Ladies and gentlemen, good day, and welcome to KFin Technologies 3Q FY2026 earnings call, hosted by IIFL Capital Services Limited. As a reminder, all participant lines will be in the listen-only mode, and there will be an opportunity for you to ask questions after the presentation concludes. Should you need assistance during the conference call, please signal an operator by pressing star then zero on your touch-tone phone. Please note that this conference is being recorded. I now hand the conference over to Mr. Devesh Agarwal from IIFL Capital Services Limited. Thank you, and over to you, sir.
Thank you, Ekta. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the 3Q FY 2026 earnings call of KFin Technologies Limited. Today from the company, we have with us Sreekanth Nadella, MD and CEO; Vivek Mathur, CFO; and Amit Murarka, CFO, International Business, and Head of Investor Relations and M&A. I would now hand over the call to Vivek for his opening remarks. Thereafter, Sreekanth will share the key developments in the quarter, and after that, we'll open the floor for Q&A session. Thank you, and over to you, Vivek.
Thank you, Devesh. Good morning, everyone. This is Vivek Mathur, CFO for KFin Technologies Limited. This time I'm starting with, you know, the good news of successful integration of Ascent with KFint ech, and you would have seen the results, and I'll give you some color on the financials, and then after that, I'll hand over to Sreekanth for the business commentary. The overall performance for the quarter has, you know, the revenue from operations, which have grown to INR 323 crore, which is 11.4% growth for the same quarter versus last year same quarter, and a sequential growth of 4.5% quarter-on-quarter. For the nine months, this is without Ascent. If you look at including Ascent, our top line growth, you know, has been very robust for the quarter.
It's 27.9%, year-on-year for the same quarter and 19.9% sequentially quarter-on-quarter. So you can see the impact of Ascent's top line coming in, where the growth has been, you know, sequentially without Ascent, 4.5% and, with Ascent, 19.9%. For the nine months ended December 31, 2025, the revenue was INR 906 crore, which is a 12.2% growth year-on-year without Ascent, and INR 954 crore, including Ascent, which is an 18% growth year-on-year. The EBITDA has also gone up, 14.6% year-on-year and stands at, INR 149.5 crore without Ascent and INR 151.6 crore with Ascent.
You know, the growth year- on- year, including Ascent, was 16.1% and sequentially 11.7% for the quarter. If you look at nine months, including Ascent, we are at, you know, 12.5% growth for the nine months in terms of the EBITDA at INR 401 crore. So, EBITDA margins have also been, you know, well within our guidance in terms of including Ascent, it is 40.9% for the quarter, which is a, you know, a dip from the last quarter for the nine months at 300 basis points because of the, you know, the integration that we have done.
There are charges related to purchase price allocation in terms of client contracts, amortization, and brand amortization of about INR 2.8 crore for this quarter, which is the impact. Quarter-on-quarter, you will see an impact of INR 3.3 crore in terms of amortization in case in Singapore because of the Ascent acquisition. But we'll continue to remain range-bound. The EBITDA margin for the quarter without Ascent was 46.3%, and for the nine months ended FY 2026 at 44% without Ascent and 42% with Ascent. You know, it is overall resulting in core PAT going up sequentially by 8% and year-on-year by 11.8% without Ascent.
With Ascent, the growth in core PAT-core PAT means without the impact of the one-time hit of Labour Code, which is about INR 8.6 crore, and therefore, the core PAT means without the one-time impact of Labour Code. So for the nine months ended December 25, the year-on-year growth, including Ascent, for the core PAT for the quarter was 9.1%, sequentially 5.4% growth, and for the year, INR 268.9 crore, it's at 8.6% growth year-on-year. Our PAT margins at the end of Q3, including Ascent, are at 28.2%. For the quarter, including Ascent, is at 26.5%.
Without Ascent, for the quarter is 31.2%, and for the nine months, it's 29.9%, which is well within the range that we have been giving the guidance for. We are having cash and cash equivalents of INR 487 crore without Ascent, and with Ascent, INR 507 crore. And the diluted EPS is at 5.30 with Ascent and 5.44 without Ascent for the quarter. And annualized nine months is 15.13, which is a growth of 5.5%, including Ascent. It will be interesting to note the mix of, you know, the revenue change that has happened. The domestic mutual fund revenue for the quarter now contributes 59.8% of total revenue. International Investor Solutions is now 16.7%.
So domestic mutual fund used to be in Q3 FY 2025, about 71%, which has come down to about 60% now because of the acquisition of Ascent. And the International Investor Solutions, which used to be around 4%, is now in the range of about 16.7% in Q3 FY 2026. Issuer Solutions continues to be in the range of 13%. Alternates about 5.5%. NPS and other services around 1% each. And GBS, which is a business which we are winding up, is becoming negligible over a period of time. So our objective has been to move towards diversification, and it's a true reflection of how the future quarters are going to look like.
This time we integrated Ascent, effective 13 October 2025, so you will see, you know, the impact of Ascent, on a going forward basis on similar lines. As a result of, you know, the change in, you know, the ETF for metals, you would have seen that the domestic mutual fund, you know, yield has slightly come down by about 2.6%. And that is something which we believe is, a phenomena where there is a lot of participation, from the investor community in terms of metals, ETF metals. And there is almost a 200 basis point shift in terms of, AUM mix towards passives, and that has come down a little bit on equity and debt, respectively.
That's more to do with, you know, the market commentary that Sreekanth will cover. But this is what I wanted to talk about in terms of financial performance, including Ascent and without Ascent, to start with. Over to you, Sreekanth, for the business performance and the developments.
Thank you so much, Vivek. Very good morning, and a warm welcome to one and all. We felt it was a good way to segue into the business performance, unlike typically with the business commentary, then falling into accounting. Given there are, you know, there is an acquisition, there is a consolidation, and then everyone's keen to hear in terms of with and without in terms of the progress and traction of the organization. I wanted to make sure that we level set and baseline the numbers, now that, you know, we are reasonably familiar with the numbers, and of course, we'd be happy to take more questions around that. By and large, you know, satisfied with the quarter performance. There are controllables and there are non-controllables.
I think as a management and, as a board of the organization, over the past X number of years, we've been championing the cause of driving more and more attention to, the controllable items beyond the vagaries of the market, in order to de-risk, the organization from overconcentration, in order to de-risk our investors in terms of, you know, predictability, or lack of it, given the uncertainties both on macros as well as micros in terms of the financials. I guess, a headline statement is, the fact that, the mutual funds, domestically for us today contribute to, about 60%. Now, that includes, 6% of revenue, which is non-related to market, which is basically the value-added solutions and, technology-driven, outcomes we deliver to various clientele.
If we take that aside, pure market-driven revenue now is down well below 55%, and it is our intent and the stated commitment that we want, as we grow other businesses much faster, would be able to reduce, you know, reliance on one asset class and one geography under 50% into the next couple of years. That said, our continued focus to win mandates in mutual funds and deliver exceedingly strong values for our clients to grow faster continues to be steadfast. If I were to draw some metrics to your attention, we won two out of the two new launches that have happened in the mutual funds in terms of mandates. We won prestigious mandate of Nuvama and Monarch.
And of course, as we move forward, Bajaj as well become operational and, you know, I'm sure we'll be able to continue to add a lot of value to our clients. The overall market share of AUM for KFintech continues to rise from about 30% in 2020 to now 32.7%. So there's market share gains, even if there is a marginal dip in the equity side of it. And I'm sure everyone's respectful of the fact that that is the predisposition of the clients, rather than KFintech in terms of where they see more focus, more traction, and more growth to come. There were times when we had a lot more equity exposure.
Now, over the past couple of months or so, there's been strong traction on ETFs, especially driven by the gold and silver, and that has given a marginal decline in the yield and correspondingly the share of equity into the overall AUM. Outside of that, in terms of the overall win rate, you know, it's about 60%. We won 23 out of the last 38 mutual fund houses that have launched in our, you know, in our country.
The market share in SIP continues to be strong, a little over 37%, which I always believe will be the you know, critical determinant factor in terms of where I expect the overall market share to move towards to, as this is the sticky retail book, and it tends to propel the overall AUM into that direction over a period of time. Moving away from mutual funds, Issuer Solutions and also RTA business, you know, we've been calling out the importance of you know, adding significant value in this direction to transformation as well as you know, significantly elevated sales performance, including orchestrating several transitions you know, into the industry.
Happy to inform you that our current market share, in terms of and of course, this is as measured by the market cap of the companies we manage on the Nifty 500 now is about 50%. It's about 51.4%, to be precise. We, at this point in time, you know, while at the time of release of the numbers, you know, we're about 9,877 corporates. Happy to inform you that we just touched 10,000, you know, corporates on the issuer solutions. Of course, about 9,000 plus are unlisted, and we hope they become listed at some point in time.
But the buoyancy in the IPO market into the previous three quarters definitely has helped, despite the fact that the retail participation in the market had been tepid. Many retail investors did move out of the secondary market, which obviously will have a bearing on our financials. But in spite and despite of that, we clocked a very strong 22% plus year-on-year growth in the issuer solutions. The overall folios that we manage today puts us head and shoulder above biggest of the RTAs in the world. We manage roughly over 35 crore folios at this moment in time. This is just India.
And as the acquisition of Ascent and as we drive forward international expansion, I'm very confident that we will be in the top three into the next five years in terms of the total quantum of investors volume of transactions as we handle, and I'm pretty sure the revenues would follow soon after that. Now, these two being our traditional businesses, you know, it had been truly our intent to orchestrate several new lines of businesses. One, to de-risk the overall business from concentration. Two, to capitalize on the momentum of various different asset classes, various different business services, and various different geographies.
All three of them, all three vectors, if I may, with an intent to, you know, drive faster growth, and, you know, continue to, create moat, all with the singular intent to become the first large global fund administrator based out of India. What has that done? The acquisition that Vivek had spoken about adds about 328 additional clients in the form of Ascent. And also very happy to inform you that this seems to be a milestone quarter for us. We have touched 100 corporates in our own GFS business, which is KFin's organic international expansion.
We've added seven new logos in the last quarter, which gets the number to about 100, 328 being Ascent clients, getting the overall clients to about 428, managing an overall AUM of now about $41 billion, up from $10 billion till about a quarter back, largely on account of the acquisition. We continue to look at the Asian markets, and the mark-to-market gains have been, you know, less than tepid. You know, one area where India had performed exceedingly well over the past three-four years in the form of mark-to-market gains, you know, probably is also seeing sideways movement in the last 18 months.
But I'm pretty hopeful, into the coming quarters, the Southeast Asian countries' mark-to-market gains would be higher by contributing to faster growth of our international business in the form of AUM-driven revenue. Otherwise, much of the revenue growth had been on account of winning several new mandates literally every single month. What had been probably the standout, you know, business performance for us, albeit on a very small scale, is National Pension System. Very happy to inform you that not only have we broken even on this business, we have clocked a very healthy, close to 30% EBITDA margin. We have also continued to grow 3x the pace of the industry. The industry grew at about roughly 12%.
We grew about 35% in the quarter that has just concluded, having hit yet another milestone of 2 million subscribers, thereby adding a revenue expansion and a margin expansion, which we believe will continue to be accretive as the scale of NPS you know will see an organic and an extremely resilient growth given an extremely low churn in this portfolio. Alternative investment funds and the wealth the other lines of business you know and continues to expand rather fast. You know, we were at about 36%+ market share into the previous quarter. We have enhanced that to about 39% totally in terms of the alternative investment funds. Clocking an overall AUM about INR 1.8 trillion.
As we speak today, we are inching close to INR 2 trillion AUM being managed by us. Mindful of the fact that unlike in the case of mutual funds, here, a decent part of this AUM covers both transfer agency and fund accounting. So it's a full stack, service, much like global fund administrators, how they provide for the rest of the world. And we believe that it is extremely important for us to cover, nearly all business services that are required for a fund manager, so as to deliver to our, coveted goal of, being an XaaS provider, which is everything as a service. Which we created with a very simple notion that a fund manager should do what he or she does best, which is deliver returns to their investors.
If that being the North Star of any fund manager, then we believe that it is the duty of administrators such as us, to be able to take the headache away in terms of technology, in terms of compliance, in terms of operations, sales, marketing, what have you, allowing them to, you know, deliver superior returns, you know, to their clients. In terms of the overall, you know, performance of. I want to just take, you know, probably a minute or two in terms of the Ascent demographics itself. As we all know, it's an entity that is present in about 18 different countries. About nine of them have been reasonably newly orchestrated.
Which effectively means that, you know, they are yet to and will be fighting, you know, in a relatively short period of time in terms of their own growth vector. Otherwise, currently, much of the revenue comes from five different geographies. Singapore being the largest, followed by Cayman, Middle East, Hong Kong, and that part of the region. And, as we have now opened offshore locations in the U.S., in U.K., and many countries into the Asian side of it, including Taiwan and Japan, etc.
We expect, through, you know, as the Indian feet on street, we'll be able to unlock value into each of these geographies, even as, we have, you know, rather, you know, key focus in continuing to consolidate our current positioning in our growth geographies and grow at a much faster clip. And of course, the entity had grown about 30% year-on-year, with the potential to grow much faster. It had been, the, you know, pretty busy couple of months for us in terms of integration with Ascent, both at, finance and accounting level. It's been a phenomenal job by our, you know, F&A, you know, and the M&A teams to be able to integrate, an entity whose calendar year does not align with us.
Currencies do not align with us. Accounting policies do not necessarily align with that of India's. Now that that's done, we have simultaneously worked on labels. One, to drive a higher clip of revenue in the form of upsell, cross-sell. There are close to 60 different products that we have identified in KFin Technologies that we've created, which have global relevance, which is something that I would you know expect Ascent to be able to leverage in terms of their faster growth elsewhere. Similarly, many of these geographies are very large mutual fund markets. As we all know, U.S., for example, is you know spectacularly large in terms of mutual funds.
We are identifying, you know, how to, you know, push the head start in terms of initiating our services in much of the other parts of the world beyond where we currently are present. And as we all know today, KFint ech offers similar solutions in Malaysia, Philippines, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Thailand. And clearly, there are 13 more geographies that we believe we can, you know, take things forward to. It had also been a very interesting quarter in the form of us opening a very large account in pensions in Southeast Asia, which also has a great relevance in Australia and into the Middle East.
Having won a large contract in the previous quarter, about which we have announced already, but then, you know, we are into the midst of delivery, and we believe that there is a, you know, a strong potential for driving pensions in addition to, the core asset management solutions for mutual funds, and alternatives per se. In terms of, cost management, you know, we have razor-sharp focus to be able to drive productivity, but in extremely scientific manner. We never take a knee-jerk, reaction in the form of looking at the market correction, so on and so forth.
It had always been our focus that even and especially during the tough times, you know, investing, you know, front-loading investments to drive value to capitalize when the market's down, had been our mantra, and we'll continue to do so. None of these conversations in today's world can be concluded without the strategy around artificial intelligence. Much like any other sector, we believe that our industry, too, is ripe for disruption for AI. And as we always believed, it is not for somebody else to come and disrupt us. It is for us to disrupt our own selves, and hence, our comprehensive strategy on AI.
It cuts across both the generative side of AI as well as on the agentic side of AI and has started to yield, you know, a certain level of comfort in terms of deploying it organization scale, at enterprise scale. It would be very important for all of us to note that a lot of it is still to be tested at enterprise scale, even if it has a lot of relevance in B2C space. We have, however, gone ahead and already created two platforms, which are AI native, and both of them are interesting in the space of Issuer solutions. One in the space of bond market and one in the space of investor relations. Both of them are about to be launched into the coming weeks.
Very, very excited in terms of how we could do it. But the sum and substance is, we managed to deliver them by reducing the cycle time of the delivery by about 45%-50%, thereabout. Typically some of these platforms would have taken anywhere between 5-6 months. We managed to deliver them in about three months. The Gen AI part of it is already live in some of our hyperscale analytics platforms that we have given to the industry, as well as many of our clients. We believe that we continue to deliver many such solutions, you know, for our corporates.
The big thing, of course, is the replatforming of our core MF itself, as we all know, which has been, you know, built over the past three, 3.5 decades, is going into, you know, sharp pace. We have gone live with some of the biggest business processes, modules into the previous quarter, which gives us a great deal of comfort as we start driving the migration of existing clientele and delivering value at scale and at speeds that the industry had not seen. Today, much of our technical technological infrastructure resilience and speed, now we no longer speak in seconds, we speak in milliseconds in terms of responses to our digital ecosystem. There is still many a mile to walk in this direction.
Of course, you know, but that said, I think it's been a very good quarter in terms of not just tech adoption, but pioneering some of even the untested technologies, finally, some of which we can't just speak yet about, but we will in due course of time. So broadly, that's been you know, a quarter for us. You know, very excited to look into the last quarter of this year. You know, we continue to see a mix of headwinds and tailwinds. Headwinds largely in the form of, of course, the market performance and continued outperformance of passives over actives, so on and so forth.
But, you know, the controllable parts of it, which is effectively new growth, geographies, new growth, business processes, new growth, you know, asset mixes, you know, we believe will continue to provide a huge hedge, including hopefully some amount of currency hedge as well. So that's broadly, you know, the update at my end. So we continue to drive our growth forward, keeping a very sharp focus on risk management, and cost management at it. Thank you. We're happy to take questions now.
Thank you very much. We will now begin the question and answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star and one on their touchtone telephone. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, you may press star and two. Participants are requested to use handsets while asking a question. Ladies and gentlemen, we will wait for a moment while the question queue assembles. The first question is from the line of Karthik Chellappa from Indus Capital Advisors. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Thank you very much for the opportunity. Hope I'm audible. I have two questions. The first question is, in this quarter, if I were to look at our Issuer Solutions, we've seen a sharp margin expansion. And if I just look at the incremental EBIT on incremental revenue, that also looks pretty high. So just curious to see whether there were any non-recurring items in this, and what drove the strength in this particular segment this quarter? That's my first question.
Thank you, Karthik. And as always, pleasure to be talking to you. So there is no one-time item and extraordinary item. In fact, we are ruing the opportunity of not having such events. Some of those were to have fructified in terms of mergers, demergers, and rights issues, et cetera. It had been a reasonably quiet nine months in corporate India, so hopefully we'll have better quarters ahead of us where we get one time. But this particular quarter's growth on Issuer Solutions, Karthik, is just purely organic growth, which is, one, a compounding of several IPOs that we have done in the past year, as well as in this year, which drove our annuity revenue.
Q3 traditionally, as you know, is always a bigger quarter into the Issuer solutions in the form of corporate actions, Q2 and Q3. Q3 more pronouncedly, you know, into the December quarter. So in fact, we can already see, you know, reduction of corporate activity into this quarter in the Issuer solutions. So that's broadly it. I think even in terms of the portfolio fee is a combination of two factors. I guess winning several such deals and transitioning some large accounts into us at higher rates helped us to improve the throughput. Though I would attribute much of the portfolio increment largely towards a reduced number of folios, which is because retail participation had come down in the last quarter.
But the corporate actions revenue, when distributed over a reduced number of folios, obviously will semantically show to be a higher per price folio. So I wouldn't read too much into that. I think the math would automatically adjust itself into the coming quarters, in terms of the per, you know, folio pricing. But yes, I think this is just literally a combination of, you know, fabulous number of, you know, a growth in amount of growth in terms of number of net new number of companies added into this business, and the corporate actions that are taken on a smaller retail, you know, on a retail investor base.
Okay, excellent. My next question is: if I were to look at our standalone, on the employee expenses side, at least for the last two-three quarters, that has actually been rising in single digits. While that has given us a very good operating leverage at a standalone margin level, I'm just curious to see, how sustainable this is. And to, to relate that to your point on how you're looking for AI, an opportunity to disrupt yourself rather than somebody else disrupting you and investing a lot more in productivity-enhancing measures, whether the employee expenses rising in single digits for the standalone business alone is something we can sustain, or do you think that should normalize, as we actually gain in scale?
Thanks, Karthik. No, so we continue to, you know, look at the payroll cost. You know, what we have done over a period of time is drove, you know, what used to be a significantly bottom of the pyramid, you know, kind of made it into more like a rectangle, and then possibly it'll go further up. It is counterintuitive. You know, everybody expects services industry to be like a traditional pyramid with a lot of individuals in terms of, you know, carrying out activities at an operations level.
But a shift to a high-tech business almost always calls for you know seniors and you know technically well-equipped individuals who will drive a lot of automation to reduce a laborious manual activity. Part of this is you know it is actually not a reduction of cost as much as you know improvement of services you know which we accomplish through you know removing the manual error element. As we process crore and crore of transactions. Today, we process little over you know INR 1.5 crore transactions a day. Almost $300 billion worth of money gets settled on our accounts. The margin payroll is negligible. So basically, what we are doing is you know the count you know the pyramid is transitioning.
The count probably will not grow much further. And as this entire senior, you know, technically strong, you know, team tries to drive more and more automation straight through AI, I expect the payroll costs, you know, to, you know, probably come down. But that will have a compensatory cost escalation in the form of technology. Now, some of it may be one time, some of it may last more than a, you know, couple of years. But that is very much required, you know, as we, an organization trying to be a global entity and Indian mutual fund itself. You know, today, touching almost $1 trillion, poised to cross $2 trillion-$3 trillion into the next, you know, five-six years.
The volume of transactions will expand in a phenomenal manner. And with every transaction increase, the data exposure to us increases tenfold. So, it is in that direction. So I think I draw comfort in the fact that we could keep the payroll costs around that number. It may remain to be so, but what you will see is probably the non-payroll costs expanding. But all, you know, we will, we will endeavor to keep, you know, our margin ranges around 40%-45%, you know, despite the cycles.
Thank you. Thank you very much for the detailed response. That's all from my side. Wish the management team all the very best for the coming quarters.
Thank you. The next question is from the line of Shrenik Mehta from Indo Alps Wealth. Please go ahead.
Hi. I wanted to ask you some question about the Ascent acquisition, and how you're seeing this to become EPS accretive over a period of time. Currently, we obviously see that their EBITDA is slightly lower compared to the Indian operations. How do you see this evolving? When do you see this becoming EPS accretive?
Thank you. I'll take the question. So, on a cash basis, Ascent is already EPS accretive, notwithstanding certain accounting, you know, adjustments that were required, in the form of different tax liabilities, et cetera. But, by and large, it is, however, a fair observation that the margin of Ascent is well below that of KFintech's business, and rightfully so. You know, KFintech's been in existence for nearly 40 years, and Ascent is, you know, five, six years into it. And, much like, you know, extremely fast-growing businesses, you know, you would see the initial spring of growth, largely coming, you know, in the form of negative margins.
In fact, you know, for the fact that they have already turned around the corner, both at EBITDA and at PAT level, is a true mark of, you know, phenomenal leadership of the founders at Ascent. In terms of, you know, not just expanding globally into 18 different countries, supporting some of the most complex fund structures, you know, into private equity, into hedge funds, into digital funds, so on and so forth. You know, they have also managed to keep the cost, you know, very, very firmly, you know, in the finisher, to ensure that the margins, you know, do improve.
And of course, you know, it is only through the continued expansion of margins through one, scale expansion, and two, cost optimization, will there be a significant fortification in terms of the monetization of the overall asset for both the entities as well. So, I expect, you know, every quarter, there may be quarters which may be adversarial in terms of the market movements.
But by and large, as you may have seen in every other business we have done so far, whether it is alternative investment funds, whether it is international, whether it is national pension system, KFintech too had seen the first, you know, two to three to four years, you know, steadily improving, you know, its margins, including the acquisitions that we have made, which were negative at the time of acquisition. But slowly, you know, gravitating towards our organizational EBITDA margins, and now contributing pretty much, you know, to strong growth. So, while you do not see, you know, Ascent numbers kind of meeting KFintech's into immediate future, but it is definitely a three-year plan that we believe we can get that far.
And in fact, at that point in time, we expect Ascent's margins to be even higher than that of KFintech's margins in the context of, faster global growth, higher yield that we derive, and, higher productivity, given a fairly, standardized, you know, fund administration that exists globally as compared to that of India. India continues to be extremely bespoke, and that's the reason why the AIF growth in India, you know, comes with, probably slightly lower margins as against, similar growth in the international markets. I hope I answered your question.
Great. Just another question in the same line. Are there any thoughts about establishing some kind of a GCC, kind of an operation, given that, you know, you will have far more expansion globally at a faster pace in the medium to long term?
We will be. In fact, work is already on. It's a great question. We have secured license from GIFT City, you know, and created a subsidiary in that direction. Our intention is to consolidate over time the delivery of all international business into that entity in Gujarat. And, in addition to, you know, talent expansion that's happening and a phenomenal number of opportunities that are coming up in this city. As we all know, we are probably the only entity in this city who basically is able to administer fund solutions for mutual funds, retail funds, international funds, India domestic AIFs, and also issuer solutions.
We have taken the first two companies that have gone public in GIFT City, you know, as the registrar and transfer agent. Being located in GIFT City, you know, has inherent advantages over and above the opportunity there. You know, some opportunities around tax credits. You know, there is a 20-year tax credit that we'll get. But it's still early days. But short answer to your question is yes, we are thinking. We are invested in creating a large GCC, especially for the international operations. In the operations, you know, I guess our strategy had been different as we have explained several times over, which is to move away from tier-one cities into the tier-two, tier-three cities.
You know, part of that is cost, part of, part of that is, retention of talent. But above all, we are seeing, you know, fabulous amount of, talent available in tier two, tier three cities. We believe that it is also our social responsibilities to move to as many of those cities as possible within India, to be able to provide employment and do our own little bit. For example, today, our presence in Bhubaneswar, you know, is, expanding towards, 500-odd individuals. Vijayawada, you know, has about 300 people.
Gujarat is expanding, and you know, we are looking at more tier two, tier three cities to be able to drive you know, some of the risk-away concentration risks that exist in large tier one cities like Hyderabad, Mumbai, Bangalore, so on and so forth. So yeah, GCC is for international. India domestic strategy is largely hyper scale, hyper local, moving to a lot of cities rather than being present in one large city.
All right. Thank you so much.
Thank you. The next question is from the line of Lalit Mohan Deo from Equirus Securities. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Hi, good morning, and congratulations on your quarter numbers. I have two, three questions. So firstly, on the international business, excluding Ascent, so there we are seeing that, like, the AUM growth on a sequential basis seems to be around 9%-10%. Whereas if we just look at the revenue, so that seems to be broadly flat on a sequential basis. So just wanted to understand how the revenues in the international business will pick up in that segment, excluding the Ascent business. Second question was on the Ascent business itself. Now, when we are looking at improving the margins of in this business.
Just wanted to understand, like the margin improvement, will it be on both accounts, both on the employee expenses side as well as on the other expenses side? Or, and where do we intend to take this in each of these segments by, in the next two years?
Sure. Thank you. I, I'll take the second question first. I think part of it I've already answered. Every acquisition that we have, every new line of business we have, we usually have a three-year strategy. The intent is, that we challenge ourselves constantly to push each of those businesses to arrive at similar margin profile as the rest of the organization within 36 months. Thus far, we have been vastly successful, with the exception of one odd business lines, you know, for various different reasons. But by and large, we see a very good line of, visibility in terms of Ascent, you know, getting that far, within that, time, frame, into the 36-month, time frame. What will contribute to that? I think every lever that is possible.
Part of that is just simple scale. That means as you keep expanding your revenue profile, a lot of your fixed overheads get absorbed, and hence your margin expands. Which is typically a, a symptom that you would have seen. Even National Pension System, for example, for us, it's been a loss-making business for the last four years. Not just have we turned around, you know, we are kind of looking at a very, very healthy double-digit margin in just a matter of a few quarters, which is the same thing that will happen. So there is scale that will drive it. Payroll cost, you know, to an extent, I, I won't put my top bet in payroll cost optimization in Ascent.
A business that is designed, built to grow geographically, with a strategic ambition to become a global fund administrator, we should not be, you know, cutting corners in the form of feet on street, into the geographies, having started, you know, so many countries' operations. In fact, I'd expect probably some amount of expansion in that, even though productivity will continue to significantly expand. So for the same quantum of work, we may need fewer people, but in general, we'll need a lot more people, as we grow our business, you know, into this 30%-35% kind of a clip, you know, year-on-year. It is probably the non-payroll expenditure where we may see immediate amount of traction in terms of optimization of costs.
So for example, real estate costs, much of, you know, Ascent is also present in India and in Malaysia in terms of headcount. 200 out of 300 people are based in these two locations, which is where KFintech also has very strong presence. So we will be consolidating real estate costs, infrastructure costs. As we all know, we are one of the largest data fiduciary in the country with over 8 PB-9 PB of data. The amount of support we can afford, I mean, we can afford in terms of consolidating, whether it is data centers, whether it is licenses, whether it is, you know, tech manpower, digital UI, UX, so on and so forth, is quite substantive.
The last six weeks had been in that direction, our focus to be able to identify the non-payroll costs, synergies that we can drive them down, and hence the, you know, reasonably quick margin uptake. Now, obviously, many of these are contractual in nature, so we'll have to wait for the life cycle of that particular contract to end. Or if I have a multi-year contractual life cycle, we might probably look at a premature termination, but then, you know, be able to identify how we can optimize the cost based on the cave-in zone structures. So yeah. So basically, every lever that is there, you know, we are constantly working on, including the upsell, cross-sell component of it.
I think the first question was about domestic funds, if I'm not wrong, in terms of the AUM growth being there, but, you know, the revenue not necessarily translating into as much. We've known this, beginning of this year itself. I think you probably would have seen a trend, you know, kind of, through the year, which is a combination of, you know, a certain amount of extraordinary discounts that were given at the beginning of the year, in the very month of April. You know, obviously meant that the AUM growth need not necessarily have translated into the revenue growth into this year, but the base effect, you know, will end by end of Q4.
As the base effect ends, what you would start seeing is a growth of revenue nearly dovetailing that of the AUM growth into the coming year. So, to that extent, it is expected, anticipated, and has already been modeled into our books.
Yeah, thank you, sir. But actually, the question was on the international investment solutions, including the asset.
Yeah. Sreekanth, I'll take over this question.
Sure. Sure.
On the international business, while we have seen that, you know, the revenue has gone up without Ascent, for the GFS is about 5.7% sequentially, quarter-on-quarter, and a little more than 11% year-on-year. The AUM has come down slightly, and the bps AUM has gone up, but the bps has come down slightly from 4.73 to 4.13, YTD, December 2025. That is largely because many of the funds are still on the minimum fee. And as they cross the minimum fee, the yield will, the, you know, the yield will come in, in terms of bps-based pricing.
We do expect that, you know, the newer contracts coming in, platform revenue coming in from international business that Sreekanth talked about earlier, the overall bps will improve as we go forward and start winning larger contracts, which, Sreekanth alluded to earlier in his, commentary. Does that help, Lalit?
Sir, just answer from the data you gave. So, could you just give us a split of the Issuer Solutions business between folios and corporate actions and IPO?
I'm sorry, we didn't get you. Can you repeat? Yeah, sorry, the voice is a little muffled. I'm not able to hear very well.
So, I refer to that split of issuer solutions business between folios, corporate actions, and IPOs as an income.
You want a breakup in terms of how much is the percentage of revenue mix in corporate registry, correct?
Yes, yes, yes.
Yeah. So, corporate registry, 47.6% of the revenue comes from folio maintenance, about 40.2% comes from corporate action, and 12.2% comes from value-added services.
Yeah. Thank you.
Thank you. The next question is from the line of Mohit Mangal from Centrum Capital Limited. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Yeah, thanks for the opportunity, and congratulations on a strong set of numbers. My first question is towards the yield. So you said that, you know, the yield contracted a lot in this quarter owing to a shift in the mix towards the ETFs. So going forward, if this trend kind of continues, right, so maybe for the next, say, three-four quarters, then how do you think we should look at the yield contraction versus the AUM growth? That's my first question. Second question is towards the issuer solution. So I wanted to know, I mean, say, considering a medium term of, say, two-three years, now that we already have about 168 odd million folios, how do you think the growth would kind of span out in this segment? Yeah, that's it.
I want to just clarify the point about the yield correction. It is marginal. It is not substantive. I commented about the yield correction at the beginning of the year, right? When seven-eight of large contracts, you know, went into renegotiation phase. This quarter reduction is extremely marginal, and that is on account of asset mix shift more towards gold-silver ETFs. And hence, I'd expect the yield to stabilize to where it is now, and probably even go up. You know, should this frenzy of, you know, the metals, ETFs, you know, like everything else, you know, there is seasonality and cyclicality. I expect good sense would prevail, and over a period of time, the equities, you know, would come back in favor.
So there is no significant yield correction. I just want to correct that, you know, particular math on that. My apologies. The second question was on what again?
Issuer solutions. So basically, we have about 168 million folios. So just wanted to know for the next two-three years, how do you see this panning out? Yeah.
No, it should. See, if you see the folio expansion is a component of, you know, number of Demat holders. Now, which we all know is continuing to expand over 25%, thereabout. And a vast majority of Indians still do not have a Demat account. And I expect, you know, that we continue to, you know, grow as the overall financialization as a team expands in India, and the movement from savings into investments as a, a philosophical trend changes. That is one. So which is more Demat accounts, hopefully, will translate into more participation in the secondary markets and hence more folios. Second, is, of that, how many of the clients are, the clients with record-keeping services today?
That is where I was stating that our market share has now gone to 51.2% in terms of the market cap of the Nifty 500 companies. As we win more and more companies and we transition more and more companies, consequently, the folios will continue to expand. Third item is the market performance itself. Retail investors, you know, as we all know, is, I'm actually speaking to the choir, is generally a fairly risk-off approach when the markets do not give conducive returns over a period of time, and which is what we are seeing. I think, you know, Indian markets have barely moved in the last 18 months, and the first 12 months, the folio participation or the retail participation was still good. That was the previous year.
This year, we have started to see a reasonable amount of movement away by the folios or by the retail investors from the secondary markets. We still continue to grow because of the net new number of clients we have added, and hence the retail participation in those. So what I expect to see, you know, should the market turn around, is actually a double whammy, which is a lot many more companies to go public and a retail folio expanding, and thereby the revenue expansion to be even faster clip than what it is at this point in time. Not to mention, you know, should the results be very good, so will the corporate actions be. So it's hard to predict.
There is a lot of macros associated with that, but we believe that we have unlocked, you know, this, you know, what used to be a 10%, 11%, 12% kind of a growth momentum business, into anywhere between, you know, 15%, 16% to 20%, you know, kind of a growth business year-on-year. And that, if that were to fructify, that means the number of folios will have to expand at a faster clip, which is what I think will happen.
Understood. This is helpful. Thanks, and wish you all the best.
Thank you.
Thank you. Before we take the next question, a reminder to all the participants that you may press star and one to ask a question. The next question is from the line of Devesh Agarwal from IIFL Capital Services Limited. Please go ahead.
Hello. Yeah, Sreekanth, my first question would be on the AI emergence. Although you did touch upon it, but you mentioned that it's more of a basically an opportunity rather than a risk. But what I wanted to understand, what I always thought that one of the entry barrier for any third RTA to come in is the vast amount of data that you need to process and obviously the initial cost, which would lead to losses. But with AI coming in, does it make commercial sense for a third RTA to emerge, even if they have to do this activity for a new mutual fund or a digital-only mutual funds?
Hi, Devesh. Great question, and something that's I'm often asked about and something that we ask ourselves often enough as well in terms of, you know, as a part of our risk management, we have to consider the potential impact of a third entrant. I mean, we, we should never be arrogant to think that, you know, there won't be a third or a fourth or a fifth, entrant. I do believe a possibility always exists. But world over, if you see the phenomenon, inevitably, you know, it'll end up with, you know, two or three, you know, consolidation.
For example, in our industry, while today it may appear like there are only two RTAs, if we kind of, you know, take a step back and look at what was the situation prior to 2020, just five years back, there were several more RTAs. There were actually eight RTAs when I joined this industry myself, and even more prior to that, right? What happened is basically consolidation. Consolidation happened because until and unless there is significant scale in this business, it is, you know, it's near impossible to get both ends meet, right? Even if you have very deep pockets, you know, want to burn cash for a decade, you know, it would still be a very tough thing to accomplish, you know, in this business.
Also considering the fact that our own yields, you know, what used to be 6-7 basis points are now about 3 basis points . For a third entrant to come in, you know, obviously there has to be a business case for anyone to take the risk and cut over. And if that does not give a 40%, 50%, 30% kind of a, you know, optimization, it makes no sense for anyone because the cost of transition itself is way too high, not to mention about the risk of transitioning, which can be, you know, quite catastrophic in the scale that we operate at. So, I would find it hard business-wise for anyone to enter into it.
AI, you know, probably may reduce certain amount of cycle time on the tech development, but where we exist is in the crossroads of tech and domain, and it is truly the domain knowledge that we bring to the table, you know, that makes the most significant difference. Otherwise, today, if you see, or not just today, even over the past number of decades, you want to start a bank or insurance company, you want to start an oil company, you want to start a B2C. Many a large enterprise players like SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, they always have enterprise solutions, right? And that's what you take. But for this, you know, very nuanced business, nobody, nobody has been able to create, you know, platforms like this, and that truly is our moat.
I don't think AI is going to take that domain competency away. Even if it were to, at some point in time, the business dynamics in terms of unless there is a massive consolidation and about somebody brings 15, 20 clients together, it makes no sense. Winning new clients is not nearly going to cut ice in terms of even breaking even with the next 10 years for a new RTA.
Makes sense. Very clear. And, my second question was on the international business or the Ascent. Historically, we have seen, although we had a very strong client wins, but typically, I think these were smaller clients. So just wanted to understand the progress in terms of winning new mandates from a medium to large size clients.
That had truly been our focus. You're right. I mean, many of these are. These are very large logos in terms of names, but I think we need to, we need to respect the fact that these are relatively smaller geographies, right? I mean, we're not exactly in the U.S. and Europe and Japan. You know, we are in countries where the capital markets are buoyant enough, are pragmatic enough, enough to you know, embrace outsourcing and even offshoring, if I may. But let truth be told, the total corpus of AUM is not that significantly large. And yes, of what is there, it is also true that, you know, we have managed to scoop out probably nearly all new AMCs and, you know, many of the small-tiered AMCs.
But what we have seen in the last 18 months is that we started winning larger mandates. Larger in the context of those geographies. We should not equate them to large, like, you know, our mutual fund houses, which are, you know, like, you know, very probably on an order of, you know, 20x-30x larger. But, you know, for example, we won one of the largest trustees based deal last year. I mean, REIT investment managers, you might be aware, we have already explained. We have won a large pensions, you know, platform solution for one of the East Asian countries, and which is also a material contract in the context of international business. And these businesses, you know, typically, as I always call out, there is a maturity cycle.
You know, when you go into a new country, you know, where you are not known, and it is a B2B in a highly regulated space, you know, the acceptance of a third party from the standpoint of not just commercials. Commercials is an easy win, right? We can easily demonstrate that we're able to show a significant amount of money. But despite that, the conversion takes a little tricky, you know, because of the risk, in terms of transitions. The same risk that I'm calling out as to how complex it will be to migrate from one to the other, or the same risk exists when we have to win a mandate as well. And the first three, four, five years is largely about, you know, delivering, exceedingly strong value to, the limited number of clients who would have won.
Most of them could be small ones. But it truly takes that amount of time for the large fund managers to stand up, take notice that, yes, there is a lot of value that we can unlock. We have already seen not once or twice or thrice, but with 100 different clients, and now is the time to move. And that is a conversation we are having with the medium and large-tiered AMCs. And of course, the conversion, the sales life cycle is slightly longer, but this is a business that is not meant for quarter to quarter. As you know, this is organization been there for 40 years. We're building the organization for the next 20, 30, 40 years.
And the conversions will happen in terms of medium to large AMCs, where we have already seen a glimpse of it in the form of winning two large contracts in the last year alone, even as many are under a negotiation phase at this moment.
Yeah. And lastly, if I see. Yeah, sorry.
Yeah, just to add to Sreekanth's point, Devesh, this is Amit here. Look, I mean, Ascent, you know, when we say that they want 47 funds this quarter, so that doesn't mean that the fund activity has lowered down for this quarter for them at all. So, I mean, overall, it's like more than 100 funds they have won during the quarter. But when we say 47 funds, you know, one, it means that these are the number of funds which have gone live. You know, they have, which means that these funds have become active in terms of the launch and all.
And hence, I mean, you know, that these are the funds which you can see, I mean, in terms of the revenue recognition and all. So as November, December, typically, I mean, you know, from the fund launch perspective, is a little less active quarter. You know, given that, you know, I mean, this period, I mean, people are more engaged in the New Year's activity and all. As we hit the January, February, and all this quarter, I mean, we are seeing more aggressive in terms of the fund launches and also, and this number will catch up. So, to give a perspective, you know, so Ascent did, basically, they were on a monthly revenue run rate of around $1.5 million, you know, last December 2024.
Now, as we speak now, they are more than $1.9 million in terms of the monthly revenue run rate and all. They are well on track in terms of the growth, you know, the guidance that we are envisaging for the company.
Makes sense. Lastly, if I see the asset mix for your international business, I see multiple categories. Now, on an overall basis, we understand that the blended yields are somewhere around 6-7 basis points. But is there a significant difference between, say, a hedge fund AUM or public market or digital assets? The reason I ask is that we want to track if a particular segment grows faster, will that have a positive or negative impact on the blended yields?
So see, I mean, from the blended yield perspective, so the asset class, as far as the AIF business or the private mandate business is concerned, you know, I mean, it doesn't make a big difference in terms of whether it's a hedge fund or a private equity or let's say, a digital assets and all. So the yield structures are more or less the same. But as we move into the public market funds and all, definitely, I mean, compared to the private market here, the expense ratios are also a little lower compared to what we see in the private market funds. So hence, you know, the yield structures would also be a little more different. But it also depends upon the size and the scale of the, you know, the AMC as well, that decides the yield.
But yes, I mean, given that Ascent is largely into the private mandate side, and today, if you see the portfolio of the international business is more tilted towards, you know, the private, you know, the mandate side and all. I mean, the yield structures would materially not be different, you know, when we talk about different class of assets, whether it is, you know, the hedge funds or the private equity or let's say, the digital assets.
Understood. Perfect. Thank you so much and all the best.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we will take that as the last question for today. I now hand the conference over to Mr. Vivek Mathur for his closing comments. Over to you, sir.
Thank you. It has been a great quarter with the integration of Ascent, and as we have seen, that including Ascent, our year-on-year growth on revenue from operations is well within the range of of guidance that we gave of 15%-20%, and the EBITDA margins are in the range of 40%-45%. We believe that, you know, we will continue to maintain that guidance going forward as well. Thank you very much for joining the call today.
Thank you. On behalf of IIFL Capital Services Limited, that concludes this conference. Thank you all for joining us today, and you may now disconnect your lines.