Thank you, Danish. Good evening, everyone, and welcome to Avenues AI Limited earnings call to discuss the Q4 and FY26 results.

We have on the call with us today Mr. Vishal Mehta, Chairman and Managing Director; Mr.

Vishwas Patel, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer; and Mr. Sunil Bhagat, Chief Financial Officer.

Also joining us on the call today is Mr. B.

Ravi, who is advising Avenues AI on corporate and financial strategy as an independent consultant. We must remind you that the discussion on today's call may include certain forward-looking statements and must be therefore viewed in conjunction with the risks that the company faces.

I now request Mr. Vishal Mehta to take us through the company's business outlook and financial highlights, subsequent to which we will open the floor for Q&A.

Thank you, and over to you, sir.

Thank you, Rajat. Good evening, everyone, and thank you for joining us today.

FY26 has been one of the most important strategic years in the evolution of Avenues AI. This year was not simply about financial growth.

It was about convergence of multiple strategic building blocks that we've been assembling over the last several years: payments infrastructure, merchant ecosystems, consumer platforms, AI capabilities, the regulatory infrastructure that we operate in, and international expansion. What we are building today is fundamentally different from a traditional payment gateway business.

Avenues AI is evolving into an AI-first financial infrastructure and transaction intelligence platform. We believe historically fintech businesses were largely valued on transaction processing scale.

We believe the next decade going forward of value creation will increasingly come from ownership of transaction intelligence, merchant workflows, AI-led automation, embedded finance, and intelligent financial ecosystems sitting on top of transaction infrastructure. That is the strategic direction in which we are moving.

Today, our ecosystem spans enterprise merchant acquiring, consumer engagement platforms, AI orchestration layers, regulatory infrastructure, cross-border capabilities, embedded finance opportunities, and increasingly intelligent systems. Importantly, these are no longer standalone businesses operating independently.

They are now beginning to reinforce one another structurally. Our payment infrastructure through CCAvenue gives us access to a large and diversified merchant ecosystem across enterprise merchants, SMEs, education, travel, telecom, government, and digital commerce.

Our consumer ecosystem through Rediff, Rediff1, and RediffPay gives us a direct engagement layer with users. Our AI platforms include our recently announced participation with IAO, which is India AI Research Organization, and build-up of Commerce AI, Pay Central, agent frameworks.

We are building agent frameworks and intelligent layers across transaction routing, merchant operations, fraud management, reconciliation, compliance automation, and customer engagement. When these layers begin integrating together, the platform significantly becomes more powerful than the sum of individual businesses.

We believe this creates a compounding ecosystem advantage. The more transactions we process, the more intelligence the platform accumulates.

The more intelligence the platform accumulates, the better the automation, risk optimization, merchant monetization, and operating leverage that becomes out of it. The more embedded the ecosystem becomes, the stronger the long-term defensibility of the platform.

One of our major strategic priorities going forward is embedded finance and lending. We believe lending is undergoing a structural transformation globally.

Traditional lending models were balance sheet-driven and institution-centric. The future, in our view, will increasingly become transaction-driven, AI-assisted, ecosystem-embedded, and asset-light.

Our approach is not to become a large balance sheet lender ourselves. Instead, we are building an intelligent lending orchestration and distribution ecosystem leveraging payments, merchant data, transaction intelligence, and AI-led underwriting capabilities.

Because of our merchant network, payment infrastructure, and transaction intelligence capabilities, we believe Avenues AI is uniquely positioned to participate in this opportunity through an asset-light lending architecture. We see significant opportunities in merchant financing, checkout financing, working capital solutions, consumer financing, AI-assisted underwriting, transaction intelligence-based credit frameworks, and ecosystem-led financial distribution.

Our strategic investments and partnerships are being designed specifically to reinforce this direction. The proposed strategic investment that we announced today in Online PSB Loans is important because it potentially connects us to one of India's most important digital lending infrastructure backed by major financial institutions.

Similarly, our investment initiatives in NBFC companies starting with Ratnafin further strengthens our ability to participate in lending distribution, credit intelligence, and financial product ecosystems without necessarily taking disproportionate balance sheet risk ourselves. We believe the combination of merchant transaction data, AI-led intelligence, lending partnerships, regulatory infra, and ecosystem distribution creates a highly scalable and capital-efficient opportunity over the long term.

Importantly, this also aligns with where global fintech models are evolving toward embedded finance platforms that monetize intelligence, distribution, and transaction ecosystems rather than pure balance sheet deployment. Another major strategic focus area for us is artificial intelligence.

We are not approaching AI as a superficial productivity tool alone. We are embedding intelligence directly into the operating architecture of our platform.

We believe AI will fundamentally shape commerce, payments, all financial workflows, customer service, compliance, risk assessment, operations, and practically even autonomous transaction execution. Through our collaboration and participation in AI research and our broader AI infrastructure, we are positioning Avenues AI for this transition towards AI-native commerce and agentic financial ecosystems.

We believe future commerce environments will increasingly involve machine-assisted and machine-executed workflows where AI agents participate in discovery, payments, reconciliation, optimization, and financial decisions. This is still an early stage opportunity globally.

However, we believe our combination of transaction infrastructure, merchant relationships, AI orchestration, and financial workflows gives us a very strong foundation to participate meaningfully in this evolution. International expansion is another strategic pillar for the company.

Over the past year, we continued expanding our global capabilities through Middle East and GIFT City infrastructure. Going forward, United States represents an important strategic focus area for us as a country.

We believe cross-border commerce, global merchant acquiring, international settlements, and AI-native payment orchestration represents a large, underpenetrated opportunity. Our objective is not merely geographic expansion.

Our objective is to build globally relevant infrastructure capabilities originating from India. We are also increasingly optimistic about our strategic importance of Rediff ecosystem.

Historically, Rediff was viewed primarily as an internet media and a communication platform. We increasingly see it becoming a broader consumer engagement and financial participation layer.

Over time, we intend to gradually expand Rediff1 and RediffPay into areas including payments, financial engagement, wealth, participation in brokerage, consumer commerce, intelligent communication systems, and AI-led consumer ecosystems. Importantly, we remain disciplined in how we build these businesses.

Our strategy is not subsidy-led growth. Our strategy is infrastructure-led, intelligence-led, and ecosystem-led growth.

We are focused on building durable long-term operating leverage rather than short-term expansion at cost of sustainability. As we enter FY27, we believe the company is moving into the next phase of its evolution.

FY26 was the year where the building blocks came together for us. FY27, in our view, becomes the year where scale, intelligence, monetization, lending, AI orchestration, international expansion, and ecosystem integration—they begin reinforcing one another much more visibly.

We remain extremely excited about the long-term opportunity ahead. Our vision is to build one of the world's most important AI-first fintech infrastructure companies emerging from India.

At this point, I will hand over the call to Vishwas to talk about payments in CCAvenue. Vishwas, over to you.

Thanks, Vishal, and good afternoon, everyone on the call. India's payment ecosystem is entering a completely new phase of evolution.

Over the last decade, the industry focused on digitization of transactions. The next decade, in our view, will be about the intelligence layer on top of the payments where payments become the starting point for commerce, engagement, credit, communication, and financial decision-making.

At CCAvenue, we see payments evolving from being a transaction utility into a much larger merchant operating ecosystem powered by AI. Today, merchants are not only looking for payment acceptance, they're looking for customer acquisition, engagement, financing, automation, analytics, and intelligent business tools, all integrated into a single digital ecosystem.

This is where we believe the future opportunity lies. Our vision is to bring CCAvenue, RediffPay, Rediff, and the broader Avenues AI ecosystem into a unified AI-led commerce and financial infrastructure platform.

CCAvenue brings one of India's largest merchant payment ecosystems with deep transaction relationship across enterprises, SMEs, and digital businesses. Rediff brings communication, engagement, and consumer reach capabilities.

RediffPay strengthens our fintech and payment infrastructure stack. Together, these platforms create a powerful ecosystem that can enable merchants to not only process payments, but also grow, engage customers, and access financial products and operate more intelligently.

Artificial intelligence will play a foundational role in this transformation. We are building AI-led capabilities across merchant servicing, fraud management, customer engagement, predictive analytics, workflow automation, and embedded finance.

We believe AI can help merchants better understand customer behavior, optimize collections, improve conversions rates, and access more customized financial solutions. One of the largest opportunities we see is embedded finance and merchant lending.

Through our liability-light strategy, we aim to work alongside regulated NBFCs partners while Avenues AI focuses on merchant distribution, AI-led analytics, orchestration, and engagement infrastructure. Our merchant ecosystem combined with the transaction intelligence and AI frameworks can help create smarter working capital and business financing solutions integrated directly into the merchants' workflows.

Importantly, our strategy remains asset-light and scalable. We are not looking to become a traditional balance sheet lender.

Instead, we aim to build the digital intelligence and distribution infrastructure layer that powers the next generation of financial services. FY27 will therefore be a year of ecosystem integration, AI deployment, and deeper merchant monetization across payments, communications, and embedded financial services.

Our strategic investments and partnership with platforms like OPL and Ratnafin Capital align closely with this long-term vision. These partnerships enable us to combine regulated lending infrastructure and underwriting capabilities with Avenues AI's merchant ecosystem, payment infrastructure, AI frameworks, enterprise communication capabilities, and distribution reach to accelerate embedded finance and intelligent merchant lending opportunities across India's digital economy.

We believe the convergence of payments, AI, commerce, and financial infrastructure will define the next era of India's digital economy. Our company, Avenues AI, is positioning itself to participate meaningfully in that transformation.

Thank you, and over to you, Sunil bhai.

Thank you, Vishwas sir. Good evening, everyone.

FY26 was a strong year for Avenues AI from both a growth and execution perspective. We delivered our highest ever annual revenue while continuing to maintain profitability and disciplined operating performance.

On a consolidated basis, revenue from operations for financial year '26 increased to ₹8,116 crore compared to ₹3,993 crore in FY25, representing strong year-on-year growth of 103%. Our net revenue on a consolidated basis for FY26 increased 15% year-over-year to ₹603 crore as compared to ₹526 crore in FY25.

Our consolidated profit after tax for FY26 increased 58% year-on-year to ₹332 crore as against ₹209 crore in FY25. Overall, the full-year performance reflects continued scaling of our transaction infrastructure business, improving ecosystem monetization, and healthy operating leverage across the platform.

Coming to quarter four of FY26, our revenue from operations stood at ₹2,490 crore, reflecting strong growth of 115% year-on-year and 5% sequential growth. Our quarter four net revenue grew 11% year-on-year to ₹149 crore.

Our quarterly adjusted PAT grew strongly by 90% year-on-year to ₹95 crore. The quarterly and annual performance was driven by continued growth in transaction processing volumes, expansion in enterprise merchant relationships, strong traction across digital commerce ecosystems, international business momentum, and increasing operating leverage across the platforms.

Importantly, we achieved this while continuing to invest in AI infrastructure, regulatory capabilities, international expansion, and ecosystem integration. As discussed earlier, our focus remains on building long-term ecosystem value rather than optimizing for short-term take rates.

As transaction scale increases, we are seeing improving operating leverage through automation, AI-led efficiencies, better payment routing, fraud optimization, and deeper merchant monetization opportunities. Another important strategic area for us is embedded finance and lending.

Our approach remains asset-light and ecosystem-oriented. We are leveraging transaction intelligence, merchant data, and AI-led underwriting capabilities to participate in lending opportunities without building a balance sheet-heavy lending model.

Our strategic initiatives involving Online PSB Loans and investments in platforms such as Ratnafin reinforce this direction and strengthen our positioning within embedded finance and lending ecosystems. As we move into FY27, our priorities remain focused on profitable growth, AI-led automation, ecosystem monetization, international expansion, operating leverage, and disciplined capital allocation.

We believe the company is entering a phase where scale, intelligence, and monetization can increasingly compound together over time. Thank you, and we will now open the floor for questions and answers.

Hello? I would just like to understand what are the top three use cases that is driving extraordinary TPV growth for us within the payment business?

Secondly, on the lending side, if you could further clarify what is the level of exposure we would like to go on the balance sheet side? Is it identified in terms of capital allocation, or initially it would be all about distribution to begin with?

Thank you.

Rahul, I'll take the second question first. We are not going to put our balance sheet for lending.

The strategy that we've applied is that we will work with NBFC companies to be able to open up our ecosystem, and that strategy will continue to percolate. What we will do selectively is to invest minority stakes in more than one NBFC.

You may have heard earlier in the call, Ratnafin is the first one that we've opened up where we've taken up up to 2.5%. The idea here is that we are able to connect our ecosystem very tightly with such NBFCs where we have some minority investments.

We would allow the NBFCs to continue opening up the lending opportunities to our merchant ecosystems and consumer ecosystems. We will work with them in building products and opportunities to be able to take advantage of.

To your question, our investment thesis in some of these NBFCs is that we want to pick up certain NBFCs with a few thousand crores of AUM which have a good operating history, which have scale, which are next generation, and well run management. We would work with them in terms of building such bridges, products, and opportunities.

Does that answer your question?

This part is clear.

Yeah. As far as the payments is concerned, Vishwas will take that up.

Vishwas, you want to go ahead? Sure.

Yes,

yes. Overall, Rahul, there's been a good merchant wins that we have had in this last Q4 quarter, which has translated into a good growth of TPV.

Overall, merchant transactions across thousand thousands of our merchants were growing, and also a lot of big wins that is there. In India specifically on the utility, government payments, B2B payments, everything was growing very well.

Hence that relates into the transforming into the higher TPV numbers, Rahul.

Basically, Vishwas, what I was trying to understand, if I look at the industry growth, this growth look pretty phenomenal. There must be something that is driving this kind of traction.

Is there something which we have identified as a gap or area where we are seeing this momentum?

Yes, I think a lot of customization has come into play. You put up a platform layer over the payments layer, it becomes a big hook for bigger merchants to stay on and increase volumes.

It makes it easier for them to go online. Multiple forms like we launched our own form builder, which correspondence to a lot of education institutions, a lot of small merchants, a lot of event merchants and everything.

More than 5,000 merchants were onboarded on the form builder in less than a month. A lot of growth on the platform.

It's just not a vanilla payment gateway. It's a platform plus payments play that has come, like for the hospitality industry, now we're scaling up to more than 3,000 hotels where we're building the entire central reservation system along with a payment gateway built-in.

The workflows which connects to the global distribution systems to their own property management systems, like we are certified with Opera Systems or Micros Fidelio, which is used by almost all the five stars and some of the bigger four-star chains. It makes them easier because everything is automated end-to-end when reservation comes in through say any OTA like Booking.com or Hotels.com or Expedia or MakeMyTrip, it gets automated systems and payments are collected automatically.

Those workflows customization is where we are winning, putting a platform with a payments play. That's where the real growth for us is coming, Rahul.

One more thing to add to what Vishwas said, we've been very focused in terms of merchants who have signed up with us. Normally you know that merchants will be using multiple payment gateway options.

We have been very consciously going after the merchants to move processing volumes to us. It comes at a cost, but I think it's one worth making.

The growth is supported by addition of merchants, as well as increasing share of the existing merchants that process from us.

Sure. That's pretty helpful and good to know.

Lastly, from my side, on the profitability side, last year we did extremely well on the TPV and revenue side, and our run rate seems much stronger as of now. I'm assuming we're investing in so many areas, which is caused FY26 profitability to be where it was.

From going forward perspective, do you think some of the operating leverage might start playing out in FY27? Or you think for now we will stay in a similar profitability band, and the acceleration on that part would come much later?

You're right. Quite a few of our costs are front-loaded, specifically, some of the investments that we're making in the AI setup, and also the opportunities that are there in front of us.

The costs are front-loaded. I think that in pockets, we are seeing the operating leverage kicking in with scale, and we also think that the productivity that we're getting through this optimization and productivity gains from AI are also not insignificant in some ways.

We think that that's adding up to what we think this year will look like. We don't see a hockey stick in FY27 in profitability.

We'll work very hard in terms of ensuring that we are able to get our take rates better, and that will require quite a bit of work and optimization, and we want to continue building up from where we left off in '26. We will also invest in the Rediff ecosystem, as you are aware, which is a very large opportunity that we believe is in front of us.

I think that it's reasonable to assume that it will be similar to what we have seen in the past years FY27 should be. We'll give guidance with the first quarter call for the full year.

Thank you, and best of luck for the time ahead.

Hi, sir. Congrats on a decent set of numbers.

Sir, while we have grown in payment side, if one look at the segment [reporting?] , I think e-commerce platform is kind of degrowing.

Once you can explain why this is happening, because that's a high-margin business for us. In that context, we've noted that Rediff has filed for a confidential DRHP, but whatever you can share in terms of their financial and/or plans for the year, any timelines that we should look for in quarter where we probably have planned that IPO, that'll be helpful, sir.

Sure. Largely we've seen, yeah, you're right, the platform business is is slightly flat to, slightly higher.

I think that overall, we have not seen big growth in that business. The full year, if you look at full year, and I'm not talking about the quarterly, quarterly you'll have some changes, of course, as you go through, but if you look at the full-year numbers in the segmental, you'll see that they're somewhat flat to slightly higher.

I think that as we build out, and and fortunately for us, with the AI-first approach in terms of building out frameworks, you'll see a lot more activities on the platform side in FY27. What Vishwas said is also true, which is we'll combine the platform and the payments more, which actually increases quite a bit of our stickiness.

We think a lot of secret sauce lies in that. You'll see, some amount of growth in that business that comes from a combination of building out a suite of new products and also opening up our existing frameworks internationally.

We think international is a fairly large opportunity in the platform space, and given, the the currency rates and so on and so forth fluctuations, we believe that international focus would be a big area to to look at going forward. That's as far as the the platform business is concerned.

Your questions around Rediff, yes, we have filed a confidential DRHP. Given the regulatory, compliances, we're not able to share, anything additional at this time.

What we will do is we'll keep, everyone updated in terms of where we stand. I think that there's, Rediff, I can tell you Rediff has got, a lot of consumer interactions going, not just merchant interactions.

Given the macroeconomics of data, data privacy, and sovereignty of data, there's a lot of incentives for very large institutions and merchants to move to a sovereign stack. I think that that's where we are seeing a lot of movement, at this time happening.

Last year we were just focused on moving these merchants and large merchants and institutions onto our framework, but we believe that, it becomes a very large opportunity in '27 and '28 to build up upon because that's when we can offer a lot more services to the existing merchants. Then we're also working on RediffPay, which is a consumer-facing UPI app.

It's actually live and in production. Given, the recent launches and also the number of transactions and being able to ensure that we are stabilizing and then, scaling it up, the team's been working on it.

You can try it out. You'll hear a lot more about those kinds of activities which are consumer-facing in the coming weeks.

Uh-huh.

Sure, sir. Sir, any new launches that Rediff has done and what kind of investments we'll be making this year, which may kind of probably say affect our overall margins, or are we going to keep say our overall consol margin in mind while kind of calibrating the investment that Rediff might make?

Also one, given the IPO money that they may receive and the investment that they may make, should we be wary about our consolidated margin getting affected? That's one.

Overall, any sense of the capex guidance, one, we've made some investments in NBFCs, including those types of investment, the capex guidance if at all you can share with us across investments in NBFCs, overall capex guidance on the infrastructure that we're building and a Rediff as a platform might make for the year?

We see pockets where we see expansions and margins, and we will also incur capex, and the payment gateway business, there is margin pressure. I think a combination of that is of course playing out.

We believe the margins should continue, in terms of consolidated basis, we should continue seeing similar numbers or maybe slightly higher, which will guide you at the end of first quarter. In terms of the capex, we have certain guidelines and policies that we are not able to share a lot of information about specifics on Rediff.

What I can tell you is that, given the platform framework is part of Rediff, and also growth is there, today most of the Rediff business is B2B, which is being able to offer frameworks and platforms to companies. Given the opportunity with RediffPay and also embedded finance...

You go ahead, Vishal bhai. I think there's some other background noise.

Let me go ahead.

I think we lost Vishal. Just continuing on that, yes, a lot of momentum growth will be there in Rediff.

As and when we are there at the IPO level, we'll give out more details.

Oh, sure, sir. One last just suggestion, sir.

Whenever it's possible, if you can share Rediff line items separately, even at a very broad level of say revenue and EBITDA, that'd be help because going forward maybe there'll be a SOTP kind of valuation which might emerge if and when we get Rediff listed. Some scratch bare detail on Rediff will really be helpful.

Thanks, and all the best.

Absolutely. Absolutely, thanks.

We'll share.

Amish, are you done with your question?

Yeah. Thanks a lot.

Congratulations for the good numbers. I have only one question that how much of the current transaction routing through the AI-assisted versus rule engine-based?

If you come to think of it, AI is in all facets of transaction processing. In other words, I'm assuming your question is around how much is automated and fraud checked using AI and AI frameworks compared to humans or rule-based engines.

I think that fortunately for us with two-factor authentication in India that the fraud rates are pretty low. We think that this AI-based frameworks have been evolving.

We've been checking and building up. I think I can tell you for sure that practically in all different areas of payments, we are using AI.

In one ways, we can say that all our transactions will have some component of AI-based checks and validations that are happening across the company.

I could say all of the transactions, but

if that makes sense.

Sir. Thank you so much.

Thanks for the opportunity. Can you hear me?

Hello?

Go ahead.

Thank you so much. I have two questions.

One of them is linked to the question just now asked of you. In fact, I just become a small shareholder, but I'm more keen to understand how AI will manifest.

From the outside, the best way to understand that is to see the sort of metrics. Personally speaking, today someone might say CCAvenue is a payment company that talks about AI.

From an investor's standpoint, I think it's important that AI is already becoming a measurable revenue-generating business line. For that, there are a number of areas.

This is more of an observation. You don't need to sort of answer the question.

It's more of an observation, but please feel free to sort of comment on it. If there was some sort of AI revenue disclosure in terms of merchant adoption, revenue per merchant, how much of your processes, the queries, the frauds, the recommendations, the underwriting decisions, the fraud management that you talked about, there are so many metrics which are AI-related partially or entirely.

If there can be a slide or two that gives us that kind of confidence on how you are tracking on AI, I think then you can call yourself an AI company and not a payment company talking about AI. I think you're going there, but I'm not able to fully grasp it.

That was the first part. The second part also is somewhat connected.

I've been a banker for many years, and I've seen a lot of banks, payment banks, fintechs completely come undone either because they've flouted a regulatory license or they've not kept pace with technology. You see what Mythos is showing up in so many banks.

You see what Andromeda is doing to all the pop-ups and the cookies. Everything is changing so quickly.

It's very important to understand how you're managing your risk and whether there can be some sort of risk management slide. Because to me, apart from AI, the only other key issue in the company is operating risk.

If something goes wrong there, you don't get a second chance, especially not from the regulators or someone who's trying to hack your system. I'm very keen to understand if you have any comments on these two observations.

I think other than that, you have a very interesting trajectory going forward. No,

thanks. Also thanks for the question.

Something that we think about all the time. We always think that, in some ways, pretty much what you said, the best metrics to track are the ones that clearly show improvements in efficiency, scale, merchant experience, risk management, and somewhat monetization at the end.

The things that internally we would want to track in some ways are things like the payment success rates driven by intelligent routing using AI, some reduction in transaction failures, and, in some ways, the way you'd want to get productivity through onboarding turnaround times and increase the cross-sell across the ecosystem products. When you think about risk and fraud, internally we look at things which are like the detection times, the response times in the transactions monitored through the AI-led risk systems, and so on and so forth.

In terms of efficiencies, we'd look at all the way from customer service support resolution times to the reconciliation settlement turnaround times and reduction in all this manual overloads and operating overloads. Pretty much the question which was asked earlier, which is what percentage of the workflows are automated using AI systems and this productivity gains.

The key we think in terms of the opportunity, and this is how we think, and our mental model is also evolving because it's a moving target. We think that we need to think of this opportunity of AI not just as a technology productivity gain or an experiment, but as a driver for our efficiency, risk management, and a long-term operating leverage.

That's how we look into this at least. Far, we think that AI is just not a separate initiative.

It is increasingly becoming embedded all across our platforms, and we are leveraging AI across fraud management and analytics and customer servicing and intelligent transaction routing and all the lending-related risk assessment that we plan to do going forward to enhance both scalability and somewhat the margin expansion going forward. That's how our approach is not just simply deploy AI on a standalone feature, but to integrate it as a layer across our payments, commerce, and financial services to build somewhat an efficient platform over time.

This has been our thought process so far. Your point about actually specifically talking about AI as a separate line item, given that we're not just a services company, we're more of a product company.

Historically, we've seen services companies segregate their revenues on AI and non-AI, and yes, there are some cloud service providers who do that in terms of the large ones including Microsoft and others, or data center providers. We're somewhat embedding AI into all different aspects of what we do.

As a result, we think that just embedding AI across all this multiple layers of our organization with a focus on some of the key areas that we need to leverage is perhaps the way we need to think about it. We do have specific AI revenue as well, which from a size of the P&L is not material.

We think that there's a lot more potential in that. As and when it becomes large enough that we'd want to talk about it, and you'll hear more and more of that in this year from us.

I think that's how we think about it. To your points about how we would want to manage risk and so on and so forth, and you mentioned Mythos and a few other security vulnerability issues and so on and so forth, keeps us up all the time.

We don't know too much about that because the new frameworks are coming up by the day. I think only a handful of companies have access to such large frameworks, but given the amount of scrutiny and so on and so forth that come along with it.

I think that we'll evolve. We'll have to learn.

Much like us, even banks will have to build up on that. I think that a lot of things are new in that space, but there are good, great compliance standards in place even today.

That much I can tell you. I think that this exposure that comes in is about a small vulnerability in a piece of software which was not patched, which was not even known.

That risk is now becoming significantly more, and something that we have to keep on reviewing and looking at. We also have a lot of compliances on data, data security, and DPDP, and many others.

I think a proper framework in terms of looking at it is very important. More at a capex level, we look at three things, which is in the world of AI, genuinely we think there's only compute, algos, and data at the end abstracted out to these three.

We think that we don't have a very large role to play in compute because we're not a chip design firm, and we don't manufacture chips, and we are not going that route. We just think that we have to work on algos and data, and that's where we are at the moment, and applied within our embedded ecosystem.

I know it's a long answer, but hopefully in the coming quarters, specifically when we gain significant traction, not just from our embedding of AI within our ecosystem, but also direct revenues coming from certain products that we've built out in AI that potentially have a lot more interesting use cases, which we believe there are, that we'll be able to share that as well going forward. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Only recommendation is if at all whatever fabric of your organization, and whichever process, front, middle, or back end, to the extent possible, you can disclose what part of that is AI, that will really help people understand where you are in that AI journey.

That's a good suggestion. Thanks.

We'll take that up.

Thank you so much for your feedback.

Hi, good evening. Thank you for giving me this opportunity.

Also many congratulations for a great set of numbers. Sir, first I wanted to understand that as AI agents increasingly execute commerce autonomously, does the control point of the ecosystem shift away from merchants towards orchestration platforms like Avenues AI?

I think it's a slightly loaded question. The way I think we need to think about agents is that there is agents and who's the custodian of that agent.

In a classical way, what you do is intent and execution. They're two separate things.

As a company, we'll provide a framework for someone to build an agent, and then there are guardrails around that agent, and then there is control mechanisms to an extent of a kill switch which has been given to the custodian of the agent. The important part is that what the agent would need to execute will always stay in the control of the merchant within the merchant ecosystem.

If Avenues AI is providing the agent for the merchant to do certain tasks and activities at the back end, technically we are an infra provider, but the control mechanism of the agent will always be with the merchant. It gets slightly more gray area because we're also the custodian, and we provide the framework to build the agents.

I think a lot of this is slightly new to all. We've built out payment agents as well so in other words, using the protocols which are out there, a classical example is the customer can go and say that I want to buy a ticket from say Ahmedabad to Bombay.

It does a discovery agent on the side that will actually go discover the lowest cost and whatever it may be and give you that information. Then once the intent is given, the opportunity for the customer to give intent is always in the control of the customer, and I'm just using one use case to perhaps walk you through how we think through it, but so the customer control is always with the customer, it is never with the agent, because the intent comes from the customer, the agent is executing on that intent.

I think from a customer perspective, we don't think that the agent can take over the customer intent at any given point in time, because that'd be huge risk if you will. That's one part.

Once the agent is able to go and discover and find the right set of search results, and if the customer wants to purchase a particular sector of tickets or whatever it may be, that intent goes into a command to execute. That again comes from the customer.

It can't be an agent which will just run the command by itself. At that point, that execution will go from a discovery agent to a payment agent.

There'll be an agent-to-agent protocol transfer that happens, and that payment agent is actually going to go again to a Avenues AI payment framework, whether it's through MCP or it will go directly into executing that if the merchant is integrated using CCAvenue. Once that happens, again, the two-factor authentication is still in the hands of the customer, which means that a payment agent cannot execute the command without the customer finally going and saying that, "Yes, I'm going to verify," because a two-factor authentication is required.

Once it executes, it will again give it back to the site agent, and the site agent gives the information back to the customer. I think in some ways, we think the intent of the customer will always be safe.

The intent of the merchant will be more around the amount of guardrails and the controls that you'd want to set as a merchant onto your own agent, and then there'll be infra providers in certain cases us who provide the agent framework for someone to create such agents and give the controls in the hands of the creator. Creator in this case would be a merchant, or creator in this case could also be a software developer working for a merchant.

You'll have pretty much all the guardrails and the metering and everything else on the agent that potentially also safeguards the interest of the person who controls the agent. I hope that makes sense, but we don't see the control moving to us easily.

Thank you so much. My next question is that where do you believe the largest long-term profit pool will kind of emerge from?

Is it payments, AI orchestration, or lending, software, or transaction intelligence?

I think transaction intelligence is an input to the profit pool. It's the most important input in a profit pool.

If the output is profits, then the input is the transaction intelligence. That's what we are after, which is that becomes the monetization on merchant data, distribution, credit, automation, and all the workflows built on top of payments.

The biggest value creation is not merchant MDR alone. In some ways we believe the intelligence, and that's where we think the opportunity lies.

Right. Okay.

Thank you. Thank you so much.

Hi. My first question is regarding X जोरदार (Xduce).

We had acquired Xduce in 2024, acquired a 20% stake for $10 million. I wanted to ask about what is the status with respect to the company, what is the turnover, where are we at, because yeah, I think I'll expect an answer for that first, and then I'll ask my follow-up questions.

Yes, we've not acquired. We've taken 20% in Xduce.

The participation of Xduce comes up in the share of associates of the company. I think Xduce is based out of the United States.

This year as a company, we will want to expand international payments in United States also. We invested post all the regulatory RBI clearances, but I think they don't show up directly in our balance sheet.

It'll show up as a share of associates in our books. I think we've got a lot of opportunity because once we build out more infrastructure in the US, we'll have more collaborative partnerships with companies we've invested in and becomes strategic in some ways for us going forward.

I hope that answers the question, but yeah, the specifics around associate companies, we'll of course start discussing it out given our interest in the United States and how we'd like to grow there going forward.

Sir, I have two follow-up questions to that. Sir, actually, your answer doesn't give me a lot of confidence right now because when we acquired Xduce, Infibeam, the board, had stated two specific objectives.

One was that we were embedding Phronetic AI into Xduce's framework and second was we were growing CCAvenue's US payments business. Since that investment, Xduce has made at least two significant capital deployments that are entirely unrelated to those objectives, and I think you would probably know about that more than I do.

Sir, at that point also you had told that the 30% target for international revenue was made in February 2024. As of now also we are not close to that number.

What do you expect us to believe that even five years down the line if you don't reach that number, we're just supposed to wait?

No, I think the way we think about this, and thanks for bringing this up. The way we think about the opportunity is that AI deployment, and you'll read a lot of reports, what the mental model was about year and a half, two years ago is very different than what the reality is today.

Enterprise adoption of AI has been slow. If you read the recent news, you will also realize that companies like OpenAI, they've set up, in some ways, investments, even as recent as last quarter, where they said that we will implement it for enterprises because historically you would have seen that companies which are into software development would actually go and say that we know how to implement and give productivity gains to you, let me help you implement AI within your organization.

You'll see n number of reports out there saying that enterprise adoption of AI has been very, very slow. In many of cases, many of them they're even not very bullish about it.

The reason is nothing else. The reason is that enterprises have their own challenges.

Within those enterprises, unless there is a team that can come in who provide end-to-end solutions, and OpenAI has been working with even companies like Accenture, and there are reports that Accenture may be at risk given that OpenAI is getting into implementation. The reason they want to get into implementation is because it's slow.

The mental model maybe two years ago was that, yes, large enterprises like Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, all of them, they'd adopt AI at every nook and corner of it, and there won't be jobs, and you'd be seeing reports in that. No, it's changed.

I think that, as a company, we'd make bold bets. We don't control the adoption as much as we'd like to, but you'd want to make such bet saying that, yes, it's worth it.

It will stand the test of time. It's just that there's some latency involved.

That's one. I think that each company will want to do what they would think is appropriate in terms of their build-out, we can't comment on specific investments and what they'd like to do.

What I can tell you is that two things have happened. One is our focus last year has been on Middle East and growth in Middle East in Saudi and some of the Middle Eastern countries because we thought that we had achieved certain scale, penetration, and we should continue building up.

US was there in the horizon, but it was not an important geography to focus on because we thought that Middle East was seeing a lot more traction than where we think that we've lighted a small fire, we pour gasoline on it, it becomes larger. This year we will pick up US because of the macroeconomic risk in Middle East, and we are also seeing a lot more activities happening in the US.

To us, we don't think that, yeah, we were wrong in terms of thinking that AI adoption in such large financial enterprises will become much cleaner, faster, and companies can provide services to them who already have MSAs with large enterprises. To that extent, of course, we were wrong that the rate of adoption for large enterprises has been slow.

On the other hand, we also believe that there is a lot more going on, and once there is an adoption that starts because the frameworks have also evolved, the cost of tokens has also been, some people say it's higher, some people say it's lower, but that's also being optimized. We think that it stands the test of time.

I think it'll work. It is just that it will take time to adopt, and maybe we were slightly ahead of our time in terms of our approach to apply AI.

In fact, if you come to think of it, even other than productivity tools in coding and many others, enterprise adoption has been very slow. I think that that thing will always happen in a new technology.

We think that it's a bet worth making. It's one that we won't get all our bets right in terms of timing, but it stands a test of time.

It'll work,

because we will... Vishal bhai, this is universal.

This is universal, not just specific to us actually, AI adoption is slow.

Yeah. Sir, but

Xduce basically, they made one investment in a US cybersecurity firm, and the other investment in Deven Information Technologies, which is a Indian listed company. I think they have spent around ₹12 crore in that particular transaction.

The Infibeam's board would have probably given approval for Xduce to redeploy the money that you gave them, right? What does Infibeam think about that?

Because if they're not using it according to your stated objectives, it is a concern for me as a shareholder.

I think that's a incorrect statement. We don't participate in the board of Xduce, and we don't allocate their funds.

They have their own control mechanism, and they have their own opportunities that they would want to explore. Just so that they've been a profitable company.

They make a few million dollars every year. I think I don't see any reason why we would want to control specifically about how firms who derive most of their revenues out of the US would perform and what they would work upon going forward.

What I can tell you is that, yes, we think that whatever we want to build up and however we want to think about growing this position that we think that there's a lot more opportunity going forward. I think that specifically in two areas that we think, because we don't have direct MSAs with large financial institutions who are based in the US in New York.

We don't have MSAs, and typically an MSA would perhaps take you 6 to 12 months, maybe 2 years even to sign a single MSA. We think that when the enterprise adoption of AI picks up, and we are able to build out a lot more this year in FY27, that we'll have more collaborations going forward.

I don't think that we would have much to say in terms of some of those decisions on capital allocations happen at that point.

Thanks, all, for joining our full-year investor call, and we look forward to keeping everyone updated on the progress. Have a good day.