Ladies and gentlemen, good day. Welcome to the Medi Assist Healthcare Services Limited Q1 FY 2027 earnings conference call. As a reminder, all participant lines will remain in the listen-only mode, there will be an opportunity for you to ask questions after the management's opening remarks. Should you need assistance during the conference call, please signal the operator by pressing star then zero on your touchtone telephone. Please note that this conference is being recorded. I will now hand the conference over to Mr. Cyril Paul from Ernst & Young. Thank you, over to you.
Thank you, Ryan. Good morning, a very warm welcome to the Q1 FY 2027 earnings call of Medi Assist Healthcare Services Limited. The Q1 results, the press release, the investor presentation have been published on the exchange on the company's website. Before we start, a disclaimer. Some of the statements made in today's earnings call may be forward-looking in nature. Such forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties which could cause actual results to differ from those anticipated. While these statements are based on management's current beliefs and assumptions, audiences are cautioned not to place undue reliance on them while making their investment decisions. On that note, I'd like to hand over the call to Satish Gidugu, CEO and Whole Time Director of Medi Assist Healthcare Services Limited. Over to you, Satish.
Thank you, Cyril. Good morning, everyone. Thank you so much for joining our Q1 FY 2027 earnings call this morning. As always, we will start with a few updates. I'll run you through the key financial updates before we hand over back to you for Q&A. We've talked about this over the last few quarters with largely three growth engines powering Medi Assist's future. One is our core India TPA franchising, which has been built largely organically also aided through acquisitions as our core engine. That's giving us the right to win giving us access to the vast Indian market where we have a pole position in the market today.
The second growth engine that we've been talking about is how some of the technology that we have built originally started from making our TPA business the most efficient then recognizing that the same capabilities are valuable to insurers outside the TPA model or in a hybrid model, as we called it much earlier. Now becoming an entity of its own, where using technology, we're solving industry-wide problems that concern payers, providers, patients. Lastly, as with that stack is maturing finding new cases, not just in India but across the globe. That's been our tech evolution, we've made some more progress this quarter, we'll share those with you shortly. The last piece, the third one is Mayfair, which is our subsidiary international platform. We made almost a seed investment a few years ago.
As we now understand, and as we have a far greater sense of how some of our technology solutions and our network solutions can impact the global market, we improved our ownership in Mayfair to excess of 90%. We are investing in building strong leadership team and demonstrating that when you take all of what works well in India and adapt it to global environments, you can find value and growth with our first ever contract going live in Thailand just after the Q1 ended. We have all of these in place now, and we are funding both these new growth tracks, which is the tech and the international tracks from our own operating cash flows and expecting them to become very meaningful contributors, not just for growth, but also to EBITDA margins over a period of time.
I will spend a couple of minutes to give you the highlights of each one of these lines of business. The India TPA franchise is transforming at scale. Our group revenues grew 25.5% year-on-year, with the premiums growing 29.5% year-on-year and the group market share at a 37.6%. The retention in Q1 of 90.2% reflects a couple of aspects. The post-acquisition transition of such a large group, some amount of portfolio rationalization, and given the way we recognize revenues, even some of the older losses reflecting in the base of the applied company. Of course, at the same time, the portfolio continues to see significant new wins and allowing us to retain or improve our market share. Within the TPA model, the retail, like I said earlier, is significantly moving to a hybrid model. The TPA model retail revenue grew 13.1% year-on-year. The government revenues grew 35% year-on-year.
We now service over 31 crore members across 12 states and four union territories. We play a very meaningful role in delivering government schemes to the underprivileged in the country. Lastly, on Paramount integration, we are at what we would call a logical closure of the integration. With all of the infrastructure, people, systems, largely integrated. In fact, as we speak now, over 95% of the group claims and over 80% of retail claims migrate to MAtrix at the end of Q1. We target a full of the balance claims and the operations to move to Medi Assist stack within Q2 FY 2027. We have demonstrated through multiple disclosures over the last quarters on how the EBITDA margins have improved quarter-on-quarter from our lowest in Q2 FY 2026. We expect this near-term PHS retention track will get fully normalized through FY 2027.
Those are some of the quick updates on our core business. As the core business, we talked about transformation and we talked about technology. Technology is not just a revenue generator for us as a new line of business, but a lot of the technology that we develop is getting deployed inside the TPA business and driving transformation at scale. Those will be obvious when you look at some of our operational numbers, be it from scale or speed. We have seen substantial amount of improvements in the way the TPA business actually delivers its outcomes. In recognition of the transformation, to set ourselves up for the kind of transformation that we need, we have backed up our leadership team in the TPA business. We have Gaurav Bhatnagar, who joined us as the Chief TPA Officer heading up the TPA business.
Gaurav comes with an exceptional amount of background in running strategy, private equity, optimization, and new operations, and substantial background in data analytics and AI deployment in businesses, both for growth and also for transformation. Gaurav joined us a week ago. He is our Chief TPA Officer, and he has also been designated as an SMP by the Board in the last Board meeting. We are ready, and we have the leadership team and the technology in place to leverage the tech that we develop and transform the TPA business at scale. We move to the technology platform, as mentioned earlier, all of our technology is built in-house. Our investments are from our operating cash flows. We did spend some dollars on building our AI stack. In fact, we spent about INR 24.5 crore over the last six quarters in a Board-approved AI roadmap.
The stack itself has evolved in very interesting ways. We now have solutions for all three stakeholders, which are the membership side for the patients, for the corporates, for the partners, and the payer side, which is our MAtrix stack, allowing payers to manage their claims end-to-end exceptionally well. For the providers, which is the MAgnum stack that we have just launched. Within this AI stack, we also developed a couple of very interesting end-to-end solutions. One largely dealing in what we call as intelligent document processing, which fundamentally eliminates the need for disjointed interpretation of various documents that are essential for a claim. These could be bills, this could be discharge summaries, this could be labs, this could be medical documents, this could be past clinical history.
IDP has evolved and is fast evolving to be able to summarize all of this and then make it ready for someone to understand and process a claim. MAven Guard, our fraud, waste, and abuse engine, continues to improve in its outcomes, delivered over INR 180 crore of fraud savings in Q1. All of these stacks that we talk about are now available outside Medi Assist, and they can be deployed independent of each other. We have today seven insurers contracted across combinations of MAven, MAtrix, and the MAgnum stacks, including all of our AI components. While we may not be able to share the specifics, we have first of all outcomes-based contracts signed, which is our compensation tied to the outcomes that we deliver in fraud, waste, and abuse. This brings us to the original point that we made about the platform supporting the retail business.
The TPA model retail premiums were at INR 521 crore, while the platform administered retail premiums are touching over INR 4,254 crore and representing almost a 29%+ market share. With our ability to tease the components out of MAtrix and deploy them as standalone components, insurers are adopting them at a fast clip within their own in-house servicing architecture and riding on top of our ability to deploy a plug-and-play capability. This truly reflects our evolution from TPA administrator to a platform partner. The platform has also matured beyond the traditional use cases. The platform today acts as the health benefits administrator for NPS Swasthya, which is a scheme that is created to allow NPS Swasthya subscribers access to emergency funds for health catastrophes. Also very seamlessly integrate with top-up covers that multiple insurers provide.
Swasthya needed a platform which combined integrated with pension fund managers, the CRAs. It allowed the withdrawals, allowed access to network of specialists, and then automatic integration with insurance companies, and then stitching it all together in real time for the subscribers, all the while ensuring that the fraud, waste, and abuse are minimized. It is a true reflection of the generic capabilities of the platforms we have built, and is an indication of the work that we can do in markets outside India. Lastly, from an operations perspective, Medi Assist TPA, our wholly-owned subsidiary, processed over 186,000 pre-authorizations within five minutes using this platform in Q1. Our Raksha Prime service, the service is consistently rated 4.7 and 5, delivered zero-wait discharge for over 87,000 members across 6,000 hospitals in Q1.
Our MAtrix implementation at Star Health and Allied Insurance crossed the 90% mark and well on its way to completing pretty soon. This is a brief update of technology outcomes that we are able to deliver, and it also reflects in the revenue growth of over 55% year-on-year, now reaching about 3.3% of the consolidated revenues. We move on for a quick update on the international business. We have increased our ownership in Mayfair We Care to 91.75% post Q1, converting the original seed investment into a majority-owned subsidiary and dedicated international vehicle for growth. Nikhil Chopra, our former Chief Business Officer of the Medi Assist group, has been appointed to lead and transform the international business, and he is going to be full-time on this business, and this is the material commitment to the international growth opportunity.
Our first technology deployment contract went live in Thailand from July 1st, 2026. With multiple corporates onboarded to digital health benefits experience for the first time. We have a significant pipeline of these capabilities outside India. Within India, we have also been able to sign up with multiple retail insurers to provide a seamless cover for the travel premiums that are placed in India. The Q1 performance is temporarily impacted due to the ongoing softness or moderation in student, leisure, and marine volumes all in the same quarter. But as some of these other projects kick in, we expect to see the growth coming back or improving. I will now hand over. We have some more updates, but I will first hand over the call to Sandeep to run you through quick financial updates, and then we will open this up for Q&A. Thank you.
Thank you, Satish, and a warm welcome to all the participants. Following are the financial highlights for Q1 FY 2027. Starting with the revenue profile, the total income was INR 247 crore during the quarter, representing a growth of 24.9% year-on-year. Revenue from contracts with customers, excluding other income, we call it as operating revenue, was INR 236.5 crore, representing a growth of 24.1% year-on-year. The segment size by partition of the revenue from contracts are as follows. The group segment contributed 70.2% to the overall revenue, translating to INR 166 crore, representing 25.5% growth year-on-year. 9.9% from the retail segment, translating to INR 23.4 crore, representing 30.1% growth year-on-year. The government business contributed 12% of the overall revenue, translating to INR 28.5 crore, representing a 35.3% growth year-on-year. The International business contributed 4.3%, equaling to INR 10.1 crore, representing a decline of 5.2% year-on-year.
The 3.3% revenue came from technology SaaS business, translating to INR 7.8 crore, representing a 55.5% growth year-on-year. Moving on to the margin profile. EBITDA, excluding other income, we call it as operating EBITDA, was INR 48 crore, which represents a growth of 14.3% year-on-year, equivalent to a margin of 20.3% on operating revenue for three months. It shows a secular improvement during the last four quarters. Quarterly EBITDA margin expanded consistently from 20.3% in Q1 to 19.9% in Q4 vs 18.6% in Q3 and 17.1% in Q2. Reported PAT during the quarter was INR 27.6 crore. The reported PAT included the benefit of a derivative gain on account of the acquisition of non-controlling interest in the International business that led to a one-time benefit of INR 3.1 crore.
Adjusted for this, the normative PAT was INR 24.5 crore. Moving on to key business sheet and operating matrices as on Q1. Free cash position was INR 245.5 crore. Net worth was INR 834.1 crore. Contract liability, INR 337.4 crore. We continue to remain debt-free. Revenue per average headcount on non-government contracts was INR 13.2 lakh annualized. I hand over the call back to Satish for further discussions.
Thank you, Sandeep. I have one final update to share. It's about the transition of Dr. Vikram Jit Singh Chhatwal from the role of an Executive Chairman to a Non-Executive, Non-Independent Director and Chairman. Which is our decision to separate Board leadership from executive management in line with best practice for the company at this stage of institutional ownership. Dr. Vikram Jit Singh Chhatwal has been part of this industry and the company for over two decades. His educational background, knowledge of every facet of the healthcare industry, vision, acumen have no parallels. We always placed the emphasis on governance, and we've been a Board-run company for a very long time now.
As we are a very unique company in terms of institutional ownership and the kind of independence we have on the Board, we believe it is now an appropriate time for us to separate the executive leadership and the management and the Board leadership. That this move reflects our commitment to governance, and that has always been the hallmark of how we run this company. I now request Dr. Vikram to share his thoughts, and then we can open up for Q&A. Thank you.
Thank you, Satish, and good morning, everybody. Thank you once again for joining us. As you would know, earlier the Board approved a proposal which will go to shareholders at our AGM on the 8th of September, under which I will cease to hold the executive office in this company and will continue as your Non-Executive Chairman. Some of you would be aware that Satish has run this business as Chief Executive Officer since 2018. He joined us back in 2013. The leadership around him has been in place for years. It is important that I stress that nothing about who runs Medi Assist changes on the 8th of September. As a company, we operate at scale, increasingly across markets where the question that gets asked in the boardroom have to be genuinely hard ones.
Our strategy is unchanged, our domestic and international growth agenda is unchanged. Most importantly, sponsoring that agenda at the Board level continues to expressly be part of my responsibility as Chairman. I did want to make sure that I share with you that I am not going anywhere. I am changing what I do. Thank you once again. Satish, over to you.
Thank you, Dr. Chhatwal. Back to the call team. We may open up for Q&A now. Thank you.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, 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 their handsets while asking a question. Ladies and gentlemen, we will wait for a moment while the question queue assembles. We take the first question from the line of Sukrit D. Patil from ICICI Fintrade Private Limited. Please go ahead.
Good morning to the team. I have two questions. The first question to Mr. Satish is, just want to understand, beyond the regular outlook, what are the top two to three execution priorities you are focusing on in the next few quarters? Alongside that, what do you see as the biggest risk in patient demand shifts, regulatory changes, or competitive pressures? How are you preparing to manage them while strengthening Medi Assist's position in the healthcare administration and claims management space? That's my first question. I'll ask my second question after this. Thank you.
No, I think that sounded like a lot of questions. Thank you. I'll do my best to give a really quick answer. Maybe it's best to start from the second one than the first one. We have a unique privilege as Medi Assist in this country to operate at the intersection of all the stakeholders' needs, which is not how most companies are usually set up. Today, we operate at an unprecedented scale at the intersection of solutions that are delivering to the needs of patients, the members, and then their employers and families. The providers, the caregivers, who are actually delivering the service and also originating the cost of healthcare, and the payers who are actually financing the healthcare costs according to the plans and the benefits that people have signed up for.
Today, we have a very unique vantage point as Medi Assist to understand all the aspects at scale. What has been fascinating for me and given my tech background and is how the AI-led technology build-out is allowing us to solve these problems with a very fresh perspective and very seamlessly orchestrating agentic workflows across the three stakeholder types and solve problems that really matter for the world. Just as one example of how we've deployed technology is, today, the hospitals need three to four hours to generate a bill once the patient is ready for discharge. Our prediction models predict on the day of admission what the out-of-pocket would be for that individual and allow the individual to pay an estimated out-of-pocket and walk out of the hospital.
Leaving the entire cashless process to be a conversation between payer, TPA, and the provider, and then not actually leave the consumer out of the equation. This goes straight into how the regulatory intent is around policyholder protection and policyholder experience. For example, the IRDAI says the patient should be able to get out of the hospital as quickly as possible from the time they're cleared medically. It's not about documentation. It's not about the process. It's not about claims and adjudication and technology. It's about the patient and the experience. In a lot of ways, if you look at our approach to technology and our approach to how we build out the business, it is to deliver on the underlying regulatory intent, which is fundamentally centered around policyholder protection.
At the same time, enabling all stakeholders to contribute to it, not just take on the burden, only in a back-end process. That continues to be our process, and we see this working exceptionally well in markets even outside India. That sort of brings us to your first question on what our execution priorities are. I think we've been very clear and consistent. One is how do we transform our India TPA business to be leaner, more efficient, and deploy more technology and truly be a digital self-help company. We publish many of our metrics on our website, and I would request and encourage, if you have a moment, check out the Insights Section on our website where we will present our turnaround times in real-time today. The second priority is the technology business.
We are in a very exciting phase with a very substantial pipeline of insurers, brokers, corporates in India and outside India. It is about converting this into a core execution engine and also contributing to growth and margins of the company. The third is the International business. Again, we have a very interesting pipeline of capabilities beyond the traditional IPMI, which is international private medical insurance space that we played in, which is subject to the vagaries of people traveling, not traveling, employers sending employees abroad. We are building very long-term modes in our International business, again, predominantly based on our tech and network capabilities. We have just created the leadership team. We are doubling down on the work that we will do on the International business. These three remain our execution priorities for the foreseeable future.
Thank you. My second question to Mr. Daga is, from a financial point of view, just want to understand what key risks or challenges do you anticipate in the coming quarters, and what specific measures are being taken to manage margins, cash flow, and balance sheet strength, especially in areas like cost pressures, receivables, and compliances? Thank you.
Thank you for your question. Our first priority at this point of time is to completely integrate the dilution which came around Q2 of last year when we acquired Paramount. Consistently, during the last four quarters, you have seen that we have gradually moved the Paramount part of the business into the full technology stack of Medi Assist, which has given us a 320 basis points improvement during the last four quarters. A very insignificant part of that deployment is still pending, and we expect that to get completed in the next one quarter or so. From the balance sheet perspective, our key focus happens to be on reducing the receivables by increasing our collections faster than the previous historical trends. You will see from the debtors perspective, we have consistently reduced our DSOs on a quarterly basis when you compare the same from the same timeline last year.
Like for the quarter ending June, we had seen a 4.5% improvement in the DSOs vs similar trend of last year, and that too on a higher base of receivables. At this point of time, the focus is only to sort of bring in efficiency and productivity by deploying the technology stack into our operational framework and squeezing every single opportunity which exists for us. Thank you.
Thank you, and best wishes.
Thank you. We take the next question from the line of Prakash Kapadia from Kapadia Financial Services. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Thanks for the opportunity. Couple of questions from my end. Government business is the fastest-growing segment in our pie, and it's around 12% of revenue. How does working capital behave in this segment? Do we want to cap revenues from this segment as cash flows could get impacted? Here I would assume the receivable cycle would be slightly longer. Second question is, what will it take to get back to 23% EBITDA margins? Given what we've seen in Q1, given that we are a debt-free company and a net cash company, is it fair to say FY 2027 will be a record profit for the company?
Thank you, Prakash. Satish here. I'll attempt to answer some of your question. We've been a significant player in the government business. We have a fair set of standards across, within each line of business on the quality of revenue as a bar. We have, I think, just to give you that sense. We have a fairly stringent quality of revenue bar in every line of business, including our group business where we have substantial market share. The government business coming together, especially with the acquisitions over a period of time and giving us the opportunity to participate in 16 states. We continuously evaluate the schemes for their contribution, the growth, and the margin characteristics. Government is margin accretive and government collections are the safest because they come from the state governments and the central government.
Over the last few years, the schemes have significantly become performance-driven in the sense that there are measurable KPIs, there are measurable asks, there's measurable performance and predictable payments. This is a space that we continue to watch like any other line of business. Nothing unusual in the government business growth from a growth and contribution percentage perspective. At this point, it's purely a matter of the mix of the revenues in this quarter. There's nothing very specific that we're doing or not doing in the government business.
Okay. It doesn't lead to a very elongated working capital cycle or cash flow strain is what I was trying to understand? Satish.
No, it does not. Our DSOs that Sandeep just answered in the previous question are for the consolidated business, which includes the government business.
Okay.
To come back to your question on the margin improvements. We were historically EBITDA about 23% in the margin business. Last year, Q1 before Paramount integration, we reported a 22% margin. Our immediate order of the day is to finish the remaining activities in the Paramount integrations and get back to back through FY 2027, towards the end of FY 2027. I think that's our immediate order of the day. We don't currently break out the margin profiles by line of business. At the same time, we don't provide an adjusted EBITDA margins that account for our investments in some of our growth businesses. Some of these expenses are also funded by our own cash flows and the performance.
Right. Satish, just a directional question. With technology and investments, when do we see some of these translating to operating leverage or getting to a stage where costs grow lesser? Obviously, we are doing a lot of investments, lot of new things, and some of these are, I understand, outcome-based products. At what scale or percentage do we see some of these levers coming in terms of higher margins or operating leverage? I'm not looking at a specific number, but I'm looking at the direction or what will it take to get some of these technology investments monetized. Obviously, it's too early days for us, but directionally, if you can throw some color, that'll be very helpful?
Absolutely. I think technology plays a very pivotal role in how we have built this business. Clearly, it is the reason why we are able to today process as many claims and with as much volumes and actually scale this business to this level. Fundamentally, the scale of the business itself is fully supported by the technology and the investments that we have made. You've seen The historical EBITDA margins of the companies that we've acquired, similar TPAs, we operate at a far greater EBITDA margin. That's the base case.
Right.
Directionally, I see the technology playing a role in all three lines of business. One, in the TPA business, where we bring in more and more technology and self-help. Our membership being able to access everything in real-time and through digital channels will be a lever. Second is the technology itself is a revenue and a growth contributor and possibly on track to deliver margins that are probably double the usual margins.
Right.
In pure technology contracts. Third is, I think for the first time, we have a contract outside India using technologies that are developed in India and tested in India at this scale. It's been very fulfilling, the experience. Also the funnel is very promising, and it is allowing us to deploy all the stacks, which is the patient-side, payer-side, and the provider-side stacks in markets outside India. Those yields and the margins and especially their ability to pay for outcomes is far superior compared to how this market operates. I expect technology to play a central role in that as well. I think broadly, these are the directional cues for where technology will generate value.
Understood. That's very clear. Thank you, and all the best. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you. Participants, in the interest of time and fairness to others, we request you to restrict to two questions per participant. We take the next question from the line of Navid Virani from Bastion Research. Please go ahead.
Hi. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for the opportunity. My first question is on the retail business, sir. I just want to understand how are we now looking at the retail business, because what I am able to see is that the traditional TPA business has kind of plateaued or something. At the same time, the technology piece is quite encouraging and growing really fast. How should one interpret the trajectory of the retail business going forward? That's my first question, sir.
Thank you, Navid. It's not that the traditional model is necessarily going away. It's partly also to do with how we report. Today, the TPA model, in very simple words, means that the insurer has introduced their policyholder to Medi Assist and said, "Henceforth, Medi Assist will take care of all of your needs," right from onboarding to customer support to cashless to reimbursement claims and so on. It's the introduction, right? That's the third party. Outside the introduction, all the work that the insurer does, whether by using Medi Assist or on their own, remains absolutely the same. It's identical. Today, we choose to break out how we report our numbers. Today in our retail TPA numbers, we only report those where on the policy contract our name is written and we've been formally introduced to the policyholder.
It doesn't mean that we are not participating in retail. It is likely that, for example, as an insurer, they could have their own digital interface that they would like their customers to use. We could still be running all of the back end and publishing through technology integrations, updates in their digital interface. The customer still deals with the insurer, but all the work is actually being done. Today, we don't necessarily present all of those numbers as the TPA model. I think it is best going forward to look at the total retail market that we are able to access, be it in the traditional TPA model or as a platform model. Secondly, the technology revenues will be a sign of how much of that work are we able to influence using our technology. Are we able to, one, do the back end.
Two, deliver network and other services. Three, deliver fraud-based interviews as a set of core services. Four, deliver some digital technologies where the members can actually access and so on. I think as you look at retail plus technology revenues should give a reasonable understanding of how our own retail market share is improving.
Thank you. That's helpful. Sir, second one is on the overall business growth. Now we are already a very substantial part of the growth TPA business. The Paramount business has also been settled into the base completely now. Technology is something which is encouragingly building well, but it will take time to scale, is what I understand. How should one think about overall business growth, or how are you guys thinking about business growth as a management team? Are you guys thinking about at least mid-teens kind of a growth or something like that? Is the last question that I want to ask.
On the core business, we've always said we'll grow at par or faster than the market in the group and retail segments, which I think we will continue to hold to that directionally. Government is an opportunistic play in the sense that there are schemes that we are able to execute. There's things that we may or may not want to. The government will continue to be a meaningful contributor from a sales size, scale, and revenue perspective. More importantly, you will see, I think, much faster growth rates, both in the technology business that we've already demonstrated since last year, because we first started publishing technology revenues as a part of our consolidated revenues in Q1 last year, even before Paramount came in, knowing fully well that the TPA business will substantially grow. Now on the consolidated business, technology is at 3.3%.
That should give you a sense of how some of these investments and growth are panning out. The next is the International business. International business. Q1 is not a reflection of what the International business is capable of. Today, we have technology contracts in place. In Thailand, for example, we have contracts with Indian traditional in-house retail insurers in place, giving us access to over 50% of the travel premiums that are placed in India. Today, as Mayfair, we can deliver cash to some 180 countries, right? We have some of those capabilities that are built out. We are very excited about what the International business will bring to the growth, especially considering that the yields in the International business are often multiple times the yields in the Indian business.
Okay. Thank you. Thank you for your question. Thank you.
Thank you. We take the next question from the line of [Manjeet] from Saamya Advisors. Please go ahead.
Hi. Good morning. Am I audible?
Yes, [Manjeet], you are. Thank you. Good morning.
Thanks. Morning, Satish. Satish, I was just curious still on the core, our old group TPA business, if you could help me with the organic growth there in some sense. I know we have now merged Paramount, so it's a bit tough, but I'll still try this. In Q1 FY 2026, the group revenue which we reported was about INR 134 crore. I understand there have been certain culling of customers on the Paramount side where it doesn't make sense. On this INR 134 crore, if you could give some sense on how much you would have grown, because this was the business we had done last year organically base sort of. That's question one. Question two is, you mentioned that we have signed our first outcome-based contract, congratulations on that.
I appreciate you can't give much details, but if you would just give some sense directionally on how do these outcomes work? Is it in terms of savings you generate over and above what was already happening, or it's the entire savings you are generating. What amount of percentage claims will run on your system for this? Thank you so much.
Thank you, [ Manjeet]. Like you said, it's a bit of a complex math for us to put out the Medi Assist and Paramount separately considering four quarters. Of course, the base also had the trailing revenues of some of those accounts that were not already in the book when we acquired. I think maybe directionally, we've always presented three, four metrics in the past, which is our retention rates, our same-store growth. Retention rates are below 90% this year from the consolidated book, partly the portfolio rationalization, partly some of the challenges in onboarding such a large book where there's some attrition and more also a slightly higher base effect of what was there in Q1. I think that's the retention number.
Obviously, we've been historically 93%, 94% retention business, and one of the important things for us to track is how do we get back there. Secondly, I think from a same-store growth perspective, I think I've said this in practically every quarter we call from the very highs of 20% just after COVID, I think last year ended was close to about 7%- 8% blended. The same-store growth of the retained customers, we are still seeing similar same-store growths in the group business. Slightly lower on the large IT companies, but slightly higher on all of the others outside IT. Averaging out to about 7%- 8% same-store growth. We continue to add substantial amount of new business, and we also benefited previous year because we added a lot of new business in Q1.
Our business is best seen over, say, trailing four quarters or on an annual basis. Because if we add a lot of new business in a particular year, say in October or in December, not all the revenues accrue in that year. I think these are the three effects because of which you probably have those questions. To summarize, our retention is at about 90-odd%, for the reasons I stated. Same-store growth is still holding at around 8-odd%, similar to what it was end of last year. IT companies are slightly slower, the rest is much faster. We are still adding a lot of new business. The new business has its own seasonality. Some of these numbers are best seen over four trailing quarters. I know that helps you, [Manjeet].
Satish, just one follow-up here. Assuming there were no new business additions, when you say same-store growth of 8%, does this 8% translate also into revenue growth, or is this same-store growth of volume terms and then revenue growth may be higher or lower than that? Just a basic question there.
No, same-store growth, it improves the underlying base premium. If you have a corporate that was paying INR 1 crore of premium, same-store growth of 7% basically means they are paying INR 1.07 crore this year as a premium. Obviously, revenue is a function of the yield on the premium contract.
Got it. The second question on the outcome-based contract.
Yeah.
Manish, I would request you to please join back the queue for follow-up questions.
Sure.
Thank you. We take the next question from the line of [Dheeraj Aswath] from Incred Equities. Please go ahead.
Hello, sir, and good morning on a great set of results. I just wanted to know about the industry that we are mostly catering to the group part of the insurance TPA, also mostly it is from the PSU side. I've been seeing that the four PSUs are trying to get to change to HITPA, which they have created a different entity for handling TPA in-house. Can you shed some light on it, what is it and is it an issue for us that it can be a shift at premiums from PSUs, which we are handling most of them being the biggest TPA. Is there a risk that premiums will migrate to that segment?
Thank you for your question, [Dheeraj]. We've been operating in the same market landscape for more than a decade now. While I don't want to comment specifically on any one TPA, every insurer today has some amount of work happening in-house and some amount of work happening with TPAs. The distribution changes by product or by line of business, whether it is group, retail, or government. That's an industry dynamic of how we work. What we should probably look at is the good proxies are our group retention rates, and more importantly, the regulatory provision that allows a policyholder to request for a choice of their TPA from an insurer, as long as the insurer has a working relationship with that TPA.
We're fundamentally living in a world and living in a business where if we deliver what we have to deliver well and deliver better than everybody else, we absolutely have the right to win. I don't think it's about any one specific arrangement that anybody has. Today, in fact, we spent much part of this call explaining how even insurance companies that have only in-house operations in retail are benefiting from some of the components and technologies that we've built. We will always find a way to meaningfully contribute to this industry and to every insurer and of course, may generate revenues out of it.
Okay. I also need to understand that our PUM retention for the group segment, she's showing that 90% this quarter. Is that due to the Paramount thing or?
Like we said, it's mostly in our mixed portfolio because given that it's almost four quarters, the way this business works, given most of the contracts are annual contracts. From the time we onboard a TPA, retention becomes our responsibility. In the combined business between a couple of challenges in onboarding such large books, plus the higher base that we had last year, plus some amount of rationalization of the portfolio itself is why we are at a 90%.
At Paramount, what would be this number?
It's a little hard for us to break that out today.
Okay, sure, sir. Great. Just one last thing. Can you break down what is the bifurcation of depreciation in our books? We haven't seen the annual report of 2026.
Yeah. We take this question offline with our team. Would that be okay? There'll be a few more people waiting in the queue.
Yeah.
Thank you. Thanks.
Thank you so much.
Thank you. We take the next question from the line of Sandeep Kothari from East Lane Capital. Please go ahead.
Hi, Satish. Just a quick question on this NPS Swasthya which you have reported in your numbers. What is this? What is the potential and what is our relationship? What is the kind of work we will do there? If you could throw some light, that'd be very helpful.
That's a great question, Sandeep. Thank you. Good morning. NPS Swasthya, we are aware of NPS, the pension scheme. There are millions of subscribers of NPS. Historically, NPS has been an annuity-only kind of model. Today, NPS Swasthya allows the subscribers to allocate a portion of their corpus towards health expenses. When they have a health expense need or when they need to be done out-of-pocket expense, they're able to draw down in real time from their pension accounts that are set aside for this purpose and pay a portion of their healthcare expenses. Automatically trigger other insurance policies that have a high deductible or a certain kind of deductible and aggregate this whole funding across NPS account, their cash, and the insurer payouts into paying for hospitalization expenses.
The scheme was created to support subscribers from high out-of-pocket expenses, and secondly, using their accruals rather than just one-off expenses to pay for these out-of-pocket expenses. Our role in this scheme is NPS has a definition of health benefits administrator as a technology platform that connects the members, the record-keeping agencies, the CRAs, and the pension funds, the insurance companies, network, and payments all into one single platform eventually for the entire membership to benefit from a scheme like this. That's the role that we play as a technology platform and a network aggregator. Does it answer your question, Sandeep?
What's the potential for us? We are the interface for the customer for this entire benefit delivery, if I could say that. What's the potential long term for something like this for us?
The potential long term is obviously for the platform certain revenues and where we work with the insurance companies through Medi Assist TPA, the incremental revenues. Today it's in the initial stages, but we hope that the scheme will extend to a substantial part of the NPS membership, and it's been formally notified as a product and offering.
Understood. If I may ask one more question. What is the pushback you get from the insurers when you are trying to sell your technology platform to them? What is the big pushback? Because logically it makes sense. What takes it to get the sale process done?
I wouldn't put this as a pushback, Sandeep. I think finally, every insurance company is different, every product is different, everybody has a different workflow, different key paths and claims management process. It's been very encouraging today. We probably have conversations, contracts, POCs running with half of the insurers today. Those have been very encouraging, and I think the cycle and the slightly longer duration of cycle, if any, is fundamentally to understand how into their existing process our technology can seamlessly integrate. Because not everybody is in a position to change their core systems overnight. For those who are adopting our core system MAtrix, everything is completely seamless. For those who are unable to move out of their core systems, some little bit of additional effort in understanding on how we plug into their workflows.
We now have contacts with all of the mixes where we're deploying MAtrix. We're also deploying these capabilities with our underlying MAtrix platform into their existing core platform. We have proofs of concepts and validations for both and including contracts.
Great. Thank you.
Thank you. We take the next question from the line of Vikas Sharda from NT Asset Management. Please go ahead.
Yeah, hi, good morning. One question on the data point which you report for the group segment that the PUM growth for PSUs is 28.9% for you, which is 30% higher than the industry. Does it imply that the PSU group health business specifically for the industry was down YoY?
Yeah, that is true. Our share of wallet has improved. In fact, in both the segments, both in PSU and private, our share of wallet has improved. Yes.
What would be the overall group health insurance industry growth, let's say, for this quarter?
About 14%.
14% for the industry, but you're saying within that PSUs were down YoY?
-1.5%. Again, while industry reports its group premiums is not just employer-employee, it also includes other group products. We don't have a public breakdown of the entire employee vs the others, but considering it's predominantly employer-employee, I think it's fair to look at it as we've improved our share of wallet.
Perfect. Thank you.
Thanks.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, with that, we conclude the question and answer session. I now hand the conference over to Mr. Cyril Paul from Ernst & Young for closing comments.
Thank you, everyone, for your active participation in the call. We are available offline to address any further queries you may have regarding the business and the financials. Please feel free to write to us at investor.relations@mediassist.in. That is investor.relations@mediassist.in to be added on our mailing list. We look forward to staying in touch with you and further interactions. Thank you.
Thank you, everyone. Thank you.
Thank you.
On behalf of Medi Assist Healthcare Services Limited, that concludes this conference call. Thank you for joining us, and you may now disconnect your line.