, you may press star and two. Participants are requested to use handsets while asking a question. Ladies and gentlemen, we will wait for a moment while the question queue assembles. The first question is from the line of Madhukar Lada from Nuvama Wealth. Please go ahead.
Hi sir.
Congratulations on a good set of numbers. My question was more on the non-mutual fund side of the business first.
So.
You know this whole CAMS KRA, we've seen a good rebound over here, and I think in your presentation you mentioned that you added 38 + sort of new clients, which are primarily non-MF. I want to understand which is the client category or which type of clients are getting added over here. Second, of the KRA revenue, how much of it will be sort of new account creation and how much will be fetch numbers, and then finally on the rates that we get for new account creation sets. Can you give some color on that?
You know what are the rates where.
What is the comparative pricing and what are the total number of records that we have? That's on the KRA side. Second, now in light of this discussion paper by SEBI which came in last evening, it seems that again the TERs are getting cut. At least there's a direct sort of 5 basis points impact and then also sort of 15 basis points reduction on TER, but there is also some benefit on GST, etc. that will come.
So.
I know it's too early to ask this, but the worry is obviously there that again AMCs come and cut yields. What will be sort of your reaction, and how do we sort of alleviate these fears, or how do you think about this? These would be my broad questions.
Thanks.
Sure. Let me start with the first part of the question which was on CAMS KRA. We have now totaled close to 2 crore bands. With the induction of NSE KRA, this will increment by about 13 lakh-14 lakh bands. When you think of us in the coming quarter, think of us like CAMS KRA having about 2 crore 15 lakh-20 lakh bands, and that is sustaining this commercial activity of approximately INR 50 crore annually of revenue today. I think when you look at the market, you know that this activity is a lot more intense in the non-MF segment than in the MF segment for obvious reasons. MF account opening has been at a much faster clip for many years, which is both demat and broking with F&O. That number increased this part.
Just think that in the last three years, this entire about 28%- 30% revenue contribution to CAMS KRA is brand new; this did not exist. If I take you back to, let's say, FY 2022, it did not have this segment. This 30% contribution has got built in this segment. I would say the real scale trick is to win one of the top 10 clients and get them to stay with you because frankly, 28 clients or 30 clients or 40 clients are typically, let's say, fintech clients, smaller demat clients, smaller broking clients. It's a long tail business. The math sits in the top 10 or top 15. Our focus always has been to get those clients. Never too easy, and like you know, proposition always is to get someone to start working with us not for price but for quality and delivery reasons.
Ask them to contribute 10%- 20% to CAMS KRA uploads and downloads and then move from there. That's really the focus of the team. I think the redeeming feature is building from zero. About 28%- 30% of revenue contribution from non-MF has been a big thing. Think of it as about building it to 10% a year.
If we can do this for the.
Next three years I think that's a great growth trajectory because most of the CAMS MF will continue to work with CAMS from our carry perspective. This is brand new and this is what is driving growth. That's part one of the answer. Do you want to add something to that?
Yeah, just on the rates, I think the rates have been very stable. Without getting into specifics, you know, we have seen the rates to be very stable from upload and a download and IoT perspective. We see no big concern on that. If at all, there is some that may happen.
Will be delivered by volumes, but as.
The range seems very stable for this.
Understood.
On the KRA part of me, what percent of the revenue is for the new sort of records that got created? Of course, the now 2.2 crore approximately and 20 lakhs are from the acquisition. Of the 2 crore organic CAMS KRA, how many records would we have added in the last three years? Are we seeing any sort of material increase in the record addition now? I think longer term the person who has more record is in a better position, right.
Some sort of.
Is that the way to think about it? How do you think about this?
You will probably have uploads of 10 lakh-12 lakh PANs a quarter.
Right.
10 lakh PANs is probably a good estimate to have, which is the fresh PANs that gets into the system based on CAMS.
As far as the two crowds.
You keep adding that organically. Obviously, the fan potency depends on how many times they get down again. Download revenues depend on that.
The thumb rule is that you know.
Every PAN gets downloaded at least three times in new accounts, you know, post the first upload that happens. It's obviously this is an industry.
That's driven by the stock, right.
We are progressing on growing the stock from organic and also from the acquisition of NSE KRA perspective. We get around 12 lakh-13 lakh from them.
This is going to be the driver of the business going forward.
We are actually inching up in terms of the number of banks that we are adding. Given that we have some brokers also added as a part of our, you know, out of the customer.
List, I think this is also going.
To add a disproportionately higher rate going forward, that's kind of looking good from the overall PAN addition perspective.
I will only add dimension to this mother curve. If you have a way of looking at the KRA business, here's the way I look at it. Part A of the mix is to continue getting these uploads, which Ram said, on a base of about 2 crore, 2 crore 20, about 40 lakh a year. Currently, that's about 17%, 18%, close to 20% of the base. The second is that existing fans and new fans should be consumed with speed, which means I can create inventory, but I may not sell. I have to continue selling them at least at the same rate as I was doing in the past for my revenue to kind of hold at the historical rates and for my revenue growth to match the bank growth count. The third is pricing should demand. Those are three components.
I think that's the way I look at the business. If there's any other question, I'm just happy to answer.
Just one question I think was left out of the 3:38. Most of them you're saying are fintech. I know that you got one of the top three brokers. Any addition, you know, in the top 10 amongst the 38?
Yeah, you can say one where we have a contract. We're just trying to make sure that they migrate volumes to us. They start off with, you know, 10%- 15% upload and download content. Yes, one of them. It has to kind of operationalize properly.
Got it.
Yeah.
That was part one of your question. Part two of your question was on the consultation paper. Frankly, we had a board meeting till about 9:30 P.M. and this has just come out. Our belief is that there was a longish TR discussion from, let's say, mid of 2023 toward mid of 2024. That PR discussion got deferred. It had various components—components of security, trading, tax, GST, and brokerage. Brokerage paid above a cap on the sale and purchase of securities by mutual funds were three elements which were focused on at that time. That did not progress to conclusion. I still have to look and understand what this one is about from a consultation paper perspective. Like we've always said in the past, part A of the story is that we made our entire delivery extremely efficient.
You can see it from the pricing, either from a bps pricing or from a pricing account or folio perspective. It's also a fact that we are a large participant in the overall ecosystem. We eat at the same plate. I think we have to establish whether this is materially impacting to the AMCs. If it is materially impacting to the AMCs, that is something that we have to estimate. Will they make requests to discuss rates, etc., I think is a subsequent step. I cannot guarantee that that distance will be zero. I think it's just too early to conjecture and come to a conclusion.
That understood, sir. All right.
All the best.
Thank you.
Thank you. The next question is from the line of Sucrit Patil from Eyesight Fintrade Private Limited. Please go ahead.
Good morning to the CAMS team. My question is as India's financial infrastructure expands through new platforms and investor segments, how do you see CAMS evolving its.
Role to stay central and differentiated in this ecosystem?
You only have to watch what we are doing. You only have to watch what we are doing. You will see that we are very, very closely aligned. We are a commercial organization but very closely aligned to the agenda. We are closely aligned to the agenda because the agenda, I mean, produces a lot of opportunity for us. We are a domestic-focused company. Our eyes are focused on just this one part. We are creating infrastructure. Think of it this way: we have the largest infrastructure in mutual funds for the last 20 years. That's a great vindication of our intent. We today have the second largest infrastructure in customer onboarding and verification, which is a KRA business. We have a large, I would say, financial services-focused infrastructure as far as payments are concerned. All financial payments for banking, non-banking, insurance, mutual funds. That's a business.
When you look at insurance, we are one of the central figures in BMAT of insurance. BMAT hasn't really progressed as much as it could have. There is no utility in the country like Bima Central. We do not have a utility where you can go and monitor your portfolio of insurance. You can see today's maturity values or surrender values. There is no place where you can apply for marker lien and ask for a loan against securities or initiate a claim. There is no unified single place except for Bima Central. Apart from all of this, we build utilities around account aggregator. You may have seen us announcing Consen Pro, which is ahead of the times in terms of the implementation of the DPDP Act. Finally, we are not doing this because we are looking for licensed businesses with price protection.
To be frank, a lot of these businesses may be licensed but they give no price protection. Our account aggregator business today has the revenues at 4% or 5% of where they were four years back when we started. We believe it's an opportunity. We believe it's an expertise in the company and rather than going everywhere, we just want to stay in this one place. I hope that just the actions that we've taken in the last five years or last many years are a good vindication of this. If there's anything else in your mind, how would answer my second question.
Final question is to Mr. Ram Charan Sesharaman. Sir, looking ahead, what internal levers or cost planning do you see as most important for sustaining margins, especially as service mix and volumes evolve?
Okay, we have repeatedly said that.
There is, this is a fixed cost kind of a business, but there are some levers available for us, and big ones are that the biggest thing is automation. Automation from a process perspective makes the process more efficient on a daily basis and tries to make it as automated as possible. We have achieved significant progress and success in most of the processes, right from the posting to your reconciliation to transaction acceptance, etc. A big initiative in that regard is the entire Re-arch project that we are doing, the re-architecture of the platform. The new platform is kind of scheduled to go live in phases starting from the end of this financial year. I think once that goes live and we are working for it, this will have a disproportionately higher impact on the way that we approach things.
It will just make the process more efficient and more automated, AI enabled, and various other things which will kind of lessen our dependence on manual labor going forward. We do have many levers that we are working on, primary being the automation of the process, the new Re-arch platform, making things more efficient than what it is. I think all those things will be very useful, and we are confident that our margin profile will be absolutely maintained even in the face of some cost pressures. From an inflation perspective and from yield pressure, we'll be able to hold margins. I think that much of our assurance that we can give.
I just want to add one thing on this theme which we haven't spoken about too much, but I'm sure most of you would have noticed that back in the month of August we unveiled the brand of CAMSAi. We haven't changed the company's name yet, we haven't done any higher decibel PR because you know that's not a habit where we do a lot of, not too much. We were preparing ourselves for the last year and a half. You can think of it as all of 2024 and perhaps all of 2025 to really have the spine, the capability, talent, the tooling, a structure to build AI solutions since it took time to unveil the branding. You've seen the launch of CAMSAi. You will very shortly see two things.
One is the composite, a very wholesome deployment of artificial intelligence inside our operation, which means the operation, it's a large platform which has been built over 30 years. You will see that deployment will obviously be conducive to managing productivity.
Which means you will see.
That's one.
The second thing you will see is deployment technology solutions outside of portable, which means inside the core business obviously we'll continue solving the problems that we solve to become more efficient, faster, quicker.
I think that's good guidance from you.
Part, and I wish the entire team.
Best of luck for the Q3.
Okay, thank you.
Thank you.
Please go ahead.
Yeah, firstly, in the non-mutual fund business, could you give us what would be the overall EBITDA margins in this particular quarter? As you mentioned, nationally we had around 12%. How are we tracking business?
If I may just ask you, what's your question on the margins for the non-mutual fund businesses? As we have said, you know inherently all the non-mutual fund businesses are platform-based businesses, which means the platforms have been built and the investment phase is largely over. In terms of all the platforms, for example, Bima Central or a pension fund or an account aggregator, etc., as the revenue increases, the margin profile keeps increasing. We've said that the margins are currently at the early, you know, between 10% and 13% EBITDA is what it keeps having. The current quarter margins are on the same line, although payments margin has increased related because of the higher volumes that we are seeing from a payments perspective.
Overall we are at the sub.
15% EBITDA margin and stated aim and expectation is that this will go to a 25% margin in steady state. Given that our incremental investments are going to be muted, but the revenue is going to flow directly to the bottom line. We are at a top 15% EBITDA now and we expect that we will reach 25% within the next couple of years.
Just look at it this way that the mature scaled non-MF businesses, which is KRA where the margins will be in the 30s, payments where the margins will be in the mid-20s, and AIF which will also be in the mid to late 20s, demonstrate that on our INR 40 crore-INR 50 crore portfolio it is possible to make 25%- 30% EBITDA margins in KRA, higher than that. There are investment businesses where we are putting money, which is account aggregator, which is NPS, which is insurance, a few smaller ones including MF Central. Those are the ones which have to get to some scale. We have said in the past that our experience is that it takes about the initial INR 10 crores per annum of revenue for a business to break even. Insurance, for example, would have a much later break even because the costs are larger.
Somewhere between, we intend to routinely grow the scale. The business will break even; above that is the profitability line. As you scale up to INR 25 crores, INR 30 crores, INR 35 crores of revenue, the profits can become very handsome. Like you've seen in a INR 50 crore-INR 60 crore business, it is possible to cross 30% EBITDA. We don't expect non-MF to ever become or easily become a 45%, 50% EBITDA business. It's our desire, like concept, for it to become 25%, 30%. We're very confident that the current line from, let's say, 15% at portfolio level to 25% at portfolio level will happen in the next couple of years.
Just lastly on this insurance, like central, just like we have added TATA AIG as well as a port in over there, I wanted to understand what should be the broader economics over there. How do you make money in this statement?
Okay, so revenue model for insurance repository is threefold. One is when you convert or take a new policy online. You get paid and every payment is done by the insurance company, none by the policyholder. We get paid some money and then we get paid AMC. From year two on, all the policies that get converted under a part of our platform and probably we get prime time. Now the way that things have panned out before these integration is that our revenue was entirely dependent on the initial conversion as well as the AMC revenue. Now that we have four insurance companies and more on the pipeline who get integrated, more and more transactions are flowing through the Bima Central platform. The transactions could be in terms of not only change of data but also, for example, a premium payment.
Once we go live with additional features like a, the transaction count is going to increase disproportionately. We have now touched a transaction volume of almost 1 lakh a month and sometimes more. What used to be a negligible number is now kind of ramping up rapidly because of these integrations. Our monetization will involve around three things, 1 and 2 already in place. Third is an increase in share of the overall revenue. Given the number of insurers are getting integrated, number of policies are getting increased, the number of transactions also will increase and it has a beneficial impact on the overall revenue. That's the way that we monetize this platform.
Thank you.
Thank you. The next question is from the line of Devesh Agarwal from IIFL Capital. Please go ahead.
Good morning everyone, and thank you for the opportunity.
Sir, my first question is on the.
MF, what would be the number for this quarter?
It's a very tough number to predict, right. In terms of this, what I can tell you for sure is we do not expect a depletion in the yields. Obviously, there could be some mix. In fact, this could be plus minus because we've seen new customers, meaning the customers who run smaller size, growing more than larger ones, etc. It's very difficult for me to predict. I can tell you we do not expect the yield depletion to be more than 0.02 bps given the current trends. Expectation is that I don't think it'd be more than 0.02 bps. We'll try to see how much within that range it is.
No, sir, I was actually asking for two things.
The quarter gone by, we had a yield depletion of 0. We said 0.03 to 0.04 will be the expectation. I think we are at 0.04 depletion when compared to the last quarter, which is probably on expected lines. We have taken the entire impact of the FBI price reduction on this, and hence we do not see a further impact more than the telescopic present.
It should be somewhere around 2.12 basis points, if I'm right.
Yeah, this time it is.
Yeah, it is.
It is a 2.0, between 2.0 and 2.10.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Now that 100% of the SBI present has been captured in this quarter, would you share what would be the pricing difference between the top three mutual fund and 2P?
I think as we had indicated very clearly in the last few calls, the entire reset of pricing happened because the parity had to be reached now, and if you see the published accounts and if you actually compare it yourselves, you will see that among the top three, two do not have any difference. The third has been reset from April. Currently, based on the pricing that we have, we can confidently say that there is no big difference between the prices of the top three which will involve any renegotiation or any such activity. We are almost on parity levels. Obviously, there will be some differences because of asset mix, etc., which is unavoidable, but broadly I don't think there is any difference that is kind of cause for a trigger of a repricing or etc. among the top three customers.
Right. In the next two years, how many contracts are up for renewal among your top 10 clients?
As I said last time, we are in for a period of sort of stability. We do not have any major customers up for renewal. We do have some mid-sized customers coming up for renewal in the next year, next financial year, and the year after that. A few of the large ones will come. As I said last time, we will have at least 18 months of stable where there are no big renegotiations happening, repricing happening, or even renewals happening. Every renewal period will not amount or will not result in a repricing. I think that's kind of an impression that I need to correct, which is that a lot of the contracts get rolled over also without any change in prices, including large ones. Purely from a renewal perspective, we have nothing major coming up for the.
Rest of the year.
A couple of mid sized customers coming up for renewal in the next year and year after that will be where a couple of the larger customers will come for renewal. What it actually amounts to in terms of repricing, I think we have to wait and see. I would like to caution that doesn't mean that it's going to be. Every time there is a renewal there's going to be a big price giveaway. I don't think that's going to happen.
Right sir. A more strategic question. Even if you see X of these regulatory changes, AMCs may always ask for additional discounts. What can we do to put a floor to the pricing? Is there anything that we can do?
We have said this in the past, Devesh, that this is a market which doesn't have too much competition. There are 2 domestic providers. The thought of putting the floor on size, doing anything else that concentrated providers do, hasn't happened in the market. I think all the time we've tried to demonstrate value to our clients, and like Ram said, more than half the contracts which could have been negotiated just get rolled over because clients see value. I think essentially the way I look at it is that our ability, we've said that our ability to grow our business at current scale, current scale we are a INR 1,450 crore, INR 1,500 crore company. For us to grow revenue at the rate of INR 150 crore-INR 200 crore a year is perhaps the most acid test that I look for.
I know that we are looking for pricing bps and stability of pricing bps. I'm just taking a little away from that and trying to share my point of view, how I think about running this business. Our attempt is to scale this business, let's say by INR 200 crore, INR 50 crore of non MF , INR 150 crore of MF . INR 150 crore of MF is almost a given. If we have assets growing by INR 8 lakh-INR 10 lakh a year at current basis, cross 50. If I have assets growing at INR 8 lakh-INR 9 lakh a year for the next three years, we will get to INR 150 crore of mutual fund increase.
Non MF.
You've seen we've crossed over INR 40 crore of revenue increase last year. We will cross over INR 40 crore of revenue increase this year. We believe that our cost increases will always be in the range of INR 60 crore-70 crore and not more than that. Operating EBITDA therefore growing by INR 100 crore is really how it works. In most of these platforms, when we are pouring revenue from the top, a lot of that goes to the bottom line. I need not illustrate it to you because you can see it happening ourselves within. This is a big question that you are asking when you asked me very often in the past that can we fix a price, float it down somewhere and say that we will not fall in dips anywhere below that possible. We haven't yet gone down that route. Yes, prices have become very fine.
It's a viable thought. We haven't implemented anything like that yet.
Understood, sir. One last one for the new agencies. As I understand, the pricing is very competitive for some of the new agencies. Could you share, one, what is the additional cost that you have to incur whenever a new agency starts an operation? Once we have these 8-10 AMCs who start operation, what could be the drag on the margins of the profit for us? Like what you shared on the non-mutual fund side, that there is an initial INR 10 crore-INR 15 crore cost for the business. Any number for a new AMC that starts operation, is there a cost for us?
I just want to answer this question in two parts. First is that new AMCs are deeply discounted or any new new ones are default discounted. Since you, all of you and you yourself, I know track scheme accounts. Please look at two AMCs that we won from competition. One is Navii and one is Taurus. You can take a look whenever the scheme accounts are available to you on whether we discounted those. We are actually charging more. You can say it is a subset of our wins but it is a relevant subset because somebody wanted to come to us and we told them we will not sell at a lower price. This is clear evidence that will be indisputable. Kindly do take a look. For one you will have to wait till next July. For the other there is evidence available.
In front of you.
For all the others, we have won new ones in the past. I will not name individual contracts, but there was a contract we won, let's say in end of 2022, went live in end of 2023. You've seen skim counts that deep discounting does not exist. We may have a support period of six or nine months, maybe a year, at which time the AUM is only INR 1,000 crore- 2,000 crore. It is not that they are enjoying any freebies for five years. Just to answer your question, a typical new account goes live with a team of about 12 people- 13 people. We are liberal. We don't want our quality of service to repeat. It goes live with 12 people- 30 people and will have its own database and its own app servers, etc., and TCP side, etc. All those things are there.
If you want me to estimate what is the cost of running the new AMC, it will probably be INR 2 crore-INR 3 crore, it won't be more than that. Which means that if they get to INR 1,000 crore revenue and we get just basic yields, we will start offsetting that cost. That's really the cost. Six of these are, by the way, live. I just want to point out that six of them are in the base. Choice you can include because it went live over the weekend, but the other five happened in my base, most of them for 4Q of last year, some of them again in 1Q, and then mostly everything was live in 2Q. If you believe there is additional cost incurrence because of these, even if your argument is correct, which it is not, there is no fresh accretion of cost.
Three more have to go live post. Of the others, which are six aligned.
Just to reiterate the last point, Devesh, you will see that the margins of mutual funds are very stable, right, are very stable over the last few quarters barring if you take away the impact of the price. Second is getting back to what we think is the normal company margin of 45+%. As Anuj said, if you have six AMCs who have gone live and supposedly deeply discounted pricing and a lot of cost getting incurred, I'm sure you would have seen the impact on the margins, which you are not seeing, right? Which you're not seeing at all. I think that's again one of the misconceptions that we will need to correct. What we have in the base is already there, what we're getting revenue is already there, and still your mutual fund margins are stable.
If you just equalize for a moment the last few quarters, the price discount that we gave, they're also getting back to what is actually the margin historically also.
Thank you so much, all the best.
Thank you. The next question is from the line of Dipanjan Ghosh from Citi.
Please go ahead.
Hi, good morning sir. Just a few questions from my side. If I look at the alternatives business, obviously there has been a very, very strong pickup in momentum.
On a sequential basis.
If I look at last year also, you know between 1Q and 2Q there was a decent improvement of almost 10% +, and then it kind of again fell off. Just get some sense on whether.
Is there any seasonality in this?
Business or incrementally we can think of more like INR 11 crore to be more than that, to like more of a steady state run rate in that segment. That was the first question on the alternates business. Second, I just want to go back to one of the previous participants' questions on the KRA business, you know, sequential offtake that you have seen, how much of that would be, let's say, because of new demat accounts getting opened and incrementally? When you see the visibility for, let's say, October also because we are towards the end of October, do you see this run rate sustaining? My last question is again going back to the mutual fund business.
You mentioned that two years out, somewhere around FY 2028, you would probably see multiple large asset managers coming up or some large asset managers coming up for renegotiations, given that at that particular stage the absolute quantum of money that some of the asset managers might be, you know, that will be paying to you depending on their AUM at that point of time would be a very, very significant number. Do you think that there can be a case that, you know, given that it will be almost three decades of your operation, that some of them might want to move to more of a cost plus sort of a model or some different sort of a revenue model compared to the AUM linked model that we have today? Those were the three questions.
Okay, no, I would perhaps answer your questions in a different order if you're okay, starting with MF and then we can go to the HTML rambutan as needed. See, as far as the MF business is concerned, you have to think of it and believe that it's an investment infrastructure business. It is not IT services, it's not BPO, it is not a per transaction business. Today, for example, like we said in the past, I don't give a very long answer. If a regulatory change happens or if a new product comes to the market, our charging remains at asset level. For SIF, I may have built a lot of new things because the regulation says that the new mutual fund cannot let it masquerade as a mutual fund product.
The font size has to be different, the website should be different, customers should know it's a different product. Everything is designed and built by us. We don't build on instruction. We are not expected to seek somebody's help. It's a very bespoke, our design product, the platform belongs to us. The entire intelligence, the infrastructure is ours and the operations, whatever labor we incur is part of that. It is not amenable to be run as an IT services or any services.
Business, which is cost plus.
Where a change happens, the buyer asks for a price, we give a price. The nomination methodology is going to change and you will have to now give us a video starting 1st December if you don't want to nominate someone. The mutual funds don't have time and we don't have time for them to come to us with these changes and say what is the change going to cost? That's how services work. That's how a cost of model works. Despite this not being a cost up model, I think today you have to look at the pricing and again I'll repeat what I've said in the past that today we have about 11 crore folios with balances, INR 100 crore+ of MF revenue. We sell each folio at INR 110-INR 120.
You basically, for a demat account, the provider, the principal pays for ISIN, for downloading the benpass, for doing corporate action. There are 100 ways so you pay money to the other equivalent cohort entities. You don't pay that here. The equivalent pricing is maybe one third of what comparable domestic pricing is. I think therefore while there are potential arguments saying why don't we insource, can we build it, we are so big and go to cost plus. I'm not saying the instances of those questions are zero, but they are very few. I think the industry believes in outsourcing.
The industry believes that they have been able to scale this to this level and declutter their lives by letting the advisors do what they are doing, letting the sellers and banks do what they are doing, and letting the RTAs do what they are doing and giving us enough independence to design the outcome and not just take instructions. I think that's an abiding belief system in the industry.
Unless that changes at a transactional level.
I don't see either a cost plus mentality coming in or an enforcement mentality coming in. That's one of your questions. Do you want to take it?
If your question was how much of your new carriers are coming because of your share brokers etc. as against the mutual fund, the estimate is between 25% and 30%. There's actually new bands coming from that. Of course, the exact numbers, I would have asked Anish to kind of get back to you on the number, but this is the estimate that we have. You had a question on the AIF business similar to what you had last time, and my reply remains the same, which is that we see that this business is strong enough to grow this 15% a year on average. This one quarter, first quarter, was a little disappointing in terms of this. Even this quarter appears, of new logos, addition and also from an ex principal number.
The number is very healthy, and Gift City is doing well in terms of the overall revenue, is broken even in Gift City also. I think the prospects are bright for us to reach this target of a 15% growth year-on-year. We stick to that estimate, and I think there will be no seasonality on this. On quarter-on-quarter basis, we expect that this will kind of hold true for the rest of the year.
One small question. If I can chip in, any inorganic plans in the horizon, I mean barring the one that you have already ongoing.
I would say we continue to scan the market. We continue to scan the market. There are a lot of opportunities available in the payment space. Like you know, we haven't decided that that is going the way we want to scale the company because some of that is just pure technology sales. Some of it is a per transaction payment company kind of architecture. There are very small opportunities available. You can buy lumps of INR 20 crore, INR 30 crore, INR 40 crore of revenue. You will not easily buy INR 100 crore revenue lump payments. Of course, you can buy multiples of INR 100 crore. We continue to look at the market. There is nothing immediate which can hit us in the next two or three months.
Yes, I must say that beyond the target of growing the company by INR 200 crore through existing business lines, we continue to look at the market carefully. We have the cash, we have the management bandwidth to do this, but you won't get anything in the next couple of months.
Got it right, sir. Thank you for all the detailed explanations and all the best.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you. The next question is from the line of Siddharth from White A. Please go ahead.
Good afternoon. Thanks a lot for the opportunity for me to connect. I just want to get a quick idea as to, you know, a lot of PMS are, you know, rolling out with their, you know.
AMC, you know, at the moment.
You do have a good share in.
The upcoming AMC which are to be rolled out.
Just want to understand what kind of.
Revenue contribution to the top line can.
Be possible from that and how much on a relative scale that do you have the share of the upcoming AMC and also would like to get an idea about the geographical business that you are planning to have in the future as at the moment as was highlighted on the previous.
All right, can you just come back with your third question? Your third question was on it.
Regarding your geographical presence, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, I was getting to an outlook of, you know, you are venturing or stepping into new markets to expand global presence as well. Just wanted to check in on that part as well, after mainly checking with the new AMCs rolling out.
No, you're right, we do have, you know, higher share of the new AMCs and a lot of them are PMS players. As Anuj mentioned, the first slide itself that we did get the biggest one and a few more are in the pipeline. From a revenue contribution perspective, the way the industry works, the industry size currently is upwards of INR 70 trillion and our asset under management is almost like INR 55 trillion. For new AMC it will be initial.
Few years for everybody is a little.
Kind of a tough year in terms of wrapping up their AUM. Even at a very decent pricing or for them to even get to INR 10,000 crore in a couple of years or three years' time is a very big task in the sector. We have seen the new launches getting to that level in probably three to four years' time, if not. The revenue contribution that comes from the new PMS who are coming to AMCs or the new AMCs for that matter is always going to be a little on the lower side. The game is that once they reach a scale of say more than INR 15,000 crore or INR 20,000 crore, that's when they start contributing. Not only do they start making money, we also start contributing from a probability perspective to the service providers like RTA.
So.
This is more on future footing our market share.
Right?
We are pretty sure that with all the wins that we've had in the foreseeable future and beyond, our market share, we are going to be the market leaders in this place. That kind of the new logos ensure that more from a short-term revenue or a profitability perspective, the contribution will be little lesser given they take time for the AUM to ramp up. On the question of geographical stuff, I think we have repeatedly said that we are focusing on the domestic market. We continue to believe in the potential of the domestic market. We continue to see a lot of upside and market share given the various metrics on penetration, launches, etc. We feel that a lot of room to grow not only from mutual fund perspective but also the other businesses that we have ported into from a non-mutual fund perspective.
So.
The business that you saw from an international perspective was more of an inbound that we got from Sri Lanka, and I'd just like to stress that the same platform with minimum customization has been used for that also. This means that it was not as if we made a separate product offering and invested a lot for that particular sales or from a product process. We continue to kind of cater to such inbound. We would probably do a couple of things which our existing customers take from a geographical, other geographical range, you may go with them. As a strategy, we continue to be fully domestic focused, not only from mutual fund but non-mutual fund perspective also.
Okay.
Okay, got it.
Thanks a lot for the clarity.
Yeah, we can, you know, take this forward.
Thank you.
Thank you. The next question is from the line of Prayesh Jain from Motilal Oswal. Please go ahead.
Yeah.
Hi.
Hi everyone.
Just on this question, you answered another year but just trying to get more insight into it. If, for example, an AMC which would have been giving you a certain fee at INR 1 lakh crore AUM today, let's assume that it's just an equity AUM. The new AMCs that you have enrolled, would they be, in case they reach that INR 1 lakh crore equity AUM in the next couple.
Of years, would you still earn the.
Same amount of fee that you would be earning today on that INR 1 lakh crore AUM?
Just trying to understand, is there a.
Pricing gap between what you are earning today and what are you giving the pricing to the new AMCs?
Absolutely. See, we have no reason to discount the base. You won't do it. If you are sitting in my place, you would not discount the base. The base is a loyal long-term franchise which can see if I discount another base it would be bad strategy on our part. Like I've said, you can take a look at whatever clients we acquired. Three line acquisitions, 2015, 2021, now in 2023, Taurus in 2025, some of them, the new logos have gone live. I know a lot of schema calls are not available, but the ones which went live in 2023, at least one year schema cons are available. Take a look at all of them. We can do a call separately. We don't want to do that, to be honest.
We are okay to let some of the new logos go because just think about it, they might grow to INR 1,000 crore, INR 2,000 crore, INR 3,000 crore, maybe INR 10,000 crore. On a busy day sometimes my AUM moves by INR 50,000 crore. I must exercise judgment that in our haste to get new logos, we do not make mistakes and start discounting a base. That just does not make sense. A base is the most special part as I've said in the past that if you take all AMCs launched in the last five years, the revenue contribution to the RTA business for the marketplace is past 1%. You take all the AMC knowledge in the last 10 years, the revenue contribution to the RTA business will not reach 5%. It takes time to, you know, to kind of grow that.
Therefore, for us in our quest to get that 1% or 5% with us to deal with, discount the base just doesn't make sense. There is enough evidence, if you find contrary evidence we can have a conversation.
Got that, got that.
Second is, from profitability perspective, you mentioned that the non-MF business's profitability will improve to 30%, 35% in the next couple of years. Should that kind of lead to the overall company level EBITDA margins inching towards more like a 47%, 48% kind of margins, or do you think that you will be able to maintain.
At 44%, 45%, given that there could.
be some compression in margins on the mutual fund business. Just trying to understand that.
See, historically if you see over a 10-year period, we've incremented EBITDA margins by more than 1% a year. If I take out this one event of price equalization, that is how things happen. Non-MF bond is a big part of that story because non-MF bond was, I mean, we seriously started scaling non-MF, let's say from 2022 or four years back, and that's the time period for which we got this 28% revenue compounding. When you look at non-MF, first look at one lump of three, which means look at alternatives, KRA, and payments. That's the scaled part, and like I said, that's producing between 20%- 35% depending on business line.
Already at a current gain in those three businesses, we are perhaps very close to 30% of operating appendix where we are putting in money and still investing in our central, investing in the NPS business, investing in fund aggregator, probably investing some money in things like printable, and building out new products like ConsenPro, etc. That's where we're investing money. The fact that we can produce 30% in non-MF is demonstrated by the big three. I've just got to take some of the others, and insurance is somewhere there, somewhere in the middle. Building scale is not very easy. It's perhaps a business between INR 25 crore.
To INR 30 crore right now, but it.
Has some component of labor. Otherwise, insurance would have been part of the mix. A part of non-MF, a scaled part, is already making 28%- 30%. Some businesses are making losses. For them to cross the, let's say, INR 14 crore-INR 15 crore revenue, that's like crossing the Rubicon. Once they cross that, you will see profits there. Therefore, on an average, for us to increment company-level operating EBITDA by about a percent a year, I think is a reasonable expectation that you should have an IR.
This balance is one thing. Fresh is that the share of non-mutual fund revenue as a proportion of total revenue is also something that we are planning to, which we are hoping to increase and which we are working to increase.
Right.
Which means that from a weighted perspective, if it becomes 20% with a 35% or even a 30% margin, and the remaining things have whatever margin it is, it's not fully from that perspective mathematically. Also, you have to see the weighted where the margins will not be 40%, 49%.
Right, right.
The last question is on again the MF is right.
I think this has been discussed in the call earlier also.
Given that it's just.
Been a two-player, two-player.
Market and I'm sure that it doesn't appear that any third place can make an entry here. What's the kind of restrictions that you have to, you know, protect your elites from falling further? Because I think that that's the concern which has always been there. Whether we again come to 3.5%, 4% yield decline on an annual basis or at any given point of time, again there could be an.
Episodic event where we will suddenly feel.
That, you know, the yields are falling by about 10%, 10% again.
Right.
That's the biggest fear that we have with respect to yield, that whether this yield fall of 3.5-4% is a number that.
We should work with or there could be risks to that.
No, we have always guided that that is the telescopic part of a contract. That is the part of price depletion that our clients take in their core business. Philosophically, that principle still applies and should continue applying. There will be some basic yield depletion because of telescopic rails, the one incident while it's happened. I think you should also appreciate that within two quarters of having implemented that, we are back to the highest ever enterprise revenue, and my hope is one month is gone of this quarter that we will be at the highest ever enough revenue by the end of this quarter too. We've recovered very quickly. I understand that that recovery is because of circumstances and some efficiency that we have. Will it happen again? It happened once in 30 years. Will it happen again?
I don't know. I would say that it's a rare set of circumstances which lead to an event like that. I would again say that if you focus on our ability to continue keeping this character, the character of this enterprise at platform revenue, running it at small increments in operating cost and very small increment in cost of sales, our ability to drive revenue up absolute rupees. Look at the next three, four years. I mean, after that we have this discussion every quarter. When I think of the next three, four years, I want to grow this company by deep fast in the next year. We believe that we have a very solid paper solution to that. We know that not even half of that will be consumed in cost, so margins will improve. That's the broad way we look at it.
I think any large price correction of the kind that you've seen one in maybe three decades is not a very likely one.
I'd just like to add one thing to that. What triggered this, as you know, is similarly sized customers and parity of which is probably in the same range. I think we are at a stage, and you will see next year when these schema tools are published, that at a stage the similarly sized customers do not have a big variance in price. I think the root cause has been addressed from this particular exceptional event that happened. That's where we stand as a company.
Got that. Thank you and wish you all the best.
Thank you. This was the last question for today's conference. I now hand the conference to the management for closing comments. Thank you, and over to you.
Thank you.
Thank you to all the participants for spending time with us on this earnings call and your continued interest in CAMS . If you have any queries as usual, please feel free to reach out to MUFG or to Anish Sawlani and we'd be happy to address the questions or take your calls. Thank you.
Thanks everyone.
On behalf of Computer Age Management Services Limited, that concludes this conference. Thank you for joining us, and you may now disconnect your lines.