Thank you very much. We will now begin the question -and-answer session. The first question is from the line of Supratim Datta from Ambit Capital.

I had two questions, particularly on the insurance repository business and the CRA business. So on the insurance repository business, you talk about how the current regulation do not mandate Demat -- storing policies in Demat account. Just wanted to understand then how will you drive consumers towards moving away from PDF copies towards EIA accounts? How would this journey be facilitated by a player like CAMS or it has to be facilitated by the insurance company? In which case, this could take longer to happen, the transition from PDFs to EIA accounts? That's the first question. The second question on the CRA business. We understand that recently, the government has opened up the APY business to other players as well beyond Protean. So just wanted to understand how d o you see the opportunity in this business? And how do you look at scaling that up? Those are my two questions.

No, sure. Thanks, Supratim. So on the first part, think of it this way that any digital issuance or electronic issuance of policy like an attachment to an e-mail or a DigiLocker etcetera, does not have the intelligence that an EIA account has. So for example, you can have a single EIA account and within that, all the policies can be managed together, which means you can manage your metadata, which is your contact details, name, address all of that, if you make a single change, it flows to all the policies and then it flows back into your insurance records, which is not how PDF attachment works, that is just a PDF, dumb PDF attachment you'll have to store somewhere. But more than that, as you scale up, can you set reminders for payments of insurance premium. Can you pay an insurance premium through the EIA, the answers is yes. Can you set up of reminders, the answer is yes. Over a period of time, can you make claims through this utility? The answer is yes. Whenever statute allows today, digital lien marking is not allowed in insurance, it is allowed in MF, in the securities market, it is allowed not in the insurance market whenever that ha ppens. You know that a large part of the market borrows money to pay their premiums, which means you have an annual premium due on 1st of June, and May you just borrow against your policy where you have, let's say, a surrender value of INR10 lakh. That kin d of thing is still done on paper. To facilitate all of those things. And today, you know in the securities markets very elegant APIs are available where in 3 or 4 minutes, you can get lien making done and identification of assets. And then the limit is made available to you or the money lands up in your bank account. All that is not available in insurance. So those things can only happen through the EIA account. Think of it as exactly the mirror image of what happens in the D emat account, the securities Demat account. So the advantages are legendary, and are fairly significant and consumers will start adopting. But to create financial infrastructure, what do you need? First of all, each one of us should have an EIA account, and I'm very sure that amongst the people on this call, everyone will not have. You should have moved the policies there. And the third is that all the insurance sector participants, largely insurance companies, should be on a seamless data exchange just like today, the mutual fund comp anies are, the RPAs are and the repositories are, that's journey to be undertaken. Will not take very long. Will not take -- I don't think it will take 5 or 6 years, may take a couple of years. As that happens, the significant advantage of EIA will get est ablished. That's part one of that first -- the first of your questions. The second is that on the CRA, there's this policy class, which is APY, the Atal Pension Yojana, which has been eyeballed for quite some time now by the regulator in terms of allowing the CRAs to participate. They have made a formal notification recently. It's a mass-market product. It is consumed in large numbers. But of course, the pricing, etcetera, is very, very thin. Like you know, in most of these markets pricing is thin. But this is significantly thin because it is targeted as a social advantage delivery to a certain fraction of our population. So we are excited. We are excited that APY is opening up. We have the capability because all of that is a base requirement to you getting the license. So we have the capability to participate and we will soon begin participating. How the numbers will pan out, how do you penetrate those markets, etcetera, will become visible in a period of time. But yes, it's a great announcement, and we are excited by it.

Perfect. And just one question over here. So could you -- the existing customers who would already be on APY with Protean, could you get a share within that existing customer base? Or is it mostly in the incremental new customers will be getting the share?

So what happens is that inter -CRA capabilities switch is available as a part of the architecture, just like you've seen in mobile number portability, etcetera, most consumers do not switch. So getting consumers to switch to build a marketplace isn't an easy task and isn't perhaps the cornerstone of our strategy, selling new is. So that's how this market will also progress.

Understood. And just 1 last question on the MF business. So just wanted to understand that like going into FY'25, are there any major contracts which are coming up for renegotiation?

So like you know, typically, these contracts hold out for 3, 4 or 5 years, some for 2. So there are some contracts where the dialogue is undergoing, which were due either on 1st Jan or 1st of April. And we are in the process of speaking to the client and then second down on a price regime, which will hold out for the future. So there are a set of clients.

Understood. Can you quantify what would be the share of AUM or the number of contracts that would be up for renegotiation?

So I'll just say a couple of things, Supratim. Yes, there is a cycle, right? So if you have 20 customers, you would assume that every year at least 4 or 5 will come up for renewal. So I don't think this year is going to be any different, given that we enter into this renewal at different periods of time. So nothing extraordinary from that perspective. The one thing that I will add is that it's not going to be something that's going to be a steep kind of a discount or give away given that a lot of these customers have reached a stage where the marginal cost for them is actually not huge, right? While there could be some impact that they will have on the TR ratios and all that stuff. But what we expect is a moderate kind of a impact on all these things. And I don't think this will disturb the usual formula of AUM growth that is AUM fee growth that we have been used to. The only thing that I w ill say is that this is a routine development that keeps happening every year. Nothing exceptional is expected on this.

The next question is from the line of Devesh Agarwal from IIFL Securities.

Many congratulations on great set of numbers. My first question is on the mutual fund business. We see that there's a 2.3% sequential decline in the yields for a 10% growth in the AUM(37.30mins), and this is despite the 200 basis points increase in the equ ity share of the AUM. So just wanted to understand it better is this you think the new normal run rate for a 10% increase in the AUM that we should expect or were there any adjustment in 4Q that led to a slightly higher moderation in the yields?

So Devesh, I will answer that question, no, there was no adjustment or anything that happened. We've seen that, in fact, earlier quarter, you saw more than normal kind of a AUM fee growth to AUM growth. It was kind of almost like 90 -plus percentage. So me quarters, depending on which customer grows from a scale perspective, there will be some adjustments. Yes, it is on the lower side of our expectation in terms of what the yield will be, but not very different from what you see. If you say AUM growth, to AUM fee growth, we are again plus 60-plus percentage in terms of this, 70% is the normal. So I don't think that we need to make any adjustment on our assumptions. I think going forward, what we have projected in terms of AUM to AUM fee growth, plus or min us a few percentage will play out. You will see that in Q1 also. So no adjustment is needed, and it's not as if a big price reduction was given or something happened in the last quarter. It's more kind of a growth that's happened in some of the scale custo mers, which marginally add the lesser yield to us. I don't think that -- that's normal, so over a period of plan has been our experience. So no major change in assumptions is actually needed for this.

Understood, sir. And secondly, sir, wit hin the mutual fund non -asset based revenue has been growing in line with the asset -based revenues at least for the FY'24. So do you expect this to continue that the growth in the non-asset based revenues will be similar to what we're seeing in asset-based? Or this is expected to slow down, given that there's an increase in digitization of transactions and the revenues from paper-based will go down?

So Devesh, there are 4 aspects in this non -AUM fee, right, which is: one is the transaction fee , which is again going up. But we see that overall percentage of say static, right? It's between 8% to 11% of paper transactions still continue to come. On an absolute number, they are not going down at all. But there are other components of this also, whi ch is the call center, which is kind of more and more regions do get added and then there is this entire miscellaneous and application fee. As we kind of broaden our base, we have more and more people subscribing to our applications, to our APIs, etcetera which is a part of this. And then there's out-of-pocket expenses it never goes down because always, there is an increase in the volume of transactions, which is linked into it, right? For example, you'll never stop -- you'll never send lesser SMSs or e -mails or lesser postal when they are quite -- they are low, etcetera. So while I do understand that the growth this quarter has been a little higher than what we are used to, I don't see any big moderation happening in that growth given that the paper transactions continue to be range bound in terms of the percentage of total transactions. And the other components of this non -asset based revenue being on a upward trajectory even when the digitalization happens, because it's not related to the average.

Understood, sir. And sir my last question would be on the non-mutual fund business. Again, we have seen a very healthy growth especially in the fourth quarter. So one, I wanted to understand what would be the segments which will see the maximum gro wth in FY'25? And also your thoughts around the growth through acquisition given that both Fintuple and 360 have been good acquisitions for us. So what are the areas that we will target, which will kind of grow through acquisitions or inorganic growth? Yes, that will be my last question.

No, sure, Devesh. So if you see last year, which is FY'24. What added to the momentum of non- MF growth is KRA as the biggest engine, pay as the second and AIF as the third. And I think in this year, I'm expecting the same to happen, which means these 3 will remain the engines, which will drive the growth. Account aggregator as a fourth engine was great in percentage growth, but the base is so small that absolute growth at company level has not been impacted. I'm expecting that in FY'25, account aggregator will also start making its presence felt in terms of making at least some increment to company financials, very small, but it will do that. So think of it as pay, KRA and AIF in the lead, account aggregator some where there. So then what it leaves is 2 franchises, 1 is insurance where we have said that the -- while environmentally, everything sounds very good, the exact niche to enter and the start scaling the adoption of EIA is perhaps still not 100% clear in the marketplace, not just with us, with everyone. You are holding out the large share. But absolute growth in terms of policies and EIA accounts, etcetera, is still a moderate number. So something has to happen materially as the Bima Central becomes a large franchise, adoption is very great or consumers wake up and they want to start adopting EIA accounts. That's 1 part which can play out and Think is the other one, which can also play out. Fintuple is a small constituent. But like I said, is doing some very meaningful work. So when you look at MF plus 6, which is non-MF of these 6 constituents, I think Pay, KRA, AIF as the 3 leaders, account aggregator coming as the fourth, driving the engine. And then between insurance repository and Think where percentage wasn't very high last year, if they are able to kind of be the penetration and scale up, then we could have them also participating. But the first 3 really will continue to lead the charge. That was the first part of your question. The second, you asked ab out acquisitions and whether we have an intention whether we are shortlisting things. So yes, we are looking at the market. As usual, finding a good candidate in a good segment is always our intention. I can also tell you that while Fintuple was largely on the alternate side working with custodies and with AIFs and PMSs. Think, a core franchise, is more on the lending side not so much on the capital markets. We believe that a good target could come out of payments and insurance. And more than that, I don't have much to share because we haven't really thought sharper than that. We continue to scan the market all the time. But I believe between payments and insurance, it could be a nice segment for us to think of the next target company. When and how, we will update you whenever that happens.

The next question is from the line of Abhijeet Sakhare from Kotak Securities.

Question on expense growth. Last year, we delivered about 15%. So looking forward to your FY '25, how should we think about it? I mean, part of it would obviously be driven by the revenue growth that we're able to achieve. But anything that's already kind of committed and part of the investment pipeline?

So Abhijeet, yes, we do not -- 2 things. One is that I indicated earlier, which is that the usual increase in salaries and given the market and given the technology focus that we have, will continue to happen, that's a given in terms of what we do. So our overall expense growth, I think last time it was around 18% is what including 15% in terms of year -on-year. I do not foresee that expense growth will be much larger than this. We do not have -- we continue to invest in the products, as I said, the run rate is around INR7 crores a quarter is what we invest in the new platforms. We don't see that changing drastically either upwards or downwards in terms of what we invest. Obviously, the revenue that's coming out of it just next to nil a few quarters back, it's now ramping up. So that w ill have a beneficial impact. But from an expense perspective, I don't think we're going to cut down on our investments or moderate that to any extent. So I don't think that you will see any difference in terms of expense growth for the next year for your projections. No exceptional expenses are being planned as of now from a revenue perspective. If and when there is some concrete plan on re -architecting platforms, etcetera, we will come back with a proper explanation for that. And that will be more kind of a long-term platform building, not a short-term operating expenses kind of a ramp-up that you will see. So the short answer is we don't expect exceptional expenses coming up for the next year, and it will be in line with what you are seeing now. Obviousl y, as we go along, we might see some strains on salary cost or we might moderate salary cost that depends on how the market behaves, but overall, not much of a difference.

Understood. And one data question, what's the current headcount? A nd if you can split it up between MF and non-MF business?

Yes, the current headcount is around 7,800. This includes around 1,200 people in the front office for MF and around 2,500 people in the back office for MF, then that includes around 80 0 technology-related resources. And then there are about 100 in risk and compliance. And the rest are split into corporate, support, the new businesses that we are into in terms of pay, Rep. Pay will have around 100 people, repository will have around 250 people. KRA will have 150 people. So that's how it gets split into.

The next question is from the line of Prayesh Jain from Motilal Oswal Financial Services Limited.

Sir, congratulation on a great set of numbers. Firstly, on the margin front, the -- what would you attribute more to and if you could give some granularity as to how much of the increase in margins is coming in from the new businesses? And how much is from the scale -up in the MF business? So some understanding as to -- and that will help us think about the margins in FY'25 and beyond as to how should we kind of think about margins. But Ram did mention about the cost and you'll be able to maintain margins between 45%, 46%. But if you could help us understand the quality of margins in the MF and the non-MF business, that would be helpful. And just in that context, it would be great if you could start sharing some information on the subsidiaries on a quarterly level in terms of profitability. That's just a feedback, yes. That will be my first question.

No, thanks, Prayesh. We've taken that feedback. And just we do track from a -- I'll just give a caveat that all the non-MF business are not homogeneous, and we don't follow the same pattern in terms of market, pr icing, target markets, etcetera, revenue model, etcetera. But then just for the ease of understanding, I kind of put it into MF and non-MF buckets. We have seen a creep up in the margins of non -MF given that the platform businesses are -- predominantly are all platform businesses. We've seen what used to be a 15% kind of overall EBITDA level across all businesses, that's now crept up to more than 20%. We still feel that there is room for growth on that. We feel the steady state is probably close to 35% to 40% given the nature of these businesses, but it will take time to come there. But we've seen a good growth from an overall perspective from the non -MF business also. But the bulk of the market increase is flowing from the mutual fund business. What you see is obviously earlier it used to be a depletion in margins because of the non-MF business. What we are seeing now, they're also starting to contribute incrementally to the margin growth. And hence, we don't see this reversing. The only reason why I kind of wanted to moderate, and Anuj also mentioned this earlier, to moderate the expectations for the next quarter or 2 is the annual cycle that comes from the salary increase. So traditionally, our impact has been about a couple of percentage on the sales has b een the impact on the salary appraisal. Obviously, we would try to mitigate that to the extent possible with productivity increases and automation, etcetera. But the caveat has always been that in a quarter or the next quarter or 2, you might see some moderation in margins. But I feel that a steady-state margin would be around 45%. In a good quarter, it comes to 46%, in a bad quarter it will be a couple of basis points less than that, but that's a range bound number that we are seeing. On your subsidiaries performance and profit margin, we've considered that feedback, we will kind of definitely consider that while publishing the results for the next quarter.

And coming to the AIF business, and that has been one of our key focus areas and drivers. What I look at is quarterly, there is -- on a sequential basis, there is no major increase in revenues. That is the way we calculated it other -- on whatever percentage share you give, we calculate the numbers, applying that to the total revenues. From that, I'm seeing that the revenues are kind of flattish, right, sequentially. Why would that happen in a market where equities have done well and AIFs would have done well. So any or -- any thoughts there?

Prayesh, I think we have grown reasonably well quarter-on-quarter. Even in the last quarter, I think we grew on a quarter-on-quarter basis 5%, which is I think a decent number to grow. The nature of business is that you will have to keep repolishing the business as and when the fund's life go away. I think we're doing a decent job of that. And we have the newer lines coming in, in terms of the WealthTrak and the WealthServ, this onboarding as well as the analytics module. And GIFT City, the lot of sign -ups have happened, but the ramp up in business is expected to start off shortly. So I think we are doing decently well on a quarter -on-quarter basis. And we only expect this trajectory to be higher as we go forward as we just -- the products that we have launched become more industrializ ed in terms of adoption. As far as the GIFT City revenue going up, which we have a lot of sign-ups in the GIFT City, but I think for the actual operations to start will take some time. So I think we are on a reasonably good wicket on that.

Sir, even this would be -- revenues wouldn't be linked to AUM growth in this business, too?

So most of our billing is -- actually less than 25% is AUM-based billing. Most of the billing is dependent on the number of investors who are onboarded to a particular scheme, which is the way that the customers are moving towards. I know that competition has got a different view on this. But what we are seeing in the market is that the customers are preferring or, in fact, are insisting that the revenue for the RTA be linked to the number of investors being serviced rather than the AUM. And we see that that's also reasonable given the nature of the AIF business, given the large ticket sizes and one-time drawdown and investor servicing requirements being tied to that rather than to your commitment or AUM. So that's the way the revenue model is developing in AIF.

Okay. Last question on the cash is, what would be your current cash position? And how -- is there any -- so the entire cash would be available to shareholders, right? And what would be the plans to utilize the same? That would be my last question.

The closing cash position we had at 31st March was INR617 crores. This is before the recommended dividend. The dividend, I think the board recommended INR16.5 per share. That's a -- if the shareholders do approve that, it becomes a payout around INR80 crores, INR81 crores. So if you -- and even after that, we will have excess of INR525 crores, INR530 crores of cash on the books. That is the minimum net worth requirements for specific businesses. It could be INR25 crores for the pay business. It's probably a little less for the RTA businesses. But keeping all those things aside, the cash question is extremely comfortable and surplus. Anuj was mentioning this earlier, that there is -- we are -- on scanning the ecosystem for possible inorganic growth opportunities. So 1 possible use of the cash is when we arrive at a candidate for this inorganic growth, and at that point of time the B oard will take a call on whether that's an appropriate way to move forward for us. But for that, the entire cash is definitely available for the shareholders barring some minimum net worth requirements for the individual businesses. And the use will be dividend and more dividend and if at all we decide on inorganic acquisition, which definitely we are looking out for, that will be the better use for the cash that we have.

The next question is from the line of Dipanjan Ghosh from Citi Group.

Just a few questions from my side. First, going back to the AIF segment. You obviously don't give the number of investors in your disclosures and AUM is only data point that we get. On that, over the last let's say, first half versus third quart er versus fourth quarter, we have seen some increase in yields, if I calculate revenues as a bps of AUM. Now is it a function of new clients getting onboarded or the WealthServ, platforms on the modules, digital onboarding modules that you have kind of maybe sold to your customers? So just wanted to get a sense of what is a recurring sort of revenues growth in this segment versus, let's say, if there is any one -off sort of upfront income that you're booking because of this rapid growth in the new clientele that you're onboarding? Second, as you said -- correctly alluded that your competition has taken a different view on this segment. So from a structural perspective, do you really see pricing being stable in this segment? Or should -- or can one see some amount of volatility out there? Second question will be on the entire non-MF businesses. Now you alluded to the fact that first movers in this segment obviously have some advantages in terms of both client recognition and trust. Having said that, you also alluded to the fact that it can be replicated over a period of time by competitors. Given that some of segments are quite nascent and maybe not duopolistic in nature, what is the pricing you are seeing in any of these non-MF business? Is it sustainable from a perpetual perspective or can there be some amount of volatility? Lastly, two data keeping questions. One is if you can give your KRA revenue mix for FY 2024 as a percentage of your -- sorry, for FY 2023 as a percentage of your overall revenues? And the second will be the 7,800 employee base, if you can just split it between permanent and contractual?

Okay. So that's quite a few questions. I'm just thinking which order to answer them in. But let me just take your question on non-MF and non-duopolistic markets. And that is true that across these markets, pricing plays out in a very different way. There are 1 or 2 markets where you could have a base pricing or more uniform pricing. KRA is 1 example where there is a set of 3 or 4 participants. An d therefore, selling on price hasn't been a endemic feature of that marketplace. That marketplace can be counted as a stable marketplace despite having several competitors. But if you go anywhere else, if you go to repository, where the price of convertin g a policy or the annual maintenance is perhaps half to one-third of what it used to be 5 years back. If you say account aggregator where the price of a single data pull is half to one-third to one-fourth and sometimes lesser of what it used to be at one-time. And if you take payments where, as the ticket size falls, the INR2 to INR3 per trigger that is the standard price, we try to accommodate our clients, let's say, if somebody is launching INR100 of SIP collection or even smaller ones, we do accommodate. So therefore, not that in the MF RTA business, there is some great advantage of price. You have seen that despite being the two- player market, it does see a bit of price erosion. In the others, I think they are as competitive markets as you've seen anywh ere else. And for a lot of them, pricing is perhaps getting to a stable place. Because if you've seen a -- pricing is perhaps sub INR2 at times and INR1 per pull. If you see policy conversion and maintenance, which used to be upwards of INR10, there are pl aces where it could get sold for half the price, and that is true of payments, too. So we don't worry too much about predatory pricing because a lot of these competitors are stable, which means that one guy trying to just gain share basis asymmetry in pric e is something we don't see often, prices have -- in general, as consumption goes up, prices dwindle down. You've seen that in all these 3 markets. Even in the new market, we've seen that, Rep is a stable market, more than 10 years old, we've seen that, an d so is payments. So I don't think there is cause to worry about pricing depletion is one force of nature, which is going to hit us on the face. It is something that you deal with it every day or every month. It's like 4 gifted manufacturers or 4 car manufacturers perhaps behaves the same way, the threats are the same, the opportunities are the same. We have a stated position of not being a price player. So that is one thing we do not sell unless it's a relationship deal or a client we really want to be wit h, we don't sell price. What our competition does is obviously evident to you, a lot of them are listed, and therefore, you see how they strategize in the markets. So that's how I would answer your question number 3. I'm thinking of -- do you want to take that?

Yes. So on your question on AIF. So it is -- well, almost all the revenue is annuity(1.00.39mins) in nature. It's not as if there is a onetime revenue that we book. There is some amount of implementation for the onboarding platform, but that's insignificant when compared to the overall revenue. And even in WealthServ not only do you have implementation cost, you also have an AMC cost that we bill. It's not some one-time revenue that's booked to ensure -- that is kind of causing the increase in yield or growth that you're seeing. It's kind of -- what happens is that fund's life will fall off and new funds will get launched. So if at all, there is some fluctuations in the revenue, it will be because of the life of the fund and not because of our billing model. And we continue to see whatever the plus or minus, I think on the assets we see around 1.5 bps of yield that we continue to see across a reasonable period of time, probably it might vary from 1 quarter to another quarter. Again, that's not how we bill, but just for reference, you can probably have that as the number. From -- I think you also asked revenue -- or 7,800 employees and how many are -- I think we have a policy that most of the employees are in -house. We have less than 500 pe ople who are probably vendor staff and all those things. So most of the employees are on roll and -- on the roll of CAMS or its subsidiaries, and that's the split that we have. KRA 2023 revenue, I think some more detail, I can probably share the detail wit h you in terms of how the revenue was ramped up. But suffice to say that this year has been exceptional in terms of revenue growth with a 90% growth, and our strategy has also changed on that. But the exact revenue on '20, '21, '22, '23, I will probably share with you separately.

Just one small follow-up. With this employee number of 7,800, what total we did in '23 last year?

Ladies and gentlemen, we'll take this as our last question. I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. Ramcharan sir please for the closing comments.

Thank you, Neha. And we thank all the participants for taking time to be a part of this earnings call and your continuing interest in CAMS is appreciated. In case of any questions, please do reach out to Orient Capital or Anish Sawlani in Investor Relations in CAMS, and they'l l be happy to respond. And thanks once again for your time and hoping to stay in touch and engaged.

Thank you. On behalf of Computer Age Management Services Limited, that concludes this conference. Thank you for joining us, and you may now disconnect your lines.