Thank you, Danish. Good morning, everyone.

Welcome to Q4 and FY '26 earnings conference call of Computer Age Management Services Limited. From the management, we have with us Mr.

Anuj Kumar, MD and CEO, Mr. Charan, CFO, and Mr.

Anish Sawlani, Head Investor Relations. Before we proceed with the opening remarks, I would like to give a small disclaimer that this conference may contain certain forward-looking statements about the company, which are based on beliefs, opinions, and expectations of the company as on date.

These statements are not guarantees of future performance and involve risks and uncertainties that are difficult to predict. A detailed disclaimer has been published in the investor presentation.

Now I would like to hand over the conference to Mr. Anuj Kumar for his opening remarks.

Thank you, and over to you, Anuj.

Nikunj, hi. Thank you very much.

Good morning to everyone. Appreciate all of you taking the time out to join our earnings call.

As you would have seen the results that we published yesterday, it's been a pretty solid quarter for CAMS in 4Q of FY '26. That the external environment has not exactly been friendly.

In the months of Jan and Feb, those I would classify as normal months. In the month of March, of course, there was significant impact from what was happening in the environment.

Despite all of that, you've seen our results, and I'm very happy to kind of share with you a set of events which I would say are pretty interconnected, and their reflection is in the quarter that just went past. The foundational impact of a lot of things which are happening will continue to be seen, I'm sure, in this year and perhaps the next.

Just to sum all of this up, you've seen the deck, I'm assuming that you've gone through it at least once, we've posted our highest ever quarterly revenue in Q4 '26. For the first time, I think I am calling out the non-MF performance ahead of MF because non-MF kind of heralded the growth metric a lot better than MF did in this quarter.

We grew non-MF revenue close to 25% year on year. Our promise has been 20%, but successively over the last three years, we've been able to beat that.

We expect that we have the mix of products and go-to-market strategy to continue doing this. Enterprise revenue for the quarter went up 11%.

Quarter on quarter it was 1.3%, you know the reasons. Annually it went up 11% year on year.

The MF business revenue was almost flat; it just grew about 0.5%. Given the circumstances, it wasn't bad at all.

MF yields held quite well. With all the operational efficiency, automation, the new platform program, what we call the re-architecture program, everything contributed their bit.

Obviously you know that there's a significant degree of fiscal discipline in the company. Absolute EBITDA scaled back to the highest ever.

Now I will take you back to 4Q last year, Jan, Feb, when you know that we had done price adjustment, etc. That is almost an event which is completely behind us.

Because from a peak of about ₹173, ₹174 crore of absolute EBITDA, we went back to about ₹177 last quarter. We've climbed up to about ₹183 now.

I expect that this is kind of a baseline number which will stick. Percentage EBITDA climbed back to just in excess of 46%, about 46.5%.

As a collectivity, I think that's a great set of metrics to have on our side. From a mutual fund business perspective, AUM at ₹55.1 lakh crore is obviously significantly lower than the 58.5 that we achieved at some time in 4Q.

Because of the impact of what's happening in the Middle East, it came down. However, this represents a 21% year-on-year growth and holding 68% overall share.

Share is a great story on equity assets. I think overall, we are holding 68%.

We grew AUM in line with the industry at 21%. Equity assets, within all this, within the turmoil, went up to the highest ever of ₹30.5 lakh crore with a share of 67%.

This is almost a 90 bps, I would approximate it to about 1%, went up about from 66% to 67% year on year. Certainly grew faster than the industry, which is a great sign.

Equity net sales, which I think is the most formative metric here because after all the puts and takes, this is the real money which comes and hits the books, which was in just in excess of ₹1 lakh crore. Within equity net sales, therefore, our share grew from 71% in the past quarter to 76%.

These are great numbers. Historically, if I take you back four or five years, CAMS used to be about 60% share of the active equity market, and about 80% share of the fixed income market.

This is before passives, etc., became popular. Five years back it was largely an actively managed market: 60% in equity, about 80% in fixed income.

That 60 gradually has climbed up to the number that you're seeing, which is about 67%. About, I think, about a percent a year.

Given the fact that this is the most retailized, the most sticky, the most remunerative, and the most growth-oriented component of the overall market, it certainly is formative. It's not a flash in the pan.

It's nothing that happened in one quarter or two quarters and will then go away, because we believe the foundational components just remain intact. New SIP registrations aided all of this.

They aided AUM, they aided equity AUM, and they aided net sales. New SIP registrations went up to about 1.26 crore.

Our typical baseline number is about a crore to 1.1 crore in a quarter. This was a significantly higher number than 4Q last year, grew about 46%, industry grew 37%.

Another metric after metric in the top four or five metrics that really matter, again from a foundational perspective, not just a quarterly performance perspective, I think we outpaced the industry by some margin. Annual SIP registrations hit just short of 5 crore, about 4.7, up 17% over FY '25.

This number is almost 2x of the industry growth. Across all of these that I've spoken about, significantly or a little bit ahead of the industry.

SIP collections crossed the ₹20,000 crore milestone in the month of March, grew 25% year on year, and almost touched ₹59,000 crore for the quarter. This is about 17% up year on year while compared with 4% for the industry.

Overall, share of these collections went up from 57% to 64%. Unique investor base similarly, you can see the numbers, again outpaced the industry.

From a new logo perspective, you're aware that our philosophy has been that, of course, it's very encouraging to see in the environment that a large number of new AMCs are getting licensed. We have said that traditionally for the last three decades, our franchise is built on a scale play, a bit of a brand play and a scale play.

Therefore, our endeavor is to go after logos that we believe are great fits into the scale play. Both the names that I mentioned, Neo and TorcQlen, conform to that.

We believe that our strategy of selling value, selling just incremental consumer value and AMC value instead of selling price, has succeeded over a period of time. The total count of AMCs, this is of course licensed AMCs, not everybody is live yet, these are live, these are licensed domestic AMCs, adds up to 31.

Transaction volumes continued to scale. They have continued to scale because that is the retailization, penetration metric that everybody talks about.

Grew about 20%, reached 107 crore financial transactions. There's a bit of about 2, 2.5 crore non-financial transactions, too, on top of this.

This is the core financial transaction. SIFs, which was a product category announced somewhere early in '25, went live in September, October of '25.

Four new SIFs launched during the quarter. Total number of live SIFs is now six.

We have about eight which are either licensed from a product perspective, eight additional, which are either licensed from a product perspective or have made announcements and will get licensed soon. You will see these launches.

I suspect the launches will happen between May, June, July, August, maybe even faster, but certainly within those four months. This will become very relevant, competitive new product category for the industry and for us.

Very sanguine about the prospects. Retail fund launches in GIFT City, I know that it isn't a great AUM story yet, but it's a compelling story for domestic investors wanting to invest in outside assets and not feel the constraints of going through the ETFs, etc., some of which have run into a ceiling.

This continued. When I move beyond MF to non-MF, I think contribution to enterprise revenue obviously could have been better.

We certainly want to scale it even faster. At 15.3%, it's kind of underscoring all the diversification that we've tried to do in a very focused manner in the last four years.

Within this, Pay, which is now a licensed PA and a PG both, delivered about 23% growth year on year, continued to add new clients, and continued to do payment gateway and scale payment gateway, which is the additional offering. Alternatives, although you know that not every AIF which has got a license has launched, quite a few of them have been licensed but haven't launched yet, or have been deferring launches.

We had a very strong quarter. Revenue grew over 25% year on year.

AUM crossed ₹3 lakh crore. So 50% share of the outsourced market remained intact.

The number of mandates, these are full-service mandates, 44 new ones, 14 new logos, almost one a week or faster than that. KRA, where you know that the business has gone through several moments of reckoning in the last one year, not one moment of reckoning, and that's not just a story about us, across the industry, as investors have rethought their strategy on participating directly in the equity markets through the demat accounts and broking accounts.

Also, some of the geopolitical stuff would have had its impact on new folio opening, etc. Despite all of that, and despite the fact that now of course you've seen that the KRA business will take a bit of a revenue down because of the price down, despite those several moments of reckoning within one year, there's a 28% year-on-year revenue growth for the quarter.

Like we had said that our base is mutual funds, our additional arena is brokerages and DPs. Within that, we added a couple of fairly active large accounts, and we believe that this trend is there to continue, we will continue gaining share.

The integration of NSE KRA, which was a slump sale done by them and acquired by us in the month of January, brought in about 13, 14 lakh new PANs. It was a very clean integration.

You did not hear a single hiccup, you did not hear of a single service issue or anything on social media, so that part is in the base now. Rep delivered a 6% year-on-year revenue growth for the quarter.

Bima Central, I think, did well, doubled its active user base. LIC started policy issuance in the demat format, largely digital origination.

It was signed in last March in '25, took about up to Feb, March to get integrated. We're expecting that that will, at some point, and that some point should be within this year, add a new dimension to how the insurance industry looks at insurance demat.

As LIC scales, a lot of the other ones who've been convinced about demat issuance and service will jump into the fray. Again, a formative metric.

We've said this for some time. We'll wait for some decisive, definitive action before we thump the table, but I think it's my duty to mention this to you.

IR market share expanded to 40%. Again, just to sum it up: 68%, I've said this many times in the past, 68% market share in MF, 40% in IR, 50% in the outsourced part of AIF.

KRA now decisively the number two player, leapfrogged from being number three about a year and a half back to number two. All of that is held together.

The last thing I would mention is that as this DPDP Bill, whose rules have now been notified, the date for adherence and compliance has been declared as 1st of May next year, although the board is in the process of getting set up, I think there is a lot of inquiry inside the markets. I would say right now inside the financial services market, not as much in hospitality and airlines and retail and food delivery, etc., but all of that will happen.

Since we believe that we will have certainly a processor status in several segments of our business, and in one or more, including KRA, repository, and RTA, we could be a fiduciary, we built an offering out. Largely it was a captive offering, but then both from a data discovery and a consenting part, you know that we know consenting well because that's a very, fairly evolved practice in MF, in both MF Central and in account aggregator, largely in AA.

We decided to launch this commercial offering called ConsentPro, which kind of delivers the end outcomes in so far as DPDP compliance is concerned. We are expecting that this market will undergo a lot of decisive action in the coming quarters as the date for compliance gets closer and closer.

We're still about a year away, and that's how the action is just beginning to unfold. We saw this opportunity.

We'll keep you posted on how this goes. The last thing that I decided to cover, there've been questions across the board from all of us and all of you rightfully so, on what is the behavior and what is the progress on the re-architecture program?

Are we on course? How is the Google relationship doing?

I think finally everyone wants to know that why are you dropping less or dropping more of these words of GPUs and artificial intelligence and deep learning algorithms and everything which is being said around us in the marketplace. Very happy to share with you just one metric that you would have seen us grow revenue on almost a flat headcount.

That we've never historically been a company which does frequent headcount resets. We actually haven't done it in recent times, including during the COVID years, etc.

On a flat headcount, which means we are doing nothing to the headcount, but we are just getting the productivity up through a series of automation steps. I think that is something you would have seen in the last year.

I saw it in the last quarter, and our belief is that in FY '27, we will see all the revenue growth on falling headcount, some bit of fall, which we may choose not to do some backfill. Some backfill obviously we will have to do, but if we choose not to do some of it, that I think will be significant improvement in terms of employee productivity and revenue productivity per employee.

What are the key capabilities? That we've done great stuff in face reading and video reading and face match, etc., and we're the only ones to do that 10-minute KYC.

We extend all of this to form reading. We are now almost taking out the maker step in a lot of physical forms, which means we still retain the physical checker, there is a human, but the other human we're taking out and letting the machine do that work.

This has been in production, now in actual production, no beta, no testing, for over a month now, almost two months, and we will continue to deepen this over a period of time. That delivers some degree of operational efficiency.

From other capabilities that you will see now, you will see our data lake and transaction origination platform. These are large platforms where building and testing it is one part and then taking it to market because everybody integrates, which means all of them have to do a bit of integration work at their side.

I think that is beginning to happen. Where will you see the impact?

You will see the impact in a significantly lower percentage of industry complaints. When you see a 1.5x or 2x transaction base, complaints per transaction as a metric is significantly ahead of the industry.

You will see and hear from the marketplace and from our clients about the next-gen transaction origination platform. Of course, taking it to market and making sure that we sunset the old one and get the new one in place will take some time, but we are ready, completely ready.

Then the data warehouse is ready to go. Both of these within the next three or four months, they are technically ready and waiting for a rollout.

Then there are several other things which obviously whenever we meet you one-on-one, we will talk about those. Where will you see the benefits?

I've told you the benefits, that this is not just some technical jargon or something hidden in five layers of technical detail. It's obvious metrics.

You will see headcount, you will see revenue by headcount, you will see complaints, you will see lowering of the complaints on transaction ratio, you will see fewer frauds, you will see fewer risk items, charges taken to the P&L, AS risk incidents, etc. I know a lot of you track those numbers; we track them closely too.

I believe that all of this will have a salutary impact on the overall functioning of the company as we make it more productive and more battle-ready for the future. I will pause here and then hand it over to Charan.

He will take you through the specific numbers, and then we are open for questions. We will have about 30, 35 minutes for that.

Ram, over to you.

Thank you, Anuj. I think Anuj has gone through the highlights from a financial perspective.

I'll just call your attention to a few trends and numbers, and then open it up for questioning. As you would have noted, the AUM growth during the quarter was muted.

It was a little more than 1%. If you actually see our yield, the compression on quarter-on-quarter basis has been less than 1%.

If you drill down further, I think you can very clearly see that, I'm not saying 50%, 25%, this is entirely because of the impact of the mix, which is that you have seen the passives grow over the last quarter more than what the active funds have grown. If you see from that perspective, the yields have been very stable quarter on quarter.

We have always said that post the reset of the pricing, you will get back to the normal equation of asset-to-asset growth as asset fee growth. Happy to say that we are kind of tracking that and been doing better this quarter in terms of yield stability.

In terms of growth of revenue, you had 11% growth year on year for the quarter and 1.3% quarter on quarter. If you further split it down, mutual fund revenue was sort of flat, almost 0.5% growth.

The non-asset-based revenue did go down on year-on-year and quarter-on-quarter basis, largely driven by some drop in transaction revenue quarter on quarter on probably MF Central-related transaction revenue, and also on OPE and lack of new NFOs that are coming into the market. If you take that, I think from our overall growth perspective, asset-based revenue broadly tracks the growth in AUM.

The bright story, of course, as Anuj was mentioning, is the growth of non-MF revenue. Happy to say this is across the spectrum.

This is not one outlier. On a year-on-year basis, you had CAMSPay, AIF, KRA, everything growing more than 20%, right?

It was not just one thing which was outsized growing at 80%, others not growing. It was across the spectrum kind of a growth you're seeing year on year, which is more broad-based.

Even on a quarter-on-quarter basis, the growth in non-mutual fund sort of offset the weakness in the AUM growth, and hence we are able to report 1.5% increase in revenue. We feel that this is kind of keeping in line with our projections that you will see the non-mutual fund business grow more than 20%.

This time it's 24.5% year on year, and for the year, they're close to 18%. That's because we had a weak first quarter.

Going forward, based on the run rate, we are very sure of maintaining this 20% plus growth of non-mutual fund revenue. From a profitability perspective, I think we put in strong numbers more of what Anuj said on automation, etc.

We did have a margin of 46.5% for the quarter in spite of no growth in mutual fund revenue. There was some cost optimization that happened.

Just to take you back to the commentary on cost the earlier part of the year, I think what we had said was if you're able to keep the cost increase to say 11% kind of a number year on year, I think you would have done well on target. Happy to say that if you see the actual numbers on a year-on-year basis, including the depreciation increase because of the additional investments, my cost increase has been 9%.

If you actually remove the depreciation, the cost increase has actually been only 7.8%. On a quarter-on-quarter, we've had a very muted increase in cost, less than 1.5%.

We will continue to take these cost actions. We will continue to be focused on that, that is a requirement.

Just to say that from a year perspective, we have ensured that the cost remains well within control, and hence you will see that there is some margin creep up in terms of year on year from 45% to 46.5%. Some other important aspects I would like to highlight, one is the diversification is on track.

You would have seen the 15% plus percentage number which Anuj also mentioned. More heartening from a profitability perspective, we have been saying that once the revenue starts flowing into the non-mutual fund, you will see the profitability also grow up.

You would have noted that earlier profitability targets or the ranges for non-mutual fund was around 12% to 13%. This quarter, they're upwards of 16%.

I think on a sustainable basis, we have said that we will get to a 20% margin by the end of next year. I think we are on target for that, too.

From a return on equity perspective, we continue to be top of market. Return on equity in spite of retaining 35% of the profits and not distributing as dividend, continues to be 39%.

The board has declared, subject to confirmation by shareholders, a final dividend of 2.5, which means for the year we'll be disbursing a revenue of ₹305 crore. Overall across the board, a very strong quarter in terms of profitability, in terms of cost optimization, in terms of non-mutual fund growth, in terms of profitability of non-mutual fund, and in terms of stable yields.

With this, I hand it back to Danish and open it up for questioning.

Hey, hi. Good morning, everyone.

I hope I'm audible. The first question was on the opex line.

The 10% sort of a number in FY '26 is the lowest in five years. One is if you can put this into context of how much of this would be deliberate or discretionary expense management given some revenue headwinds as against some savings which could be thought of as more sustainable over the medium term.

The second question is on the yield. Now when we think about the mix effect, the yield drop that RTAs take when it comes to passives generally is much more than the yield drop that the AMCs have to absorb.

Now how do we think of it in terms of really the cost that actually go into supporting the passive investments? If there is a scope for some renegotiation with respect to that?

Those would be the two questions.

Thanks, Abhijeet. On the cost part of it, I think I'll just amplify what Anuj said earlier, which is that this is not a one-off.

I think what we have done is a structural, and automation kind of thing has crept into the entire system. If you look at just the numbers, right, if you see from last year to this year, while the company strength may have grown by about 100, 120 people, we have achieved this entire 11% growth with, you will see a reduction in the core MF operations, right?

There has been a reduction in the core MF operations. Obviously some investment has happened for re-arch, some investment happened for risk and compliance, etc., that's kind of contributing to the small increase in headcount.

You will have seen over the course of the year, there is no operational impact for any of these things, right? Which means we continue to get industry-leading statistics in terms of complaints, risk, etc.

There is not a one-time squeeze that we have done of everything, and which is not going to be repeatable. I think what we are approaching is a more sustainable, long-term kind of an impact is what we see.

Next year again, Anuj laid out the targets saying that you're going to see further kind of optimization that's going to happen as we get more and more of this re-arch platform, AI embedded into the operations system. This is, in our mind, a very sustainable kind of a cost levels.

We are not saying there'll be zero addition of cost, obviously that's not going to happen, but I think we will try to keep this to the minimum without impacting obviously day-to-day operations, etc., which we have successfully done rather, say, below the radar in the last year without making a big show about it. We will continue to do that in the next year also.

I don't think you need to have any worry from a cost sustainability perspective. On the passives and how it has worked out, see, honestly, I've been saying this throughout, saying that this is such a small part of the operations that for us to kind of say a separate profit line and a cost line for this is actually not so material, given that it's less than 10% of my overall AUM.

Now from a yield perspective, I think the rates that we have for ETFs are extremely low, it's nothing to do with AMCs suffering more than us or etc. It's extremely low.

The yields for passives by nature are extremely low. I don't think there is any room for us to kind of have any renegotiation on that, given that it's actually at really low levels now.

As passives increase, there will be some impact on the mix and there'll be some impact on the yield, but it'll be very muted. If you see for the last quarter, if you actually line by line compare everything, the only reason is that yields have not gone down on any of the individual asset classes.

None of the individual asset classes the yields have gone, including passives. It is just that the mix of passives in the overall scheme of things has increased, and that's why it's causing this 0.9%.

I don't see this being a big cause of concern going forward also.

Ram, just a follow-up on the yield question. One was that, because there is a mix effect, there's a hit on the overall yields, does it allow you in any way to kind of have a stronger bargaining power when it comes to the yield negotiation on the active book?

No, absolutely. That's one of the points that we will pick up in terms of yield decline, saying that the mix is also unfavorable to us.

We should also be cognizant of the fact that the other side, this has a similar impact on the AMCs, too. I think this will be one of the things that we will bring across, but I don't know whether that'll be the only argument in which we'll hang our hats on.

Got it. Thank you so much.

Hi, everyone. Now firstly, just on this renegotiations with AMCs, there is a 3 to 5 basis points impact what we've heard from all the AMCs that is likely to come, and they have indicated they'll be passing it on to distributors.

Any negotiations that has happened with you guys on the RTA fee changes that should come through because of that change?

Prayesh, so far nothing is there. We are not saying that we rule out any discussions whatsoever on this.

There may be something discussions happening on this, but one thing we are clear on our stand is that I think from a value perspective, I think we have reached a stage where we are comfortable with the price-value equation. There's not much of a room for us to kind of revisit that.

Having said that, I think this is a discussion that probably some people will have with us. Nothing so far concrete, and nothing for me to report as a something that will definitely be there.

We'll keep you informed as we go along. We don't see that being a big impact.

As you said, the 3 to 5 bps impact is the entire AMC impact, and I've seen many commentaries saying that it's going to be passed on to the distributors. We'll wait and see.

If at all there is an impact, we've always said we don't think there will be any material impact on this.

Structurally we've been talking about the 3.5% to 4% decline in yields every year. Should we start thinking about this for FY '27 and FY '28 basis, and that should be the way, or how should we think about the yield drop on a regular basis?

Historically we've been very conservative in guiding you on these yields, etc. We've always said that what we have seen over the last five years in terms of trend has been this 3% to 3.5%.

If you really want to build that into the model from your conservative perspective, please do. Our aim will always be to bring it much lesser than that.

I think going by the last quarter, I think we are on track to have a number lesser than that. We are not going to hurry and tell you, "Please take only 1% or 1.5%."

You continue to kind of work in the conservative way that you have, and treat anything as a positive.

Got that. The other question was while we were talking about EBITDA margins improvement, and that's commendable job, but empirically, I would like to get Anuj's thoughts also out here where we've seen that, right, we expand our margins to 46%, and quite a few times that has happened empirically as well, but post that again there is a renegotiation, or there's some investments that come in, and then we drop back to 42%, 43%, 44%.

At this juncture, what gives you confidence that this is more of a sustainable margin trajectory than what we've seen in the past?

Prayesh, the way I would think about this is just leading you back to the facts. We were on a quarterly, about a 47% margin about five quarters back, let's say.

That was the first time we hit that number. From that 47%, we went down to 42% for reasons known to all of you, and then we've climbed back.

It's taken us four quarters. We've climbed back, I wouldn't say exactly to 47%, but let's say 46% and some change, we've climbed back to it.

I don't think it's something which has happened several times. We've been continuing to underscore one thing, that you should take that as a once in a blue moon, once in a lifetime event, and not as a frequent reset because the command center for this number is sitting somewhere else.

That's point number one. Point number two, from an investment perspective, and that's just a pure pricing and revenue play, which you've seen over a period of time.

I'm sure you guys give credit that you are able to read us much better than you're able to read anyone else, because we have cautioned you in advance. Whatever I can see, we tell.

We've been telling you, right? We've never left you guessing in terms of what we see, but what we don't tell you, and therefore you have to guess and take a surprise the day our results come out.

We have a history now of 20-plus quarters, maybe 22, 23 quarters of publishing our results, and you've known things for much before that. That's point number one.

The second is that as far as investments are concerned, we've always said that there are four parts of the portfolio which are moneymaking, which is MF, AIF, Payments, and KRA, those four are moneymaking. There are four or five parts of the architecture which are not moneymaking, which is repository, account aggregator, pension, to an extent Think360, they are not moneymaking.

We've made the investment. We've now made the investments in ConsentPro.

We should invite you to one of our events where we're unveiling this entire thing. We've made the investments.

We may not have made them in a high-decibel way, but all these four or five businesses, like in any other business, we continue to fund till you get to a point where, like we've said traditionally, you achieve a ₹14, ₹15 crore annual revenue, you break even, and then above that, most of the money goes to the bottom line. That's a standard architecture of business.

We've made those investments. All of those have been made in the last four years, between '22 to '26, let's say, those four calendar years, '22, '23, '24, '25.

What is the choice for us now? The choice is that do we keep pushing optically on increasing this margin by about a percent a year?

My guess is that will happen by itself, not because we are doing something fantastic in MF. We will continue doing what we are doing, but also like Ram said, the non-MF portfolio now is of a size, about ₹60, ₹65 crore a quarter, and I'll not be surprised in three years if it is ₹100 crore a quarter, where it is generating money by itself.

On aggregate, non-MF by itself has a power to stand on its feet. He reported a 16.5% EBITDA line, and we are hoping that we'll get to 20% and onwards to 25%.

Across the board, the platform nature of the business, apart from AIF, which is very, very service-oriented, every other business is largely platform, right? You set up a platform, you let transactions ride, you let customers come and use it as a highway, and you get paid for it.

I think that character is not changing. Therefore, our focus is that we'll continue investing in new things, we will never get distracted, we will never do things which only sound fashionable.

If margins in the process expand by about a percent a year, be it, but we will not deny the right investments in business because of that. The last thing I would say is that when you see this EBITDA line, I would take the genesis to what we did two or three years back in investing in real automation.

Today, I do a payroll for 200 fresh engineers who are two or three years out of IITs and regional engineering colleges and NITs and those kind of places. The gain will never be seen in a month, but the gain is being seen after two years.

Will this gain be seen only today? No, you'll see it for every year in the next five years, because it's the past period investment.

Just look at it like that. I know the shadow of what you believe is unreasonable price negotiation looms heavy in your minds.

I would just say that think of it as a normal thing, don't think of it as an oversized sense.

Got that. That's helpful.

Just last bit, do you see any impact on the KYC business because of the changes that are expected from April 1st, that were implemented from April 1st, and would that impact profitability in the near term?

No, it should not. Just to be clear, we are expecting to hold KRA revenue in FY '27 after all the puts and takes.

What are the puts and takes? Whatever hit we had to take because of slow demat and broking and F&O account opening, we've already taken in FY '26.

Some upside, ₹2.5 to ₹3 crore we'll get from NSE KRA. Some revenue down, about ₹6 to ₹7, maybe ₹8 crore we will take from the price down.

I have the base revenue minus eight plus three, I lose about five. That five we will make up through growth and increase in share.

We will have flat KRA revenue. We do not expect that there is any profit challenge there.

Got that. Thank you so much, and all the best.

Thank you.

Thank you for the opportunity, sir. Firstly, sir, just on the margins, you did mention you don't see any significant yield pressure, but you also said that the new TR regulation for some of the large AMCs are underway.

If this were to kind of fructify, the impact will be retrospective starting from 1st of April, is that correct, or this will be more like retrospective starting from 1st of July?

Sorry. I don't think, Devesh, just to clarify, we did not say that there are some discussions happening with any AMCs on yield.

I think what we said is nothing substantial is happening on that, and we don't rule out the possibility of something like that happening over the next month or two. Even if it happens, it's going to be extremely muted.

I think it's premature to speculate whether it's going to be 1st April, 1st July, because we don't even know whether it's going to happen or not happen. What we are saying is that if the discussions do happen, at that point of time we will kind of decide appropriately, and whatever happens will be muted.

We will see at that point of time. I don't think that we should have a significant impact of that from a reset perspective.

The other contract negotiations, we will not have a big price down, that is for sure. We'll have some mid-sized contracts coming up for renewal in the course of the year.

Overall, all put together, we don't see that being a big impact on the yields.

Understood. In terms of, sir, opex, will this be another year where you will see a single-digit growth in the opex, especially in your employee cost we see that the growth has only been 5%, and Anuj did mention that this time there could be a reduction in the headcount on an overall basis.

Are we looking like another year where the growth will be less than 5% in the employee cost?

Absolutely we are. We are looking.

Obviously, there is this increment that will have to be factored in, which will kind of come from Q2 of this year. That's when the increments will become effective, there'll be some impact of that.

I think we will look at a sub-5% and overall definitely sub-9% kind of a growth in expenses. We'd like to make it a little lesser than that, but that's what we're shooting for.

Right. Sir, in terms of EBITDA margin, what would be our expectation or target for FY '27?

We've always said that we don't want to guide for a specific EBITDA margin, and we've always been range-bound. We've said that in a bad quarter it will be less than 45%, in a good quarter it'll be around 46%, 47%.

I don't see any reason for changing that. I understand that there is a cost kind of thing.

We'll have to wait for the asset growth number and revenue growth number, as you know that we are kind of waiting for the markets to settle down on that. For us to give a specific EBITDA number guidance will be difficult.

Our aim is to at least retain what we are in Q4, right, in terms of the EBITDA margins for next year. This is after absorbing the increase in cost that may have happened because of the salary increase and other investments we'll have to do, and some yield compression that will happen, although not as much, even close to what it was last year.

After that, I think if we do maintain the 4Q EBITDA margins, I think it'll be a good target to have.

Right, sir. Sir, finally on the non-MF side, you did mention that the targeted growth is around 20-odd percent, and we have already reached a revenue share of 14% in the non-MF business.

Are we looking at any new line of business or any further diversification that can add to these revenue growth, or this will be the existing businesses in which we'll see the growth?

Devesh, I would say right now, like we've always said in the past, that building a product in markets where you may not have the right to win and competing against not just traditional kind of competitors, but against startups, fintechs, etc., is not easy. We don't want to get busy creating products where we have no business to be present.

Consent, therefore, the DPDP compliance product, is the only product that we're putting out. We may put out one adjacency, we've put in the deck I think, which is a device, a unified device which will do payments and KYC, etc.

It's an adjacency; it is just going to expand the MF SIP market, it'll do nothing else. We do not believe that we are angling for too many new things.

We will just focus on what we have. We believe there's scale opportunity in Payments, significant scale opportunity.

We believe that Rep should continue kind of building mass, like I said, we will hold KRA revenue despite all the puts and takes, and AIF will hold on and grow. Between all of these and anything else that we do on the Consent, on the CAMSLens, smaller products side, we believe that we have absolute confidence in growing at least 20% on that side.

MF, the story will unfold during the year as we see asset growth come back after the last two months. That's the broad story.

To answer your question, we don't want too many distractions. We're not in the habit of just opening markets or just jumping into products just because it sounds fashionable.

You will see that behavior more than less.

Perfect, sir. That's all from my side.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Hi, thanks a lot for the opportunity. I'll start with maybe the mutual fund side.

Just wanted to understand if you could give us some update regarding the transition of the RTA business to cloud from prem, where are we with respect to that, and how are we thinking it was supposed to be a three-year project, where are we, and what kind of changes or new products from that could we see over the next coming years? That's one bit.

Secondly, there has been already a lot of discussion on the opex. Just wanted to understand what was the employee count that you ended FY '26 with, and going ahead, what are the other areas where you could maybe reduce cost?

Lastly, coming to the non-MF side, you are gunning for a 20% growth. The KRA business is supposed to be flat in FY '27, and that's one of the major parts of the non-MF business and has been a key contributor of growth.

Hence, wanted to understand which are the other parts of the business that you think will be able to deliver much higher growth in FY '27. That is one thing if you could give some color.

Lastly, just wanted a clarification. The 16.5% margin on the non-MF side is for FY '26, right, not fourth quarter '26?

Those are my four questions. Thank you.

No, sure. I guess one of us must have noted your four questions, but I'll start with the first one, which is on re-architecture.

On the re-arch side, the plan was and is to build a brand-new hosted-on-the-cloud kind of a cloud-native platform which does the entire MF service delivery and platform delivery from the cloud. We have opted for a feature-by-feature, module-by-module build-out, taking things live one by one.

The other approach could have been to kind of build it all together and then test it, and that is like moving an army because you could have gone wrong just anywhere, we will be taking things live module by module. There are about nine significant modules, think of it as nine significant modules, and then a number of things surrounding all of these.

I'll give you an example of what has happened on both sides. Of the nine modules, the first one, which is transaction origination, which is getting transactions in from whichever mode they come in from, whether it is exchanges or banks or websites or partners in fintechs, including paper and branches, all of that, that module is fully built and is now getting launched in the marketplace for consumption by a very broad audience.

They're literally several thousand people who will integrate and start passing transactions on. It has several merits in terms of having a better rules engine, giving you rejections in real time, etc., so that remediation can happen.

Any net shrinkage which happens because of transaction rejections, etc., it comes down, it is accretive for the industry. That is the first thing which is live we are taking it to the market.

The second last thing which is ready with us, but obviously has to be taken to the market because there's nothing that I can sit here by pressing a button do unless it's an internal process, is this entire concept of a data lake where our entire on-prem data is now AMC by AMC sitting on the BigQuery on Google Cloud. What it does is that all the MIS, all the insights, all the analytics, all the what-if can be done by speaking to a machine, can be done by our people, can be done by AMC people over a period of time.

Other partners will also be able to do it. It is a most futuristic and capable single instance of a data lake that has been built, and that will go live again in one edge of this year.

Beyond this, of the core nine other modules like payments and settlements, transaction with exchanges, internal posting of transactions, all of that, accounting, will go live over a period of time as they get built. We have a team of close to 200 engineers working on this.

We've not lost the opportunity to kind of also build some of the smaller things which are relevant, which are internal only, which means I don't really have to interface with the market. The example that I gave you, which is of form data extraction, which means we still get about a million physical forms in a month, and we are now in the process of taking a maker layer out.

You've heard the term maker-checker, two people trying to do the same data entry located at different parts of the universe, and an engine compares what they've done. We're taking the maker out completely, AI is doing the entire making.

That part is live. Similarly, there's several smaller parts which are live.

This was envisaged to be a four to five-year project. My advice would be to strictly think of it as a five-year project, not even four.

About two years are done, which means the first two years are done, and you will see significantly increasing momentum as we move forward. The revenue productivity and overall productivity that you've seen, I gave you a metric of flat headcount and growing revenue.

Over the last three years, we've also seen transactions grow at 27%, headcount grow at about 6% to 7%. You will see all of that get accentuated as we move forward with that platform.

I would say we are about 3% to 4% behind on the overall curve or the trajectory, which is normal in IT projects of this nature, but broadly we are completely on track from a business benefits perspective. I'll pause there because you had three more questions.

Do you want to take the other?

Yeah. Saubheem, your next question was on headcount, and how did we exit 2020, '26, etc., between '25.

The exact headcount I'll give you is at 8,300, right? 8,324 is what we had in '25 end.

I'm saying headcount as of year-end, it's not the average for the year or something. Exited '26 with 8,420.

We had around 100-plus people, but if you actually take the re-architecture hiring that we have done, which is for the new platform, that itself was more than 100, right? From our overall MF perspective, we actually, as I mentioned earlier, we dropped headcount by around 70, and we had some increase in the risk, compliance, in kind of non-mutual fund businesses, investments, etc., so that kind of made it neutral.

Overall if you see, if you take away the hiring that we have done for technology re-arch perspective, it was a flat headcount year on year. The aim that Anuj was saying next year is to kind of better this and actually have some more optimization done, have an introduction in headcount.

That's the way the numbers will play out in the next year also. In terms of non-mutual fund growth, I think your question was, given that KRA will be flat, how do you think that you will be able to see the 20%?

If you just break it down to numbers, right, and depending on the exit quarter or on the last year, you're talking about a ₹45 crore, probably close to ₹50 crore kind of a growth in non-mutual fund revenue. If you actually break it down further, I think we are confident of Pay taking at least ₹20 crore of that, if not more, AIF taking some ₹7, ₹8 crore of that, and then TSP, pension taking some ₹4, ₹5 crore, and then Rep taking some ₹7, ₹8 crore, and then you have the new lines like ConsentPro, you have GIFT City, etc., which will take a few crore.

If you actually break it down to a ₹45 crore to ₹50 crore increase, I think we have its solution. We have plans behind it.

We have its solution. Our aim is obviously to better that 20%, but I think 20% is a reasonable visibility we have, assuming that there is no growth in KRA.

Got it. Sir, any particular line that you see driving that ₹40 to ₹50 crore addition that is, or is it going to be across the other businesses?

Sorry, say that again. I think we missed what you said.

Sure. What I was asking is in the non-MF side, the incremental growth, is it going to come from, say, Payments or Repository, or is it going to be across the four or five businesses that you have?

No, it'll be across. I think that is what Ram was trying to say, that if we convert this into simple arithmetic, you're looking at a base of about ₹60, ₹62 crore of quarterly revenue at exit.

About ₹250 crore in the base, to grow 20%, you need a ₹50 crore revenue up solution. Of the ₹50 crore revenue up, your question is that if KRA is zero, where does the 50 come from?

I think that is what he was trying to answer, that Payments will be about ₹20 crore out of that, AIF about ₹7 to ₹8 crore, and Rep about ₹7 to ₹8 crore, adds to about 35. Everything else, the balance 15, is a sum of the account aggregators, the TSP, pension, all of that put together should add up to another ₹15 crore.

That's where the 50 comes from.

Understood. That's very clear.

Thank you.

Hi. Good morning, everyone.

Just coming back to one of the previous participant's questions, you mentioned that one can probably conservatively build in around 3.5% to 4% MF yield decline, and maybe you would gun for maybe in the range of around 1% to 2%. Now whether it's 3.5% or 1% to 2%, just wanted to get some sense of what are you factoring in when you kind of are thinking on those lines.

Is it a factor of the negotiations on the mid-range AMCs that you mentioned which are planned, the asset mix, what are your expectations on that, and also any probable discussions that might take place, as you highlighted that you do not rule out any possibility of such discussions. Just wanted to get the factors that you're kind of building in this expectations of MF yields.

The second question, and the third question are data-keeping questions. On the CAMSPay business, if you can give some color on the MF and the non-MF, and within the non-MF also, if you can kind of break it up into some subparts.

Also on the KRA business, what would be the composition of the non-MF business currently?

Yeah. On the MF yield, Dipanjan, traditionally I think the 3%, 3.5% comes from historical numbers, right, rather than any break-up of what the expectation of the mix will be, and which over a period of time, and you would assume that over a period of time you've had various combinations, and as I said that this is determined by not only asset mix, it's also customer mix, it's also negotiations, it's also scale-based pricing, everything put together.

It's a complex kind of interplay of factors. The 3%, 3.5% is something that historically we have seen.

Now we've seen years where it is 1% also, you've seen years where it is 8%, 9% also. It was just an average, right, from that perspective.

Given that next year would be a normal year in terms of there being no big strains on yields, and just to again clarify, we're not saying that we're going to have discussions with AMCs on price, etc. The question was specifically with respect to this 3, 4 bps yield compression that some of the AMCs may face, and we just said that we don't rule out any discussions that they may open and all these things, because it's mostly their choice, right?

Nothing that got to do with us. We're not saying there's going to be any big negotiations.

In fact, we see a period of yield stability. Now our aim and our calculations are that this will not be 3%, this will be less than 3%.

Given that historically we have been around that number, I think it was prudent for us to kind of quote that number as a number that probably you can work with. Having said that, it's a combination of everything.

Equities are close to 54%, 55%, we don't expect that to go up much more in the mix when we did this calculation. We do expect some sort of growth to come from the larger AMC customers, which will have its own impact on the yields.

Finally, we do have some mid-sized AMCs who are coming for discussions, but we don't expect a material decline in yields because of those discussions. All those things put together, our aim is to keep it down to the scale-based pricing plus some minor adjustments here and there, and not get into some major things.

That is why we said it will be much less than 3%. If I may just go to your second question on CAMSPay, CAMSPay, happy to say that the non-mutual fund share has been much more than 50% on the back of cards, right?

We've had, in fact in the last quarter, if you see the PG business, which is the credit cards business mainly for insurance companies and some for loan repayments, etc., is almost 25% of the revenue, right? Almost more than ₹2.5 crore, starting almost from near zero probably a year back.

We've now reached 25% of the quarterly revenue coming from cards business, and all of it is non-mutual fund. Our non-mutual fund revenue is much, much more than 50% now in the CAMSPay.

In terms of split into how much is insurance and how much is kind of other sectors, most of the non-mutual fund is from insurance and EMIs for NBFCs. The exact split, I'll let but this is basically how the revenue is split.

Your question was on KRA. KRA, I think we have reached a 30% non-mutual fund share of the revenue, and we are onboarding a couple of new brokers, as you would have seen in the presentation, a couple of large ones.

We expect that this 30 will start creeping up in the coming quarters.

Got it. Thanks, Ram, and all the best.

Thank you. Thanks, Dipanjan.

Hi, sir. Congratulations on a good set of numbers.

Just two questions from me. First, what is the kind of pressure that we are going to see on the KRA business?

What sort of pricing decline are we seeing, and how is this determined? We understand that this is an industry-wide phenomenon, but I also gather from our previous conversations that we were already at a discounted rate.

What sort of hit in sort of blended pricing would we be looking at? Second, I wanted to get a sense of the new opportunity that Anuj sir was speaking about, and it's something that I'm not that well aware of, this ConsentPro.

Maybe you could give some background and about this opportunity. Thank you.

No,

sure. Thanks, Madhukar.

On the KRA, effectively just think of it that starting 1st April, uniformly the KRA industry has taken a 20% price down. Why have we taken a price down?

Obviously, there was reaction from the industry, not for a day or two, but for a long time, that in order to broaden the franchise and bring in lower value consumers, and you know that the industry has been bringing lower value consumers, the Chhoti SIP was a campaign around that, and there were multiple initiatives to collect money from non-salaried people daily, etc. The KRA cost was seen as a bit of an obtrusive amount.

Not our opinion, but obviously as a collectivity, that's what the industry thought. Initially we had specifically done a remission for small value, but it did not look like that gave a lot of room to spread, I would say, happiness across.

Then the industry came together and said that let us then just lower KRA prices. I think it's a voluntary action.

It is done together at industry level. It has nothing to do with a single instance of anyone coming and negotiating.

Of course, there was a long dialogue with the industry and with the regulator when all this happened. I think in good faith, it's a good step.

You also know that concurrently we have enriched the KRA architecture so much that today we do a daily demat reconciliation, there is now disability records inside of that. There is a lot of enrichment from a recordkeeping perspective, and then there are lower prices.

Like I had said that FY '27 for KRA, we are projecting a flat revenue on a base of about ₹42, ₹43 crore. We're expecting about an ₹8 crore price down led, that's just the fee remission.

We're expecting about ₹3 crore of revenue up from the NSE KRA part, which showed up a little in Jan, Feb, March, but will show up for the whole year, so that's net addition. The balance five, the 8 minus 3 which we will lose because of price, we're expecting to make up through natural growth and new logo wins, etc., which is entirely possible.

We will keep about flat revenue. I would not read a lot more into this.

I'm expecting that the KRA machinery continues to kind of grow with the industry and enable the industry a lot more. There will be less thoughts about bringing in smaller value consumers now that the KRA price is down.

That's point number one. The second question was on ConsentPro.

That the Digital Personal Data Protection, that's what DPDP stands for, that bill, which essentially I would not say is cloning the GDPR regulation in India, but is somewhat, somewhere on those lines, is now being contemplated across the board for every industry. The financial services sector, of course, will be one of the biggest consumers.

We started working on this to do this ourselves. We just wanted the expertise to be in-house rather than to buy it.

We've built this product called ConsentPro. It has a consenting mechanism, it has a full data discovery tool, and someday it's perhaps educative for you to sit with one of our people to just see what it does.

Then it has various other angles of regulatory reporting and consulting and all of that. All of that comes packaged under ConsentPro.

We've built this inside of Think360, and it's a commercial offering. Now we've decided to make it a commercial offering because we know that almost 40,000 to 50,000 Indian companies will end up buying this in the next year, year and a half, and no harm in at least assisting the capital markets and the financial services segment with this.

If you want more details, happy to have a separate conversation, but that's broadly the view behind this.

Got it, sir. Thank you, and all the best.

Thank you, Madhukar.

Thank you. Thank you for the opportunity.

I think most of my questions got answered. Just a one small question on KYC business again.

Means Finance Ministry and SEBI Chairman of late has spoken about one KYC thing for all financial sectors, including capital markets. Does it change the conduct of the business, whether the pricing, because it will be CKYC linked?

In a way, pricing will come down, and what are the fetch revenue will or the uploading of information to revenue is there, we'll see a meaningful change? Just wanted to understand one KYC will make any material change or not.

I would say we have to watch it. We have to continue watching it.

This has been in the air for some time now. Just so that uploading of any new KYC records that the KRA gets, that obviously in the MF industry, it does get uploaded to CKYC, so that leg is intact.

Does a CKYC record, is it eligible completely to create a KRA KYC? Not yet.

I think the price down is a first step to make it easy for the industry to broaden itself. Like I said, that was attempt number one.

Your question perhaps is that will there be a day and will there be a day soon where CKYC subsumes everything under itself and there is no KRA KYC left? I think from a feature, benefit, just architecture, interoperability, the fact that KRAs authenticate on the data themselves and do not just do or tape on the intermediary to tell them, but there's a separate layer of authentication, that's a significant amount of value that is embedded in the KRA architecture.

It is not completely like that in CKYC. Maybe at some time it'll get there.

I think it's good to keep watching this conversation to see where it goes, but right now we believe we are in good shape.

Understood, Anuj. When you say verification, is it largely related to say PAN card information or Aadhaar kind of information?

Anything, when you exactly say verification, how it is exactly different from CKYC download compared to KRA download?

When an investor, let's say, goes to a microfinance institution, the microfinance institution would take his details, verify them, which means they will either look at the originals, most of the time they look at the originals, and then they will upload that information to CKYC. In the KRA architecture, the intermediary will take all of those, we'll do whatever verification they're doing.

KRA will do a full verification, name match, face match, DOB, and address from source, typically DigiLocker, UIDAI. It's a two-leg process rather than being a one-leg process.

Understood. Which means that even if CKYC becomes one KYC kind of a norm, given authentication, verification part is too strong here, is it fair to say that we will not see a meaningful disruption even if CKYC gets adopted because of that extra secondary of verification?

They're trying to build a lot of these features. All I can tell you is they are trying to build a lot of these features, like, Rome wasn't built in a day.

It will take some time before those tens of crores of consumers kind of fit into this architecture. For their roadmap, they are also trying to build it.

I would say the KRA architecture has been significantly ahead of market in the last five years in building all of this ahead of time and implementing it in all earnestness.

Understood. That was my only question.

Thanks. Thanks for the answers.

Thank you, Sanket.

Thank you to all the participants for spending time with CAMS and following our story. If you have any queries, please do reach out to Orient Capital or Anish Sawlani for, and they will be happy to assist you.

Once again, thanks for your time.