I'm Mr. Ninath Kelkar, 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.
Thank you. Thanks, and good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us on this call for Q2 and H1 earnings. This quarter was another strong step forward for Aurionpro. Revenue grew 29% year-on-year, as you would have seen, and our industry-leading EBITDA and PAT margins remained resilient. These results are not incidental. They are about discipline. They are about focus and conviction of 3,000-plus Aurionites across the globe. They are about our belief that great technology, built with purpose, can still reshape industries, can reshape nations. We added 19 new logos in Q2, bringing our first-half tally to 35. This is the strongest new logo addition in our history, and that speaks to the depth of demand across all our businesses and the trust our customers place in us. In banking and fintech, the Yuko Bank engagement was a significant defining win for our AI-led transaction banking platform.
It reinforces our position as the platform as well as the partner of choice for large financial institutions. We continued to expand banking with wins across Sri Lanka, the Middle East, and Africa, extending our global reach. Our product groups across transaction banking, lending, and Interact each had significant first half, not just in terms of business numbers but also new product build-outs. AI is now at the core of everything we build in banking, not decoration but real differentiator, helping our clients decide faster and operate smarter. In TIG, which is the technology innovation group, the two phases of the Mumbai Metro project that we won are the largest order win in our history. They further confirm Aurionpro's leadership in India's AFC and smart mobility markets. Our data center business as well continued to see strong demand and growth in the first half.
Four years ago, we made a hard and deliberate choice. We moved away from the safety of what was a diversified services business with some product into building a global products and platforms company. Rooted in deep engineering, rooted in R&D. In an industry that is dominated by IT services, I am not sure how many appreciate how hard that is. That choice was not easy, but we made the choice, and it changed our trajectory. Since that pivot four years back, we have invested more than INR 1,000 crore in new product development and in strategic acquisitions. These were bold, forward-looking bets that prepared us to compete and to win. In the world that is now emerging today. Doing 30% plus annual growth for four years in a row is very, very rare in India's listed tech sector.
It reflects the power of our strategy, our products, and our people. Enterprise software is today being rebuilt around AI systems that interpret, that reason, and act. This is not an incremental change. It is foundational. It is imperative that we act ahead of the curve on this change. As we enter the second half of FY2026, we will double down on our product build-outs and R&D. Guided by three imperatives. One, rebuilding the enterprise stack for AI, creating the data, model, and agent infrastructure that defines an intelligent enterprise. Second is to build next-generation AI-native applications, applications that think, plan, and execute with intelligence. Third is scaling the capability at speed, which we need to, expanding our engineering depth where we need to, as well as global alliances to deliver faster than anyone else as we run this race.
Our labs in AI labs in Mumbai, in Paris, and in London are advancing applied AI, are advancing data architecture, and Agentic Computing, and you should expect path-breaking announcements from these labs in the time to come. Our home markets in Asia continue to grow strongly, and the U.S. continues to register steady performance. We also continue to push very hard in Europe. I have talked about this in the previous calls. We have made major investments in Europe over the past few quarters, building the teams, infrastructure, and partnerships we need. The pipeline is building up nicely, but we know that success in new markets takes discipline and takes patience. We are determined to execute with both. As we enter the second half of FY2026, we are doing so from a position of strength.
We continue to have industry-leading margins, as you have seen, a strong balance sheet, and a rapidly expanding global footprint. We will continue to invest boldly in our products, into market expansions, and in applications in the data center and AI spaces while maintaining our discipline, the financial discipline, and operational rigor. With that, I will hand this back, and let's bring on the questions. Thank you.
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. 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 will wait for a moment while the question queue assembles. The first question comes from Vinay Menon. I request you to accept the prompt on your screen, unmute your audio and video, introduce the firm you represent, and ask a question or give comments.
Hello.
Hello.
Hi, sir. Hi. Congratulations, sir, on a great set of numbers. Just a few questions from my side. In terms of Europe and U.S., when can we start seeing some traction in terms of deal wins and what's our strategy there? I think we've hired a lot of people, so how are we shaping up in that region?
Hey, Vinay. Hi. Thanks. Look, we're already seeing traction in terms of some initial wins. We've seen traction in terms of pipeline build-out. Typically, large deals in this business, the sales cycle is 12-18 months. I think we are six months into our expansion into Europe. The U.S. is a more steady state, so I'll probably cover that separately. Europe, you're right, we invested significantly in the first half of the year, as well as Q4 last year in terms of building out the team that Tom runs. A pretty strong sales team. We also did an acquisition in the form of Finexis. That's a lot of investments that have gone into Europe. I think last quarter, we announced the first deal win in Europe, which was an AI-led lending solution win. I think we are probably a few weeks away from going live there.
Getting into any new market, one has to be prepared to initially climb over the... Just because we are strong in Asia doesn't mean we have a right to win in Europe. We obviously have great solutions, but we need to build out the local references. We need to build out the local partnerships. I think we've gone about building this methodically. As we slowly take the initial set of wins live, we build on those references, and the flywheel takes over. I think we are probably another four quarters away from the flywheel fully in operation, but you already started seeing some wins, and I think you'll see more as we get towards Q4.
Awesome.
With that help, sir. And on AI, like Arya, I just want to understand. We have three labs set up. So the focus is to build an AI company within Aurionpro, or is banking the only target from an AI perspective? I just want to understand that.
Arya, there is a reason why we keep Arya as a standalone AI-focused business inside Aurionpro. I think if you look at AI today, what is it that you're trying to do? I think there are three races you're trying to run. One is the AI-native applications, which is where you say the enterprise application. The classic software mode is getting disrupted. A new mode is getting created in the software. That is a race we are determined to play well in to win. One is that, which is how do you bring together a very mature AI framework into the applications. This is where you'll see us. You've already seen us register a lot of wins because we are AI-first in terms of transaction banking, in terms of lending. You'll see a lot more coming out in terms of our vision of what that AI-native application looks like.
That is not far away. That's race number one. Race number two is if you did not start at the application layer. Historically, in the industry, most of the money, once a technology matures, has been made on the application layer. We feel very good about that, and that's where we'll focus a lot more. If you did not start there and you start at what intelligence is of the most value to the enterprise, which is where we're building out a whole enterprise AI layer, including the MCP orchestration that it needs, including the domain-specific elements that it needs to come in and start at the intelligence level inside the enterprise. That's race number two that Arya has to run. Number three is, can we really create new foundational technology that allows banks, financial institutions, enterprises to take these models into production? Data to model is very easy.
Model to production is very hard. There are millions of toy applications sitting in sandboxes around the world. It takes a lot in terms of taking a model to production. We are doing some... This is where the labs in Paris, London, and Mumbai come in. Can we do deep research? Can we come up with net new foundational technology? Some of this, I don't want to talk about right now, but over the next, I think, very near future, we'll come and talk about it once we publish the papers and once we've sort of launched some of this. The right kind of technology to bring models into production, put guardrails on it, observability around it. We run probably one of the top four or five Explainability Labs on the planet today. We run one of the top research labs when it comes to this technology.
That's race number three. That's more future-looking, and that's probably going after a much bigger prize. That's obviously a harder problem to solve as well. Those are the three races that we are trying to run. I think there is a lot of... The whole AI space, there's a lot of noise. There's a lot of bluster. There's a lot of claims getting made. I think we intend to sort of focus on more net new value that we can add, keep the noise level low, and we'll continue to push towards these three.
Okay. Just a few things on the numbers. Our margins are on the lower band of 20%-22%, which we guide for. Any operating leverage could play out maybe in the next four, six quarters and things like that.
Look, operating leverage always keeps playing out. The scale of our R&D spend also keeps on increasing. I have been very clear about that. We have no intention of going after EBITDA maximization anytime over the next few years. I think that is something you do when you go to... You start saying, "Is my growth 6% or 6.5% or 6.6%?" I think when you are growing at 30%, you are pushing new product out, getting into new pockets. I think the focus has to be to build product, to win clients, to grow the business. Sometime in the future, over the next few years, if we feel that the market has matured, we have matured, the growth rates are coming down, then we will think of EBITDA. Right now, what we do is we try to keep EBITDA at the band.
As the operating leverage comes in and the business becomes more profitable, we pour the excess back into the R&D bucket. The R&D bucket this year is probably INR 120 crore, maybe slightly more than that. I think it will continue to increase.
Just one last thing. Our cash flows for H1 were negative. Last year also, it was a similar case. We saw great collection in H2. That is the nature of the business as we understand. Can we expect something similar for this year also? We'll maintain the CFRB term margin.
Look, every year, mid-year, it's the same story as you mentioned.
I think the nature of the product business is unlike something like IT services where you say, "I bill every month," and it's very linear. In the product business, a lot of the billing is tied to taking the customer's life. That's unfortunate.
Aziz, you can go ahead, sir.
, No, I think I'm done.
Okay, sorry. We couldn't hear you.
Your voice was not heard, sir. It went off in the middle, sir.
Okay. Look, I think on the cash question, it's the same. I think it's the same situation every year. Like I said, it's pretty much the same question every year. The nature of the business is such that we do a lot of deal bookings towards Q4 of the year, a lot of project startups, Q4, beginning of the year. Typically, most project go-lives take 12-14 months. Unfortunately, billing milestones are linked to client go-lives in this business. I mean, if it's an IT services business, it's like month to month, and all that stuff is fine. In the product business, that's the nature of the business. Some of that seasonality is coming down. Typically, for us, middle of the year, you're still executing projects. End of the year, you take the clients live and the collections pick up.
I think we basically, last couple of years, against exactly the same picture. I think we've typically converted, I would say, 75%-80% or more EBITDA to cash by the time we finish the year. Maybe even more, I think 90% plus last year, if you net out the tax. Typically, collections become very strong towards Q4. Middle of the year, while projects are getting executed, it's a bit weak. The same question and answer every year. Hopefully, that answers.
Thank you, sir. We have the next question from the line of Kunal Bajaj. I request you to accept the prompt on your screen, unmute your video and audio, and introduce the firm you represent, and ask a question or give comments.
Hello, good morning. Thanks for the opportunity. Congratulations on a good set of results, sir. I have a question on data centers. How do we see our data center business growing in the next couple of years? Maybe in terms of revenue share, client profile, along with the services offered. What all other agencies are we planning to explore in this ecosystem?
Kunal. Thanks for the question. Look, data center is one of the big bets for us over the last few years. Four or five years back, if you see, that business was zero for us. It's been growing very, very strongly, typically in the range of anywhere between, I would say, 35% and 50% any given year. It's one of those businesses where there is so much demand that you can grow at pretty much any rate that you want. We are very methodical in terms of how we want to grow that business. I think typically, the business will continue to grow strongly, but we are very selective in who we work with. We work with a few strategic partners. I mean, Iron Mountain being one of them, where we do more or less everything for them in terms of their project execution.
We run one of the top data center design teams in the country. We look after several complex design projects. That's very good work. We've been working on some R&D in terms of building out our IP, building out some products in the space, also partnerships in the space. I think net net, we will bring—so we like non-linearity of the product business. We will slowly bring some products out. Data center is where Transit was probably six or seven years back. We started off in a pure services way, learned the business, then built our IP across every point on the value chain. I think data center, we're still doing it. It will continue to grow strongly over the next few years. We will continue to be very selective on the business and the partnerships we take on.
We'll continue to work on our internal R&D in terms of where we can add net new value in terms of IP we can build out. That's essentially where the business is. Feel very, very good about it. It's one of our big bets. I think it will continue to grow very strongly.
Okay. In terms of the overall mix, as in the last call as well, you gave a hint that it is one third of the TIG business. How are we seeing this mix change over the next couple of years, maybe, given the high growth?
Look, I think the challenge is, I think probably it will go up in the mix purely because of the fact that the public sector side may come down a little bit. I think the problem with the mix question in terms of high growth businesses is the other parts of TIG, so especially the transit payment side, also continues to grow very strongly globally, as well as other parts of the banking side as well. How does the relative mix change? I think that's a slightly tougher question. I would really be speculating. I would say in the TIG business, the mix should go up from one third, logically, over the next few years. I mean, it will continue to grow strongly. What does that become? Does it become half? I don't think so. I think it will go up above the one third.
Got it. Thank you. Another question on the SaaS part. How do we see the SaaS growth in terms of the annuity revenues over the next couple of years?
How do we see the SaaS growth? You mean the software growth?
Yes, software.
Okay. So look, I think we actually license most of our software in enterprise form. So that's why the SaaS thing is a little bit, it doesn't do justice to the portfolio. We normally make large software core systems for tier one banks, which typically goes in an enterprise license space. The same software where we go to NBFCs or lower tier of the banks, we sell in a SaaS model. So SaaS for us is a commercial model. Obviously, all our products are relatively modern and cloud native and can go in either of the formats. What do we feel about the software side? I think software side has been growing strongly. The goal that we have. So I have only two asks from any product business inside Aurionpro. Ask number one is product superiority. How are we better than whoever it is that we compete with?
I don't want to be naming competitors over the earnings call, but for transaction banking, for lending, you know who the competition is. How are we going to be better? It doesn't need to be 100 points. It's usually three or four. That goes into the roadmap. Roadmap goes into product. That's ask number one. Ask number two is never fail a customer. Aurionpro has a reputation for making customers successful. Once we take something on, we make sure the customer gets the value from what they buy from us. The IT world is littered with failed projects, which is what makes a lot of the market fairly weak. We've built a reputation over time. That's the reason for, I mean, if you look at the transaction banking win that I announced, we win most of the Indian large bank deals on transaction banking these days. Why is that?
It's because we never fail a customer. So those are the only two asks. I think as long as we stay true to our purpose, build products that are fundamentally superior to the market, we'll continue to grow these strongly. Transaction banking, we are one of the top platforms in the world today. I mean, in terms of platform, we are obviously market-wise strong in Asia, going into Europe and US. Lending, we are one of the top platforms in the world today. Enterprise AI, we run one of the most mature enterprise AI frameworks around, one of the deepest, widest team in the business. We'll continue to mature. So I feel good about the software business. I think, and longer run, I think one of the earlier questions was around operating leverage. I mean, software is beautiful in that sense.
I think as we scale the business, the operating leverage really lands a lot more cash in the company. Then we use that. You can choose to stop growing and collect the cash, but we use it for R&D. We use it for acquisitions. I mean, over the last four odd years since we pivoted. We've invested more than INR 1,000 crore behind R&D and acquisitions. That's the beauty of the software business. It continues to get stronger as we scale it.
Sure, that helps. The last question on.
Kunal, sir, very sorry to interrupt you. Could you join back the queue, sir?
Sure, sure. Thank you.
Thank you. Participants are requested to restrict to two questions in the initial round and join back the queue for more questions. Next question comes from the line of Varun Gandhi. I request you to accept the prompt on your screen, unmute your audio and video, introduce the firm you represent, and ask a question. Mr. Varun Gandhi, I request you to accept the prompt on your screen. Okay. Could you unmute your audio and video and ask a question, sir?
Yes, perfect. Hi, Ashish. So. One question would be your employee expenses have risen both on a by-and-by basis as well as a percentage of revenue. Now, previous quarter, you mentioned that there was a large impact due to employee wage hikes. So my question is, will this be the new normal, or is this just an aberration because of elevated investments in the EMEA region? Number one.
So look, employee expenses, they did jump. Overall, I would say INR 9-10 crore or so. So I think it's gone up. A lot of it is due to absorption that came through some acquisitions. So some of it has gone up because of that, because the net headcount has gone up. And some of the other part is in some parts of the business. We have been scaling up. EMEA is one where we've been scaling up. And some of the new order wins like MMRDA, et cetera, they do need us to capacitize. Those are very large orders where we need to capacitize. So I think it's gone up. Would it go up at that same pace the next few quarters? I don't think so. I mean, unless.
So I think acquisition is one of those things where it does go up in chunks when we close the acquisition in a quarter. But I think organic growth-wise, it won't be that much.
You're implying that it should normalize. All right. My next question would be, could you share any update on your conversations with analysts like Gartner or Forrester, any new conversations that are happening?
Of course, of course. I think that's a great question. Historically, we've not really spent a lot of time with analysts. It's mostly in the last four to six quarters that we've actually had a strong engagement with most of the analysts. Now we are covered by just about everyone. If you look at, and it depends on the product set. Lending, of course, was covered earlier. Chartis, we are squarely for corporate loan origination, for collateral management, for limit management of the banking book. We are squarely up North, Leaders Quadrant worldwide. IDC covered us on the lending side. Again, IDC MarketScape, we featured up North Leaders Quadrant worldwide. They covered us for the first time, maybe a few months back. I think lending is well covered. We started getting coverage with Gartner, Forrester, et cetera, as well. I think we got the initial coverage.
Of course, it takes time to start featuring in the Leaders Quadrants. We started coverage for transaction banking. We feel very strongly we have the strongest product in the world today. It's a matter of time before we start sharing up North similar to the lending. In those cases, we let the analysts take their time. We also had, on transaction banking, we were named the platform, I think by IBSI, the platform of the year or something like that. I think there is a lot of success on the analyst front for the core platforms. You will see more and more of those as the analyst coverage matures. That's a top focus for us, especially as we go into Europe and U.S., because what a Chartis thinks or what a Gartner thinks does matter. We have these trends to.
Actually, I was going to ask you that, because how much do you think the impact would be of these analysts?
So look, I think it's like, look, it's not everything, but it's a useful point. I think the philosophy that we have is head to head, a pure platform evaluation for the products that we built out over the last three years. We'll win against just about everyone. Because we have the strength, and earlier, the reason we were not engaging also was because we were doing the buildouts. I think now that we have the strength, we win most technical evaluations on our core platforms these days. If you said only platform superiority was a factor, how functional, how deep the platform is, how modern it is, how microservices enabled it is, how intelligence enabled it is, how many intelligence informations exist on the product stack, we usually win those games very, very well.
Since the products are there and we have the lead, it makes sense to do that. Is it everything? It's not everything. I think it's an important decision factor for most buying organizations. I think we are very serious about it. You'll see more and more of that coverage come out.
Perfect. Hopefully, we jump up in the quadrant.
Look, wherever we are covered in the quadrants, if you look at it, IDC MarketScape came out like three, four months back. You can go and look it up. It's like straight up North, I mean, right at the top. It's like where we will get featured, we are very confident about our products.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you, sir. The next question comes from the line of Sunaina Chhabria. I request you to accept the prompt on your screen, unmute your audio and video, introduce the firm you represent, and ask questions or give comments. Sunaina Chhabria, I request you to accept the prompt on your screen, unmute your audio and video, introduce the firm you represent, and ask a question or give comments. Sunaina Chhabria.
Yes, sorry. I just had a couple of internet issues. Thank you for the opportunity and congratulations on a good result. I have a couple of questions. The first is sort of on the back of what somebody else asked relating to the TIG segment. What are you seeing the most traction in? Is it data centers? Is it the transit? If you could give us a current breakup of what this quarter looked like, whether there was more performance from data centers or more performance from the transit.
, so look, TIG continues to go strongly. I think it's hard to choose, but both transit payments as well as data center, they grew very strongly in the first half of the year. Transit, of course, had that huge win with MMRDA, which will probably propel stronger growth rates for some time. It's also because it's extremely a great deal with full hardware to software play. I think it's a crucial win for us. Transit probably will accelerate faster on the back of that. I think it's hard. I think both the businesses are going within TIG, data center is growing very, very strong. Transit payments is going very strong. The public sector side of it is, I think, as I've explained previously before, it's steady. We've scaled it down a little bit. Overall, that's what I would say on the mix.
Okay. Just my next question is, within the reporting segments that are there, the sale of software services, we've seen a bit of a sequential downward movement. If you could just speak on that a little bit. If you could comment on what the execution time period is for the order book that has been given of about INR 1,500 crore at the end of Q2, what is the execution timeline for this?
Okay. Two different parts. I think the way to look at the sale of software services versus license and equipment, the reason we declare it, the way to look at it is more. Largely what is one-off versus what is more of a continuous stream. I think it's important not to look at mix from one quarter to the other because, for example, in this quarter, because of MMRDA, that equipment and licensing piece jumped quite a bit. There will be from one quarter to the other, depending on the mix of business, that number will go up and down. I think the way to look at it is what is largely a one-off going in and what is sort of more continuous in terms of the business. I think that's how I would look at it anyways. On the order book.
Typically, the way we declare our order book, we do not really have, for example, the AMC streams inside it and a lot of the recurring stuff inside it, which will get added every year as we get into it. I would say 80% plus of the order book is typically executable over the next five to six quarters. I think that's generally the mix. There will be some 20% odd which will sort of go a lot further because there's always a tail to several orders.
All right. Thank you so much. That's it from mine. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you, ma'am. Participants who wish to ask questions through audio and video can do so by pressing the raise hand icon at the bottom of your screen and wait for your turn to speak. The next question comes from the line of Deepak Poddar. I request you to accept the prompt on your screen, unmute your audio and video, introduce the firm you represent, and ask a question or give comments. Deepak Poddar, can you please unmute your audio and ask a question, please?
Am I audible?
Hi, Deepak.
Okay. . Hi. Hi. Thank you very much for taking time out. Thank you for this opportunity. I just wanted to understand first up on the data center part. I mean, just wanted to understand what exactly, I mean, what's the scope of work in the data center? Apart from that, I mean, per megawatt, whatever investment is being done in data center, our scope constitutes what percentage of the entire investment and what is the margin profile in data center? .
Okay. So I'm not sure if I got the first part of the question correctly. I thought you said, what do we do in the data center space? And then you said, what is the sort of margin profile? Look, I think what we do, we run one of the top data center design teams in the country. We specialize in the complex end of design. I think that's our specialization. That's usually fairly high margin work. As a percentage of the overall pie, it's not significant. It's single digits. We also program manage the build of data centers for a few strategic partners, which is where the size gets bigger. I think on the overall margin profile standpoint, of course, there is a massive demand in that space, but we are very selective on the deals that we take on.
That is largely got to do with us being very careful around the margin profile of the business that we take on. The longer-term ambition is to build more products in that space, which we are slowly building out. I think then the margin profile will, of course, change. That will take some time for us to mature the products. In the meanwhile, I would say data center is probably five or six percentage points below the enterprise margin at the moment. It continues to grow at about enterprise levels, maybe slightly above the enterprise levels at the moment.
I got confused. The margin profile of data center is 5%-6% below the enterprise or, I mean, below the company level at better margin?
Correct.
Okay. Okay. I understand.
Correct. So we've been, look, I think the way to look at it is we've been steadily investing in that business as well. Plus, it's largely a services-led business at the moment. In many ways, if you look at it, any business that we enter initially, we normally enter as a services business. Like Transit, six or seven years back when we entered purely services business. Validators from one place, gates from somewhere else, AFC, payment system somewhere else, software somewhere else. Then slowly, we go and find places where we feel there is value extraction that can happen with IP. We understand the space well enough, then we build it, and then we go for it. Slowly, we like non-linear play that IP allows. Slowly, any business, we will try to productize it. At the moment, it's largely a services-led business.
Understood. Fair. My second question is on your overall growth. I mean, just wanted to understand. When we say a 30% kind of a growth, what are the growth drivers, geographically as well as segmental? How will this growth profile change over next year, let's say FY 2027? You did mention that we are stressing more on Europe and U.S. market. Just wanted to understand this trajectory. What is driving the growth in the current year and how will this change over the next year?
Look, it's not any single year that we've been growing 30%. I think we basically have grown at something between 30-35, 36% over the last four years. Four years back, we pivoted the business away from what was largely a diversified sum products, largely services play into what we are today, which is where we said we will choose a set of segments. I would highly recommend you watch one of the few investor day videos that should be available somewhere. If I was to summarize it, we said we'll choose segments where we see a demand runway that goes out at least six, seven, eight years. Obviously, in the tech industry, everyone wants to see a long demand runway. It's very hard to find. There has to be something fundamentally transformative happening in that space for us to get comfortable around the demand.
There has to be a space where we bring some unique advantage. We believe that global leadership is contested. Then we published the Vision 2030. We went after it. What are these spaces? Transit payments is one where we believe over the next 8-10 years, the entire world is going to move from closed-loop to open-loop payments, which is tens of thousands of transit operators. Data center was another space we felt India was undercapacitized. We felt AI computers undercapacitized, and we thought that will grow. Enterprise AI was the third area, lending, transaction banking. We chose spaces, quite recently, which is four years back when we pivoted, where we knew the demand is going to be strong. We went about methodically building the business. That's how the business has grown. FY2021, when we started this, we were a INR 375 crore business.
FY2022, we were INR 505, then INR 660, INR 880, INR 1,200. This year, probably something between INR 1,500-INR 1,600. We've basically been growing the business at that pace for the last five years. To my knowledge, we are the only listed technology organization, at least in this country, who's done that over the last five years. Grown about 30% consecutively for the last four years. That's how we do it. These are segments where we know the demand is. Obviously, the demand drivers vary for the segment. Transaction banking transformation is a huge theme where we see a lot of new logo wins, a lot of demand. The driver for data center space is completely different. The driver for transit payments is completely different. These are spaces which have high demand.
I think we have built out over the last few years probably the most competitive set of offerings out there. Now the question is, where do you go from here? I feel the core IP for us exists in most of these spaces. Of course, there is a whole AI. Wave that came in after we pivoted, but we were aware of it, and we've invested against it. Now it's a question of continuing to invest in that IP, but also continue to expand into markets. We feel very good about where we are in Asia. Now the game is, can we become strong in Europe? Can we become strong in the U.S.? That's the focus. I don't know if that answers that question, but that's the philosophy anyways.
That perfectly summarizes. I mean, we intend to grow at 30% for the next two, three years. Would that be a right aspiration for us?
Look, I don't know what I don't know. I mean. Businesses don't run in a straight line. I think we've got good visibility over the next four quarters. We intend to grow strongly for the next several years. I think we have the business model. I think we have the products and the IP. We've methodically built out one of the finest teams in this business. I believe we will continue to grow stronger than the industry as we've done over the last four years. Now, is it exactly 30%? Is it 25%? Is it 40%? I think let's take it one year at a time and let's see. We feel that from now till 2030, we painted a Vision 2030 in 2021, which we published. Outside is a qualitative view, inside is a quantitative view.
I've never published the quantitative view outside because I don't like making big bold statements saying billion dollars or $10 billion. It is a precise number. Four years in a row, we've beaten that. We feel good about the trajectory. We feel good about being able to grow for several years.
Got it. That is very helpful, sir. And all the very best. Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Thank you, sir. The next question comes from the line of Vaibhav Chaudhary. I request you to accept the prompt on your screen. Unmute your audio and video. Introduce the firm you represent. Ask a question or give comments. Mr. Vaibhav Chaudhary, I request you to accept the prompt on your screen. Unmute your audio and video. Ask a question or give comments. Mr. Vaibhav Chaudhary, could you please unmute your audio and video and ask a question?
Congratulations on a good set of numbers. I have two questions. One is on AI data center. What is the order book there? The second question is the receivables is a bit high for this quarter. Can you help me a color on this?
Sorry, I did not get the first question, Vaibhav. What did you say about data center?
What is the AI data center order book?
Oh, so look, I think it's sort of hard to segregate it at that level. A lot of the AI compute, so we've done, we've got one of the more specialized shops. I mean, I think we've published some things publicly in the past. The sort of high-performance compute with IIT Guwahati, with IIT Mumbai. So we've got a lot of expertise in the space. We've got a lot of offerings in the space. The whole AI compute build-out is a relatively new thing for India right now. We are a very India-focused data center business. I think some of it is still getting built out. Right now, I would not be able to give a mix, but I think the future demand does seem to be building up.
Most of the AI compute, if you see where did that get built out, probably even now, 70%-75% is still like training workloads going in, and those are mostly, they're not being in India. I mean, there's been some GPU as a service sort of offerings out there where small model building people have been using the compute, but most of the training workloads have been outside. Now, as the usage is going up, there is a lot more inferencing workloads which need to get executed closer to where the customer is, where the user is. India, obviously, is one of the larger markets out there. We do see a steady build-out of AI compute as the inferencing workloads take over. I think that's sort of how I would summarize it. I think in the past, it's been small.
We've been active participants in designing it, working together with IITs, lots of places. We do see that building out as we go. That will pick up, and I think we'll play a key role in it.
Got it. My second question is on the receivable parts. It seems to be a bit high for this H1. Can you just throw a little bit of light on this?
So receivables, look, typically for us, if you, it's usually high at this time of the year for us. I think that's understandable, especially because we also had some large orders in Q2 that we built out against. Compared to March, of course, it will probably look higher to you. Compared to September 30, last year, I think our DSOs last year were something in the range of 110 days. Now it's about 100 days. I think it's sort of steadily gotten better in terms of lower, sorry, better is the wrong usage in terms of where the DSOs are. Overall, this time of the year, they are usually high and they are high.
Sure. Thanks.
Thank you. We have the next question from the line of Rohan Advant. I request you to accept the prompt on your screen. Unmute your audio and video. Introduce the firm you represent and ask a question or give comments.
Hello. , am I audible?
Yes, you are. Hi, Ron.
Hi, Ashish. My first question is on the two line items in your balance sheet, which are other intangible assets and intangible assets under development. If you could elaborate on what is included or what constitutes these two line items, because I've seen growth in them in FY2025 and also in H1 of FY2026. How do we decide what we include here versus what we expense in the P&L? If you could just throw your thoughts on this.
So look, the way we operate is, obviously, we invest a lot behind product build-outs in this business. Like I said, this year, it's probably clocking something north of at least INR 25 million a quarter, if not closer to INR 30 million. That goes out, but most of that goes into our core large products like transaction banking, like lending, like transit payments, et cetera. We do not usually capitalize those build-outs. We usually expense them out because these are large businesses, and typically, we are quite comfortable with the net margin that comes out from it. The only places where we've been capitalizing is, as to my knowledge, two places. One is the payments business, where I have also said in the previous earnings call as well, because we have capitalized. The reason we have is because it's a business which is a regulated business.
We've asked for licenses in some geographies, including India, and there is a sort of asset build-out that happens that we also need to sort of show that we are building out, building the products out. That is number one. The second place where we've done some recently is the AI side. Of course, we've been investing a lot on that side, but in some cases, we're also trying to work together with, let's say, government-funded agencies in a few countries in Europe, as well as in India, where we are looking at grants and all that stuff. We need to show some asset build-out there. That is sort of the bulk of it, I would say. Relative to the size of product build-outs that we do, it's not really material, at least in my view. I think these are very specific small businesses inside the firm.
Understood. That's clear. My second question is.
The other way to look at it, sorry, just so I'm clear about this. These are businesses with a very large future. Even relative to the size, so AI, for example, is growing at 100% for us. I mean, I don't know what the future size of the business is. I don't think anyone knows, but it will become a very large business. Same thing with payments as we scale. These are relative to even the future size of these businesses, the size of the product build-outs actually is fairly small. I think we are probably one of the most efficient shops in the world in terms of building product. Product building takes dollars, takes effort, and takes years of patience, which we have in oodles. That is why for the larger products, there is basically no capitalization that we do.
Understood. Understood. My second question is that if I look at the segmental breakup between sale of software and sale of equipment, and what you said in an earlier answer is that you would look at it like what is one-off versus what is recurring.
Largely.
If I look at sale of software, June versus September, it's down from INR 252 crore to INR 207 crore. And sale of equipment is up from INR 84 crore to INR 150 crore. It seems extremely lumpy. If sale of software services is largely recurring, it shouldn't have fallen so much. Am I missing something in my understanding of this?
So it's not just software. There's a lot of services in there, which basically is the size of the projects that we do. A lot of the skew that you see in Q2, for example, one single project, which is MMRDA, which we got started on, caused a very large skew in terms of moving towards the equipment and licensing side. Some of these variations will happen from one quarter to the other. I would say don't read software and services as pure software. We're not big on, for example, subscriptions. There's obviously always a steady stream of AMCs and all that get captured there, which are like recurring revenues. A lot of it is also project implementations and services revenue, which will go up and down as we close new orders, as we execute on projects.
The relative mix between what is license versus what is service will also change. Depending on the sales mix in a quarter, you will see one of those two going up. If you were skewed towards a license, then that line goes up. If it was a very competitive deal, the license prices were down, but a lot of loading was towards the project work, then that goes up temporarily till the project is getting done. Obviously that number is not there. It's not like a SaaS-style subscription revenue, which you say, okay, how does it vary so much? I mean, some of it is like 20% of it is probably recurring or maybe 25%, but not all of it.
Got it. Understood. Thank you and all the best.
Thank you.
Thank you. The next question comes from the line of Jalaj Manoja. I request you to accept the prompt on your screen. Unmute your audio and video. Introduce the firm you represent and ask a question or give comments.
Hope I'm audible.
Yes, you are.
Okay, Jalaj.
Thanks. . First of all, congrats on a great set of numbers.
No, no, the line is not good. Sorry.
I think your voice is not clear, sir.
Is it better now?
Better, sir.
First of all, congrats on a good set of numbers and the continuous momentum.
Sir, I'm sorry, sir. It's again a bit low, sir.
Give me a sec. Give me a sec.
Jalaj, sir?
Is it better now?
You're not audible, sir. Can you speak a bit louder, please?
Hope I'm audible now.
I can hear. Let's go.
First of all, sir, congrats on a good set of numbers and the continuous momentum. I just wanted to have a view around if I were to break down the banking and the fintech business unit or the vertical as we report it. Could you give some directional view around the newer verticals wherein the NBFC and the fintech and the traditional banking, what we were doing? Could I have some flavor around there? How the progress is? Because I understand that the NBFC and fintech were newer products which we had been investing on. Some direction there or some flavor would be helpful. A request would be if we reach to a sizable amount or a sizable quantum of business in both the businesses separately, we could report them separately also.
So longer run, you're totally correct. I think we will probably at some point start reporting the businesses separately. Fintech, again, you're correct. I think the banking side of it is the larger platforms around lending, transaction banking that we have. Fintech side is where we've done a lot of new product build-outs over the last, I would say, five or six quarters. Where are we? I think fintech is becoming more and more material. Obviously, Sanjay Verma, I think he's been on Investor Days before. He's the President who runs that business. We have built out what we think is probably the most modern retail LO product out in the market today. We've come out with it. This is stuff that it just doesn't just go to NBFCs. It also goes to banks. We have, outside India, of course, we've got a lot of sites for the product.
Outside of India, we had our first win in Saudi recently, and we are implementing it. This is also a fully AI-led product, which we feel we're seeing a lot of traction in Europe, at least in terms of pipeline build-up, and we do think we will win. That business will grow. We are very close to coming up with a brand new loan servicing system, probably out over the next three months. This, again, will be the most cutting-edge, most modern product in the market. We've got a completely new self-service portal, largely on the auto side that we came up with four quarters back. Already a win in New Zealand, a win in the U.S. We're looking at probably some wins in Europe this year with it. I think this, again, is a large auto finance-facing product, which I think will do very well.
The initial wins have been very, very strong, very promising. A lot of sort of AI-native application build-out, agentic application build-out in that space. For example, we announced the win in the U.K. with an SME lender. I think we are probably just a few weeks from going live with it. I think once we go live there, that builds up a solid local reference that we can build on and expand into Europe with. There is a lot of new product build-out, I think, in that business that's happened over the last four quarters. I think it's maturing very fast. Each of these products, I'm convinced, are today the most modern deep products in the market in their respective spaces.
This is going to see a lot of traction, especially in terms of new market push that we are seeing in Europe as well as in Middle East and Africa. I think that's how I would sort of summarize it. I hope that answers the question.
Could you give me some, that answers? Could you give me some sort of quantitative flavor to it also? What sorts of size would we have reached there?
I think it's north of 30% of the overall banking and fintech pie. I would not be able to give you a specific number.
Okay, so you're saying the fintech and the newer products are almost 30% of that company?
Plus, yeah. A lot of the new growth is getting driven from it. Actually, a lot of the new future growth will get driven there.
Understood. Got it. Sir, my second question was around the TIG, what we had been trying to sell it across or outside India. Have you had any success there? How are things shaping up there specifically?
Outside of India, the primary solution line that goes out is the smart mobility transit payment side. That is where I think we are enormously successful. I think the transit payment side is almost 50 and 50. Of course, now we won some large deals in India, so it may get skewed for some time. Typically, I think we had that win in California a few years back, full global RFP. We're live in eight or nine Californian cities. This is the open-loop place, the open-loop win we had. Today, if you go to Disneyland in California on a holiday and you're doing a tap-in tap-out from your card, you're doing it on an Aurionpro validator, the same one you can see in our experience center in Mumbai or Singapore.
If you go on holiday in Maldives and you take any public mode of transport, the whole technology stack is Aurionpro's. Of course, in partnership with Mastercard, who fronts it. The technology solution is ours. You do tap-in tap-out on an Aurionpro unit if you take a ferry or something like that. America, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Mexico, large wins. I think we've proven ourselves. We entered Australia. We entered the U.K. We've proven ourselves as probably the strongest end-to-end solution provider in the space. The very large providers in the space tend to be double-digit billion-dollar players or multi-billion-dollar players. We don't have the balance sheet to go out and try to compete, for example, in a billion-dollar tender or something like that. We tend to collaborate in international deals. We are a very strong partner with Mastercard. We recently started partnering with Visa as well.
For example, the Egypt win, the Maldives was Mastercard. The Egypt win that we announced that we're implementing right now is together with Mastercard. We're collaborating on a lot of projects there. We are now increasingly competing on larger deal sizes across Southeast Asia, across Europe. The international side will continue to grow. I think transit we have built out between the R&D centers in Istanbul, London, and Singapore, and the manufacturing setup in Malaysia and in India, as well as the software piece. We have the whole software chain on it. We also have a payment license in India. You've got the payment chain getting worked on as well. We have today probably the deepest, widest stack in the space. We are probably the most efficient producer of software and hardware in that space. The margin profile of that business keeps getting better every year.
I think this is, in the long run, going to be a key powerhouse of growth for Aurionpro. We intend to be one of the bigger players around globally. We'll continue to push towards it.
Understood, sir. Understood. One last question quickly. Specifically in the businesses, we have one of the projects we have run in TIG, which is the MMRDA or the Metro Lines. Sorry, I'm hopping up on the same question again. What sort of margin profile are we seeing there? If you do not want to talk about that ROC profile, something because the receivables are usually higher in these businesses.
No, they're not higher in the transit business. I don't agree with that. I think it's like, so transit is a beautiful business. One, now with the, our own, we own every point on the value chain now. We even down to having our own manufacturing in this, right? Our own IP, our own mechanisms, as well as our own software. This is the first place we were also putting the clearing out of the back office software as well. The margin profile is very strong in the business. I think there is a reason why we can pretty much compete and win most deals. The reason we were not taking on some transit business in India till recently, and now we got on to take a larger one, is because we feel very confident about the economic profile of this business.
I think it's very, very strong and it's getting better. The second way, transit, generally, we don't face. Initially, in the setup, you may have some milestones to finish to collect some payments during setup time. It's not too problematic. The other thing is, once you are running in steady state, then all money goes into an escrow. Everyone gets their share. It's not problematic from a payment standpoint at all. That's where I would sort of contest that view a little bit. Even if you had a little bit of a milestone delivery while you're doing setup, just given that the contracts are long, over time, the economics improves. Over time, the business actually tends to deliver fairly strong cash flows. At least that's been our experience. We are very selective in the deals that we take on.
We have one of the most competitive stacks out there, at least in India. I think we will only take on business where we feel confident of the economic profile.
This is Debashish. Thank you so much for taking our question. Just one follow-up question to what Jalaj just asked. As far as I understand, in case of TIG is concerned, we are the most kind of end-to-end integrated player where we have the hardware capability also. We have the software capability also. If I remember correctly, we have put in our hardware manufacturing facility in Singapore, I think last year or so. I just wanted to get some sense of what is the competitive intensity, what is the kind of margin profile. If you can compare with your competition in India and give us some sense. Because what I understand, initially in your Lucknow projects in Metro and all, you were not able to take out very significant margin. How have those things changed in recent times?
So look, I think it's important to understand how we sort of get into the business. If you go back to some of the initial deals that we did, I mean, one, we said we want to bet on the transit payments as a space. Why did we want to do it? Because the closed loop to open loop movement, you can't stop. I think it's a movement across the world. Over the next 8-10 years, tens of thousands of transit operators around the world will need to change. This is a fundamentally transformative event that happens in the industry every 40-50 years, and we intend to play it. When we got in, it is like a lot of our competitors right now do it. You're almost like a system integrator. You're taking products from various places, putting it together, and then the margin profile is single digits.
It's not good, but it helps you learn the game. That's where we were five-six years back. Since then, we've steadily built out, and this is one of the only businesses where we've built out both the hardware and software stack. Why? Because if you really looked at the whole value chain, you are able to extract value. You are able to capture margins only when you have that integrated hardware-to-software play. It's very hard to capture it if you play either/or. You say, "I just do software. I just do hardware. I just bring it together." In neither of those places, you'll get the margin profile, which is what most of our competition in this business does. We will drive a very different level of economics from this business.
We used to manufacture on our own the validator side of it as well, but now we outsource it to manufacture in Malaysia. You're right about that Singapore piece, but we actually start outsourcing. The whole R&D is ours. The design is still ours. Everything is up to the BOM level, and then we get it done from the outsourcer because we've been methodically working on every single point, what is the most efficient way to do it. When you put it all together, we are probably one of the more efficient, if not the most efficient player in this game today. We will drive a very different level of economics from just about everyone else. There's a reason why we have such strong partnership in the space with Mastercard, with Wix. We've announced a few.
Overall, there's a reason why we are a preferred partner for everyone because we can do the whole chain, we can do parts of the chain, and we can do all of them efficiently. That's why we are such an independent consortia partner for larger deals as well. I think that's essentially what I would say. I feel very, very good that as the business scales, as we become more and more global. The R&D strengths that we have, the software strengths that we have, the hardware manufacturing strengths that we have, we will be very, very hard to beat in that space.
Thank you very much, sir. We will take one last question from the chat box. I will request Harnishi Shah to review it.
Hi. The question is, what is your opinion about AI as a standalone opportunity?
Look, I think AI, like I said, as a standalone opportunity, it's pretty large. There are two ways. There are three ways we are playing that game. I said, one is the AI-native applications. If you look at the history of any technology, as the technology matures, it doesn't matter what you're looking at. Ultimately, a lot of value capture happens on the application layer. That is where we've traditionally been strong. That is where our strength is. That is where a real bank uses a real application to run its real business process. That is where value gets created. That is where value will get captured. We play that game. We are good at that game. We will be very strong at it. That is number one. The second major play is AI is very new. It's fundamentally transformative.
There can be a lot of value from a single intelligence intervention. It doesn't need to happen on the application layer. It can have the application layer around it, but that specific intervention, depending on which lever you go for. Some banks, some financial institutions may want to start from that intelligence intervention because you say, "That's how I prioritize value." This is where some of the global AI vendors also have been doing work. I don't think this will happen from the likes of the services vendors and all who are kind of making API calls to LLMs and do that. You will still need the whole gamut of suites. The way we built it out is there's a predictive AI suite, which is where you use the classic models to actually drive predictive algos.
You got the GenAI suite, you got the Agentic AI suite, and you bring all of them together to see where does the value get created in the enterprise. I think standalone, at the moment, that is a good-sized game. I think that is getting larger at a furious pace. That itself, Arya will play. We intend to be a strong player in that game. We've got a very mature set of offerings around there. The third game, which is slightly different, is the sort of foundational technology game where we say, "Can we come up with a strong solution to the key challenges to taking models into production," which is explainability, observability, risk, how do you put the guardrails on, even how do you process tabular data, for example. That is the third play. I think number two and number three, both are pure AI plays.
I feel these are very, very large plays for us to play or for Arya to play over the next several years. That will obviously need a lot. I mean, we've got probably one of the strongest teams in the country today, but it will need a lot more investment as the field matures. I think both are, in my head, they are linked, but they are independent races. You do not need to win both of them to be very, very large, but we intend to run both of them with very, very strong, building up a very strong set of assets and play that. Does it make sense? Oh, this is a chat bot. Okay.
Thank you, sir. Due to the time constraints, that would be the last question for the day. I would now like to hand over the conference to Mr. Ashish Rai for closing comments.
Thanks, everyone, for joining this call. I'll come together again next quarter, and we'll share where the business is. Four years back, when we started this pivot, there were a set of hard choices to make. I think we made the hard choices. I think we've proven that the model works. We need to double down on the strategy that works. AI is a fundamentally transformative event. That's probably happening for the first time in all of our lives. We feel that is transformative for how technology is used in an enterprise. We will methodically go about building the set of assets as well as the applications and will play the game to win. Thank you for taking time to join this today, and we'll meet again next quarter. Thank you.
Thank you, sir. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference. You may now leave the meeting.