Good evening, everyone. On behalf of the company, I would like to welcome you all to Aurionpro Solutions Limited Earnings Conference Call For Q1 FY 26. Today, on this call, we have with us from the management, Mr. Ashish Rai, Global CEO, Mr. Vipul Parmar, Chief Financial Officer, and Mr. Ninad Kerker, Company Secretary. We will begin the call with brief opening remarks from the management, followed by a question- and- answer session. Participants who wish to ask questions through audio and video can do so by pressing the "raise hand" icon on the bottom of your screen and wait for your turn to speak. When prompted, you can accept the prompt on your screen, unmute your audio and video, and ask questions or give comments. Participants who wish to ask questions via chat can click on the Q&A icon on the bottom of your screen and post your questions.
Please note that certain statements made during this call may be forward-looking in nature. Such forward-looking statements are subject to certain risks and uncertainties that could cause the actual results or projections to differ materially from those statements. Aurionpro Solutions will not be in any way responsible for any actions taken based on such statements and undertakes no obligation to publicly update these forward-looking statements. I would like to now hand over the call to Mr. Ashish Rai for his opening remarks. Thank you and over to you, sir.
Hi, thanks. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the earnings call for Q1 FY 2026. I'm sure by now you've all received the investor deck, and I hope you had an opportunity to review it. I'm pleased to share the results for Q1, which show another quarter of consistent performance with revenue, as well as profitability remaining within the guided range. While our businesses don't have a large seasonal skew, Q1 typically is a softer quarter for sales, especially for the Technology Innovation Group (TIG) segment. Keeping this in mind, Q1 was a fairly successful quarter for new sales, and we've largely maintained our growth trajectory, driven by the strength of our sales channels and the disciplined execution by our teams. This performance is a great testament to our focused strategy and the continued commitment and dedication of our teams.
Coming to the financials, revenue for Q1 stood at INR 337 crores, marking a 29% year-on-year growth. EBITDA and PAT came in at INR 68 crores and INR 51 crores, respectively, with margins pretty much within the guided range. We have sustained margins despite significantly increased sales investments, slightly elevated R&D investments, and generally higher employee costs, as you will have seen, driven by a rise in headcount following recent acquisitions, as well as annual increments and performance incentives. While there may be some margin pressure in the near term, these investments are aligned with our long-term value creation strategy and will deliver strong returns over time. Overall, we remain on track to achieve our guided growth targets for FY 2026. On the business front, the banking segment delivered INR 192 crores, registering a strong 31% year-on-year growth.
TIG posted a revenue of INR 145 crores, reflecting a solid 25% year-on-year increase. This quarter saw a series of strategic wins, adding 16 new logos across key markets and facilitating our expansion into several new geographies, notably Europe, Egypt, and another place in Africa. These wins have further strengthened our order book, which now exceeds INR 1,450 crores, and we expect additional momentum in the coming quarters to further accelerate our growth. We're continuing to invest heavily in R&D so we can make the most of strong opportunities ahead. FY 2026 will see a large number of new launches and product updates with an explicit intention of creating a highly differentiated enterprise AI offerings stack, as well as one of the widest portfolios of industry-leading AI-native applications in the market.
These investments, along with our efforts to grow our global sales network, will lead to higher sales and R&D expenses in the short term, but that will largely get offset by increasing sales and better deal margins over time. As a part of our strategy to expand our solutions and enter new regions, we also remain open to inorganic growth opportunities, and this quarter was especially fruitful, with Fintra joining Aurionpro to help build a critical part of our strategic blueprint for trade finance. This quarter, we also introduced our refreshed brand identity, which reflects Aurionpro Solutions' shift into a product-first, innovation-driven global technology company. With a positive outlook and a clear plan, we are confident in living up to the promise of this new identity. With that, I hand the call back over to you and look forward to an engaging Q&A.
Thank you, sir. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question- and- answer session. Participants who wish to ask questions through audio and video can do so by pressing the "raise hand" icon on the bottom of your screen and wait for your turn to speak. When prompted, you can accept the prompt on your screen, unmute your audio and video, and ask questions or give comments. Participants who wish to ask questions via chat can click on the Q&A icon on the bottom of your screen and post your questions. We'll wait for a moment while the question queue assembles. Here's the first question from Mr. Vinay Menon. I would request you to accept the prompt on your screen, unmute your audio and video, introduce the firm you represent, and ask your questions or give comments.
Yes, can you hear me?
Hi, Vinay. Good afternoon.
Hi, good afternoon, sir. Congratulations on the third of the number. Just a few questions from my side. One is, employee cost this quarter has been really high. Can we interpret that going ahead? Also, it will be at these kind of levels, or was it just a Q1 kind of impact?
Yeah, so look, there are two things. First of all, I think generally it won't increase. It was mainly a Q1 impact, and largely coming out of, one, some additional headcount due to acquisitions, also because of the increments and performance payouts that sort of happened. You'll see it will stabilize going into the future quarters. There's also been a fair amount of increase, especially on the sales channel side, between, let's say, late Q4 and most of Q1, which is where we've added a fair amount of sales capacity in Europe. As I've said, I think in many calls before, we've been looking at it. We had that capacity come online in Q1. We added some sales in North Asia, which again is a geography we were not present in. We added some additional sales in Africa, which is a geography we were not present in.
We've added a lot of net new geographies. That's also increased the overall expense bit, but now I think it's linear. I think the way we usually build our sales channels is step jumps. I'm not a huge fan of, you know, adding a sales guy here, adding a sales guy there. We normally, when we decide to enter a geography, make a step jump. We've added six, we are six sales days in Europe, along with the supporting pre-sales and other investments that will enable that team. That does cause a bit of a jump, which is fairly significant on the sales side. I think sales expense has gone up almost 80% or so. I think that is a one-time step jump, and then it sort of stabilizes and starts delivering the returns as the sales team performs.
Okay. When the R&D spend, what percentage was it this quarter?
Yeah, R&D, I would say something in the range of 9.2%, 9.3%, but that's more or less linear. I think it's slightly elevated than the usual trend line, but as a percentage, I think it's more or less the same.
Okay. Margins, sir, like we used to be at 21, 22% kind of margin currently. We've now gone more towards a 20% kind of margin. Is that remargin going ahead? Should we look at 20- 25% as a range going ahead?
No, look, the guide sits at 20- 22% on the EBITDA and 15- 16% on the PAT. It's very hard to calibrate that down to a smaller sort of band purely because of the size. I think right now, talk about the sales expense, right? I think if we really do a material sort of investment, it will go wide within the band, right? By and large, we're not really revising the bands. It will stay within the band, but from one quarter to the next, it's hard to call.
Okay, and on the guidance part, sir, like we've done very good on the top line growth. On the bottom line, if we look at it, you have a 13.5%. Will we go back to that 20% to 25% kind of growth from Q2, or will it be in the 15% to 20% kind of band on the PAT perspective?
Yeah, look, I think the year-on-year comps can vary because of various reasons. By and large, the EBITDA will stay within the guided band, right? What does that mean for a year-on-year comp? I think we can look at one quarter to the next, but it will stay between 20% and 22%, more or less, and PAT will stay between 15% and 16%, more or less. If I was to guess, depending on the quarter you're talking about, I think you would be in the 20% or higher, not where it was in Q1, but the year-on-year comps can vary because of all kinds of reasons.
Okay, thank you so much, sir. I'll get back to you quickly.
Thank you.
Thank you. The next question comes from Mr. Anmol Gert. Mr. Anmol, I would request you to accept the prompt on your screen, mute your audio and video, and introduce the firm you represent and ask the question.
Hi, Anmol. Good afternoon.
Hi, sir. Hi, Ashish. A couple of things that I wanted to understand. Firstly, we have grown strongly in our banking segment in this quarter. What led to this growth? I'm assuming that partially it's because of Fenixys , but that also adds only INR 14-15 crores. We have added close to about INR 34 crores in our banking segment during the quarter. Is there any particular deal which has ramped up during the quarter? Can you talk about that?
Okay, yeah. Hi, Anmol. Thanks. Fenixys overall is not really that material to the number. I know there is a lot of fascination with Fenixys. I've heard that question a few times before, but it's like a 0.6% or a 0.7% on the overall top line. It's some impact. It's not, it's a non-zero impact, but it's not like a meaningful driver of growth at the overall level. Banking, Q1, a lot of the growth is driven by the execution on the existing order book. I think that's been fairly strong. There's been good new logos on the transaction banking side that have contributed. We announced a deal win in Sri Lanka. That's quite a meaningful win. We announced a deal win in MEA. I think that's been a meaningful contributor. We've had fairly strong execution. The phase one at SBI went live.
As you know, a lot of our revenue gets skewed not so much because of sales, but because of when we can actually take the clients live, because it does tend to come in only when we are able to make the client successful. It usually takes 12- 14 months for that to come in. In that way, Q1 was a fairly useful quarter. There are new logo wins for sure. If you go back to Q1 last year, transaction banking had no new logo wins in Q1, which is normally what you should expect from Q1. This time, there were three new logo wins in Q1. It's actually a very strong start for the banking side. There was also a meaningful win in the U.K. for the AI side, which again is a banking AI play, right?
Some of it coming from new wins, a lot of it coming in from Project Go Lives. Overall, it was a good quarter for banking. Q1 typically is a slow quarter for TIG. Last year, it was the same story. The year before, it was the same story. TIG, typically the second half is always much bigger than the first half. I think the same story continues.
From that perspective, we believe that the TIG business would come back towards the second half of the year. Would that also mean that our margins will be impacted in the second half of the year, given that now our base employee costs have increased, given that some hiring has taken place on the sales side?
No, I think margins should only, logically, if you look at the trend over the last few years, it should logically improve as the revenue on the TIG side scales in the second half. Typically, every year, the second half is a bigger revenue year for TIG and a bigger margin year for TIG. I don't think the assessment that it will impact margins is correct. In banking, typically, I think the revenue scales and the margin sort of scales more or less at the same level. Generally speaking, H2 is a much stronger half for us than H1, but banking has less variance and TIG has a bigger variance. Margins should only improve, I would say, as we get into the quarters, because the revenue scales up, the expense line doesn't really change that much.
Understood, understood. Lastly, in the analyst day, you talked about setting up a factory for making some of the equipment within our Technology Innovation Group business. I just wanted to understand what is the scale of investments we are looking at for setting up this factory. Would this be an FY 2026 investment or will it go beyond that as well?
Yeah, so look, it will progressively ramp up. The goal for us is, as the business grows, move a lot more to the manufacturing capacity that we are setting up ourselves. We scaled it up a little bit in the existing facilities last year. We'll scale it up a little bit this year, and we'll keep scaling it up as the business grows. What really happens is, as we move to our own manufactured items on the hardware side, the margin profile of the business dramatically improves. That improves our rate of winning, and that improves the margins that we make on those wins, right? We will keep scaling it up. I don't think in a single year it's a big CapEx planned. I would say over FY 2026, 2027, you're talking of probably INR 40- 50 crore. It's maybe INR 20 crore incremental or thereabouts in any given year.
We will really be cautious in how we scale it, and that will largely be in line with how the demand scales up on the transit side. Now we are beginning to get confident around the economics, especially in the Indian market, as well as the global markets where we export. You saw the wins in Delhi Metro, Chennai Metro, etc. We will scale up the wins, and as the wins scale up, we'll scale up the manufacturing.
Understood, understood. One last thing from mine is, earlier, we have announced a few deal wins in, let's say, Maldives or California in terms of the transit business. Recently, most of the wins that we have announced here are coming out of India. Is there anything that we are working towards in the international geography within the transit business?
Yeah, so look, Q1 was actually pretty active for Transit, and we announced a deal win together with Mastercard in Egypt. That is a significant deal win. We are participating very actively across both Americas and Europe, and you'll see wins ramp up. I think India, we were not participating for some time because we really wanted to get the economics right. Now we are very confident for the deals that are coming in. One, they are a combination of hardware and software, so just logically, the economic profile improves. Second, with our IP and our sort of indigenous production, even on the hardware side, the margins really shoot up. Now we are feeling a lot more confident about India. We tested it a little bit last year with a few deals where the economic profile has actually dramatically improved. Now we will scale up those wins as well, right?
The international side will keep scaling up. I mean, Transit is going to become one of the strongest end-to-end sort of offering stacks globally. I mean, it already is one of the strongest end-to-end offering stack globally. The goal is to make one of the most prominent players in the transit payments space worldwide. We will compete actively wherever we find deals which fit, you know, the parameters that we have in terms of the kind of deals you want to go after, whether that's Americas, whether that's Europe. We're also active in Australia. We're beginning to become active in some large deals in Asia, in Core Asia. We will get more active in India as well.
Understood. Thank you so much, Ashish, for answering my questions. All the best.
Thank you, Anmol.
Thank you. The next question comes from Kunal Bajaj. I would request you to unmute your audio and video, introduce the firm you represent, and ask your question.
Hello. Hi. Thanks for taking my questions. Congratulations on good set of results. I had a couple of questions. As we discussed about the global sales network, what are the strategies we are taking in setting up the global sales team? Can you provide a color on that? Also, the GTM go-to-market strategy for these new regions, is it on a similar line as to what we're doing, or is there any differentiation in terms of our go-to-market strategy for these new regions? Yeah, that's.
Yeah. Hi, Kunal. Good afternoon. I like the video getting switched on, right? Those who can do it, please do do it. I do understand most people have the headphones in their ears, and they'll listen in, and that's fine. Look, global sales team, how are we expanding? The way Aurionpro goes about building its sales team is we build a box, wait for it to become successful, then we double that box, then we double that box, right? We like working as units rather than like individual sales guys. We have now, so earlier we did the same thing in South and Southeast Asia when we built the sales team out four years back when we were pivoting. That's one step jump in sales expense. Then that starts paying off. We went to Middle East and Africa.
Another step jump, you saw the successes last year in Saudi Arabia, UAE, etc. This year, it's another step jump in terms of bringing the capacity online in Europe. I think we have an extremely strong sales team built out over the last three, four months in Europe. Very strong industry experts coming in on the pre-sales and the industry sort of thought leadership side. Back that up with a bunch of sort of product resources out in Vietnam, India, etc., right? I think the sales expense this year purely because the expansion happened in Europe, we had a very senior salesperson join in North Asia as well, and he's building a team out as well as expansion in Africa. All of those things together, I think the sales expenses jumped probably another 70%- 80% overall. Now that's stabilized.
Typically, the channel will start paying off in 12- 18 months. Sales cycles tend to be long. Of course, you all probably would have seen the first success in the U.K. Typically, one should expect four or five quarters before the sales investments start really flowing in properly. The pipeline build-out has been very, very strong. I think that's sort of what's been happening. Feel very good about the team we've built out, like really strong experts from most of the leading global fintechs, backed by the Fenixys team, Eric and all, who are extremely seasoned in terms of delivery capabilities. Yeah, that's that. U.S., we are largely taking the partnership route.
We have a couple of sales guys active in the U.S., but we are largely taking the partnership route, especially with a few large fintech players, as well as players like Visa and Mastercard, like we've announced to sort of go into the market. I think we'll probably keep on doing that for the next couple of years before we step up the direct sales channel there. That is it on the sales team as well as the GTM, right? For us, the partnerships with players like Murex, Finastra, FIS, etc., I think is important to us. We will keep riding on that in the more advanced markets and the organic sales channel I already talked about, right? That's more or less what it is.
Thanks for that.
Thank you.
Thank you. Participants, we request you to limit to two questions and join back the queue for more questions. Next question comes from Vimal Gohil. Mr. Vimal, I would request you to unmute your audio and video, introduce the firm you represent, and ask your question.
Hey, Vipul. Good afternoon.
Hi. Can you hear me?
Yes.
Yeah, thanks. Thanks for the opportunity, Ashish. I just had, so basically, my question was, you mentioned there has been a slight increase in investments, yeah, in the sales side, and the second one was on the R&D side. You explained the sales side pretty comprehensively. The question on R&D, now we've seen we have two successful products on the banking side, the iCash Pro and the Transaction Banking. Of course, with the integration of Arya.ai, we would have had some certain, we would have infused both these products and most of our processes and services with AI. What's next in terms of, you know, where is our next hero product going to come from? Which area? How should we look at our product evolution in terms of our product basket? In connection to that, our entry into the U.S.
and Europe, how should we look at our revenue mix in these geographies? Will it be largely led by transit, or do we expect a very good traction around our core banking products and software side?
Okay, thanks for that. I think you probably used your two questions. Thanks for the questions, Vimal. I appreciate it. I think it's a good question. I did not say slightly increased expenses on the sales side. Sales side is actually a significantly increased expense. I think we probably added, I don't know, INR 17- 18 crore of expense for the year. That's almost, at an overall level, probably at two points of the top line increase. I won't call that slight. R&D side, I did say probably slight, and I would sort of agree to that. I think R&D side, I would expect the full-year trend to be flat as a percentage. I don't expect that to climb up. In the near term, it's almost a race to get to our objectives of where we want to get to. You know, at the same time, investing across multiple vectors.
One is the whole enterprise AI stack build-out, right? We intend to have one of the most mature, deep, competitive IP-driven offerings on the enterprise AI space, not the way most. The problem with the AI space is this, right? There is a lot of noise, there is a lot of bluster, there is very little content in a lot of offerings that come out. The reason for that is it's obviously very, very easy for people to make API calls to publicly available LLMs and deliver some sort of an output. It does not really give the client the real value that they're seeking in terms of automation. It gives them a nice little toy, which can sit in a sandbox forever. Our goal is to really get to an actually built-for-purpose model that delivers value.
I'm fully conscious, I'm probably the 100th CEO you're hearing that from, but we're very, very serious about it. That takes a very serious team in the form of Arya.ai, which we're really ramping up. That takes a team which is very good at getting the level of accuracy that is needed to bring real automation. Like the U.K. win that we talked about, it's a use of AI in the, let's say, underwriting, lending, underwriting space. The client was using an AI product from another competitive vendor for some time. When we actually did the POCs with them, it became very clear to them that our teams are freakishly good at getting that level of accuracy on the model output compared to what they were using. They sort of replaced what they were using with us. All of that happened in a matter of three months, right?
I think what we intend to get very, very good at is a set of offerings which are very relevant to the bank or the financial institution or the client who's using it, and they can actually use it in production. What's happening in the AI world is data to model is super easy these days anyways. Model to production is super hard. We intend to solve that super hard problem so that we can actually create some value. That is where a lot of investments will go in. We spent some time in the Investor Day articulating the various components of that offering stack. If you remember the three layers, the bottom two layers is where the investment on the AI side goes in. The top layer was, that is the second vector, which is a whole set of AI-native applications that we are building out today.
That again results in the sort of accelerated spend right now, right? What are those applications? It sort of touches on your second point, which is where those new hero products are going to come from. I'll come to those applications, but just a comment on that hero product. I think right now we have the hero products. They need the hero geographies. We are fairly strong in our Core Asian markets now. Our win rates are probably at a level where you can, in a place like transaction banking, we probably win more deals than the rest of all the competitors whose names you can spell put together, at least in the last 18 months. I think we are very, very competitive in that space. The question is, where can you expand?
Hence the need to invest on the sales channel, especially in Europe, in Africa, a little bit in North Asia, where we've not been present, but we know the business is there, right? I think that's sort of the comment on the hero product. I don't think we need them. I think we have very mature products going after very large markets. We just need to adapt ourselves more and more to the big markets as we step in. Having said that, what are the new products coming out? Other than the offerings on the AI side, a ton of them are in beta, but we really believe in getting them totally right before we formally take them to market. The initial betas are going on a number of products, including, you know, multi-agent orchestration things and all, which again, everyone loves talking about.
Honestly, very few people get it right. On the lending side, we launched a brand new, so lending side, our primary flagship brand is Integro. Integro has been the leader in Asia on the corporate lending side. We're launching a brand new retail LO, SME LO, the most cutting-edge AI-led origination system in the market today, we believe. Over the next couple of quarters, we're launching a brand new LMS, which again would be totally AI-enabled, AI-first, absolutely cutting-edge architecture, absolutely cutting-edge user experience. We are fleshing out a lot of breadth on the transaction banking suite as well. Supply chain finance, brand new offering with the Fintra acquisition. Now we are really doubling down on building out a full front-to-back offering on the trade finance side, which itself is a giant space to go after. That's that.
On the transit side, we continue to build out more products, as well as adapt to the markets we are going into, whether that's Europe, whether that's U.K. There's a lot of build-out happening on the transit side. We are now beginning to bring in some new products on the data center side. That also will start seeing some momentum in this year. Where else are we bringing new products? Yeah, I think that's probably the list. There's a lot of smaller products out there in the payment space, in the sort of small SaaS space, but I would not really spend a lot of time talking about it because, again, it won't be meaningful in FY 2026 from a revenue standpoint. Those are the big ones.
She says small data point, if I may. Would you be willing to spell out the size of our data center business for FY 2025 in terms of revenue?
I mean, the short answer is no. The long answer is because, you know, I don't want to get into the business of sort of suddenly disclosing on earnings call stuff we don't publicly disclose, right? I think data center business is roughly, it's slightly less than a third of the TIG business probably, right, for FY 2025. That's where I would leave it.
Fair enough. Thanks. Even that helps, Ashish. Thank you so much. All the best.
Thank you, Anmol.
Thank you. Participants, we request you to limit to two questions in the initial round and join back the queue for more questions. The next question comes from Gauri Athanikar Mishra. Please unmute your audio and video, introduce the firm you represent, and ask a question.
Hello, Ashish. Congratulations on the good deal wins we have seen tr action this quarter. You already, by speaking to Anmol, you already said that TIG will be better in the second half. My question was more pertaining to the TIG itself. We saw that one deal win has happened in automated, bigger deal win, which you have declared, which has happened on the automated fare collection. Any traction we are seeing on the data center part of the TIG because a year ago we spoke quite a bit about data center and suddenly even in the investor meet and all, it kind of became, it took a back seat. Is it purposefully or are you seeing a difference in the way you are projecting Aurionpro now?
Especially after, I would have expected after Arya.ai came into your system, that also will become a part of the data centers where, was I correct or wrong in my thinking? I would like to get a clarity on how do you see the data center and TIG growth? Obviously, we've already spoken about it in the Investor Meet and you said it is going to be second quarter, so second half of the year. Clarity on what we are doing at data center, are we seeing any traction and how do you see growth from here in that segment or is it going to be a complete closure on that part? Some clarity.
Okay. Thanks for the question, Gauri, right? So look, Data Center has been, it was zero four years back. It's been one of the strongest growing businesses for us. We run one of the top data center design teams in the country, right? I don't think there is any sort of slack on that part of the business. I would contest the sort of view that we did not talk about data center in the investor day. We did talk about the new products and Sanjay Bali specifically talked about the new products that are going to come out on the data center side. We do tend to focus more in Investor Day on what's new, right? We are a very wide firm. We work at a ferocious pace in terms of building new products and new offerings out.
There is always a ton of, just given the scale of R&D spend and the speed with which we move and the sort of shortness of our iterative cycles, we really churn out a lot of stuff, right? I think we tend to focus on what's new and we tend to probably not talk about what's steady state and data center has been just such a reliable, strong growth business for us that probably, you know, it should get more mention than it does. I think what we have on that business right now is we continue to grow strongly. Q1 is not the quarter in which we bring on new clients, so obviously no deal win announcements. We are focused on execution. We are focused on working with a few strategic customers that we have and, you know, as and when there are like significant deal wins.
We also don't like announcing small deal wins, right? When there are significant deal wins, we'll talk about it. The business is growing strongly. Second half again would be bigger for the business than the first half, but we are executing on the order book. The business again this year will grow fairly strongly. I think the big difference this year would be you will start seeing some of the products come out and get implemented at some sort of a meaningful scale. Like when Aurionpro gets into any business domain, initially we spend our time understanding the domain and which is largely a services-led play, but slowly once we understand the game, we understand where we can drive the economics or where we can get the non-linear economics, we start building our own IP.
I think this is the year when you'll start seeing a lot more of Aurionpro IP into our data center projects and that should materially start impacting the economics of the business overall, right? In terms of growth, in terms of focus, I think we remain fully focused on it and I think it should be a strong year for the business.
Thank you. Can you give us any idea about what part of the TIG would be data center today? I mean, what percentage?
Oh, yeah, I already said that in the previous question. I don't know if you missed it, but slightly less than a third of the business is data center for TIG.
A third of the TIG , right?
Yeah, yeah.
Thank you. Are we seeing traction from the Data Centers being set up, planned in India? Are we seeing any traction? Are any deals being handed out for design of the Data Center here? A lot of plans are on for India Data Centers by all Global Players as well.
Yeah, so Gauri, look, I think I don't normally answer questions after thank you, but I'll take this one. I think the reason we are in the space when we got into it four years back is we were very, very positive on the amount of Data Center build-up that needs to happen in India. I think that continues apace. This is one of those spaces where if you wanted to grow 100%, you can grow 100%, but we are like a bit particular about the kind of business we want to do in the space and the kind of economics we expect from the business. We will stay focused on our playbook, which is largely, you know, design work for very complex projects as well as Program Managing, you know, the projects for our strategic partners.
We will not try to go after anything and everything that exists in that space. Having said that, I think you are totally right. There is a massive pace of investments happening in the space and that will continue to happen over the next several years. There is enough meaningful growth to be had in that business, I think at least over the next, let's say, four or five years or maybe even beyond. Yeah.
Thank you. Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you. Next question comes from Varun Gandhi. I would request you to unmute your audio and video, introduce the firm you represent, and ask your question.
Hey, Ashish.
Hi, Varun. Good afternoon.
Perfect. Just a simple question on the Effective Tax Rate. I needed some clarity on why the tax rate is so low. Is it due to just the geographic diversification that we have? Is that mainly Southeast Asia, or is there some other reason to it?
Okay, good question.
How do you see these tax rates going?
Good question. Good question. I don't know if people saw the tax rate in Q1. I thought the question would be why has it become higher? I think it was like 18 or 19% in Q1, which is slightly higher than our trend line. Why is the tax rate low for us? It's largely because a lot of our IP, so we are largely a product-driven business. A lot of our IP resides in Singapore, and a lot of our business gets done out of Singapore or Dubai, you know, out of places with a net lower tax rate than India. Of course, a lot of our business happens in India as well. U.S. has a lower tax rate. Dubai has a lower tax rate. Singapore has a lower tax rate. The sum total of all that results in quite a bit.
Plus, the other reason, one of the joys of being an R&D-focused organization is you do tend to get the opportunity to claim some tax relief against R&D in several places, especially jurisdictions like Singapore, which again we take advantage of, right? The sum total of that is a sort of more efficient business and a lower tax rate. I think if we were a business very centric on doing everything in India, we run large R&D centers in Istanbul, now in London, in Singapore, in Vietnam, etc., which a lot of our peers don't, right? I think that kind of determines the mix of where we are building IP and the kind of tax relief we can get against it. Q1, given all that, Q1 was actually, given my comfort level, a higher tax rate than what we are used to.
Going forward, do you see this moving to, you know, the corporate tax rate in India, which is 25%, or will we stay in the similar band?
We'll stay in the similar band because, you know, I think we are a very distributed organization, right? Singapore is a very meaningful jurisdiction for us, increasingly in the Middle East as well, right? We're not, so we basically distribute our R&D where we have the most efficient way to build it. Most of the corporate lending product actually gets built out of Singapore, right? Most of the transit R&D actually happens out of Istanbul and London, right? Istanbul and Singapore right now and moving to London. We're not big fans of running large offshore centers and kind of building everything out there. We stay close to the client. We stay close to the talent. We stay close to where the ecosystem is for the specific product. That will always result in us being much more distributed than most of the so-called peer group.
Understood. As a last follow-up, does this change the dynamics of the business?
Which dynamics?
Because your R&D centers are onshore, does this change the dynamics of the business? I know you function like this historically. It's just a general question.
Yeah, no, look, we are, so I'm not sure if I got the full sort of color of that and the line was not that great. Broadly speaking, I think the goal that we have is to build out a really global tech player that operates at scale. At least in my personal experience, experience of most of our teams, we haven't seen too many of those kind of players rooted in India, rooted in Asia overall, right? We have a slightly different playbook than everyone else in terms of how we intend to do it. That will always need us to be, and it'll probably mean that our R&D spend is probably a bit higher than everyone else's, but it will also give us the, we feel, the opportunity to create a truly tier one global tech organization, right? I think that also helps us attract talent.
I mean, I think there are very few of Asian players who would get, you know, CVs from the competitive global fintechs that we get, right? I think that really does change the game in terms of what we can build out, right? I think the thing to understand with the tech space is, or software or even hardware tech, the building of enterprise software is a fairly level playing field. There is no serious advantage to building software in the Valley versus building it in Mumbai or Hanoi. The difference in businesses which are able to build the best product in the world versus businesses who fail at doing it is knowing what that best product looks like. That comes down to the quality of talent that you attract, right? We feel our playbook is right for what we are trying to build.
Everyone else plays their own game, and we play our own game, but we feel the playbook is right for what we are set out to do. Hope that helps.
Thanks for that. Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you. The next question comes from Srinivasu K. I would request you to unmute your audio and video, introduce the firm you represent, and ask a question. Mr. Srinivasu, I would request you to unmute your audio and ask a question.
Hi, Ashish. Thanks for the opportunity. My question is related to Transaction Banking deals that you have been signing up. Where actually do you face the competition from, like horizontal players like C3.ai, Palantir kind of providers, or hyperscalers, or domain players like Temenos or Intellect kind of companies?
Hey, Srinivasu. Hi, good afternoon. That's a very wide question. On the Transaction Banking side, typically the competition would come in from other players who have a very specialized Transaction Banking stack, which probably would come down to the Banking Tech players. Some of them you mentioned, some of them you did not. I don't normally like naming competition names on the Earnings Call, so I would sort of stay away from it. By and large, there are four or five specialized players in the space, including one more Indian one. Those are the ones we compete with. The C3.ai and Palantir and all are a very different sort of nature of players. Even between the two of them, there's a distinction.
If I was to generalize it, they're largely what you would call Enterprise AI players, where the aim is to go from essentially go data up into building an enterprise sort of AI layer where you're driving intelligence in. Then you throw a bunch of workflows around that intelligence, or you try to ride on the application workflows that exist in the enterprise. In that case, the workflow could even be sitting inside one of the applications that we make on the Transaction Banking side. To that extent, there could be OLAP, but they approach it from a completely different angle. The Enterprise AI offerings that we are building out through Arya.ai would probably be the closer parallel to C3 and Palantir. I don't really see C3 and Palantir as being serious players, at least in the Financial Institution space where we are serious players, right?
Our goal is to build out a first-rate Enterprise AI offering stack specifically targeted towards Financial Institutions. I believe we would succeed meaningfully in it. I don't think it's an area of focus for either Palantir or C3. Although if you go to C3's website, you'll see some mention of Financial Services and all. I don't think, at least as of now, they're more Oil and Gas and stuff like that. That's that. I think they would be good parallels to what we are trying to build out on Arya.ai. C3 and Palantir are largely U.S.-centric players right now, although you can find some Sales Teams even from there trying to sell elsewhere, while we are largely Asia and Europe play, and we intend to keep building out. I think the market is large enough for a whole range of players to go in and work on the enterprise.
The problem is large enough that you will need a whole range of players to go in and do it, right? I think there is a very large market to go after. We feel we have one of the strongest teams in Asia, probably one of the strongest teams elsewhere. It depends on how you break down the problem, right? On the AI side, one is the sort of intelligence building, model building inside the enterprise. I think we have one of the strongest teams in that space in terms of building it. The other side is actually productionizing the models, the stack on the inference side, explainability, interpretability, trust, compliance. That space, I believe we are probably in a field of one, especially in Asia and Europe. We probably run one of the top explainability labs on the planet, certainly the top one in India by far.
The goal is to create something truly pathbreaking through investments you're making in that space. Time will tell how successful we get there, right? There, I don't think either C3 or Palantir really have any game. We published original algos. We've registered original patents. I think we will go far in that space. I mean, that's a number of vectors, but hopefully that answers.
Thank you. My next question related to that, when you say when you bundle Arya.ai into Transaction Banking and Smart Lending, are clients asking for open model choice? Is it like LLM- agnostic banks may want to plug in their own Large Language Models, you know, without being locked into a particular LLM?
Yeah, look, I think it's a fair question. I think it's a pretty wide range of choices that exist inside a bank. I think the way it is getting played out right now, and it may not get played out that way in 24 months, but the way it's getting played out right now is when it comes to the specific intelligence that we are embedding inside our applications, I don't think the banks are asking for choices. I think they're asking for mature AI capabilities. For example, you say Transaction Banking, we bring in a very specific capability around cash flow forecasting, which really is very mature for us compared to pretty much anyone in the industry. I don't think the bank comes in and says, do it this way and that way.
They really care about the maturity of the sort of model, the maturity of the intelligence that you're bringing in, and how can that get adapted to what they do. What they care about, if you go and sell a very generic Enterprise AI capability, I think they do want to make that choice. Right now, it's actually fairly easy at a technical level to switch from one LLM to the next. It's like a five-year-old child can do it. The problem is it's technically very easy, but in terms of really making it productive inside the enterprise, it's not so easy to switch, right? I think everyone sort of goes down to sort of their own choices. There is a lot of investment that goes into the training of models, and also it's very hard to sort of redo those investments.
There's a lot of investments that, you know, if you're using LLMs for anything, there's a lot of investment that goes into prompt engineering and all, and that again is very hard to sort of redo if you are really making, you know, switches. You can, you know, technically you can say a router, whatever, but to really make it work in one way on one LLM versus the other, it takes quite a bit of work, right? It's not so straightforward. Yes, people have a wide range of choices. Typically at enterprise level, they will narrow down to a few and they will sort of stick to it for some time. I don't think that really impacts a lot at an application level right now, but like I say, it could change. It could change over 12, 24 months.
Thank you and best of luck.
Thank you.
Thank you. We will take one last question from the chat box. I would like to hand over the call to Ms. Ashvisha from AddFactors AI to review the text question.
Thank you. The question is from Mr. Sandeep Shinde. In light of the accelerating role of AI in digital product development, how is Aurionpro Solutions planning to incorporate AI-driven innovations into its product delivery and development processes?
Okay, so I'm reading that as a question on internal tool usage rather than external AI offerings. I hope I'm correct, Sandeep, right? Look, I would put it this way. I can make a lot of bold claims on this one right now, but I think most of them would be hollow, so I will sort of avoid it. Almost everyone right now is experimenting, right? When it comes to the internal tool usage, you'll see a lot of CEO statements coming out saying, "We're generating 20% of our code using AI. We're generating 30% of our code using AI." I really don't know what to read into it. We may be also generating a fairly large chunk of our code using AI. I don't know what that means, right? I would sort of put it this way.
I think on a number of internal functions, the productivity gain that you get from AI tooling is real. It is increasingly becoming real over the next 6, 12, 18 months. It basically comes down to how well we can integrate that into the functional workflow and into the individual workflow depending on what you're doing, right? If you're a developer, can I really effectively incorporate a code generator into my developer workflow? What is the sort of productivity gain that I get, right? That is at an individual level. Then you say I expand that to a team of 10. Does that linearly translate to a team of 10? I don't think so because teams do a much more complex piece of work than a single developer does, right?
If I was getting like a 500% productivity gain, hypothetically, I'm making no claims to it, but hypothetically, the moment you sort of blow that up at a team level, that probably comes down to 50%. The moment you blow that up at a product level, that probably comes down to 5%. Again, all these are hypothetical numbers. The point is this. We are very actively using code generation capabilities on the developer workflow. Similarly, if it comes down to testing, comes down to product maintenance, comes down to support, there is a lot of tooling available. There is a lot of tooling we are using internally. I feel over the next 6- 12 months, you'll start seeing some very real, quantifiable gains in productivity where I would not have to rely on statements like we are generating 30% of our code using AI code generators.
I would be able to tell you we are actually getting a real 30% gain in productivity, which means I either ship out 30% more code or I use 30% less people, right? I don't think we're at that level, right? We are very actively using tooling across code generation, across testing, across maintenance of product, across support. The internal functions are very actively using it, marketing, HR, etc., right? Increasingly, I expect over the next 6 to 12 months, 18 months, actually very real, quantifiable productivity gains that I can come back to you and talk about, right? I think that's all I would say on what we are doing right now without making any bold claims yet at the moment.
I'll hand it over back to the moderator for closing.
Thank you, ma'am.
Okay, did you hand it back to me?
Yes, sir.
Okay, hi. So good, guys. Thank you very much for joining this call. I think, look, overall, the business stays pretty much on the trajectory that it is. We did talk about an increase in expenses somewhat, which all of you have seen in the numbers. It comes down to the sales expenses as well as increasing the headcount and increments, etc. I think it will sort of straight line as we go into the year. We feel very good about the trajectory for the year. We feel good about the pipeline. We believe we need to stay a little bit cautious in terms of the expense line over the next couple of quarters, and there will be a little bit of pressure on both sales as well as R&D expense.
Over the full year, we will still deliver the guidance that we gave to, and I look forward to seeing you all in next quarter's call and chat more about this. Thank you.
Thank you, sir. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference. Thank you for your participation. You may leave the meeting.