Thanks, Ayushi. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. This is Randhir Singh, Managing Director of IndoStar Capital Finance Limited. I'm pleased to welcome you to our Q1 FY27 Earnings Conference Call. We truly appreciate your support as we continue to build long-term value. I hope you had a chance to review our financial results and investor presentation, which are available on our website and on the stock exchanges. I'll begin with a strategic review of our business and operating performance for the quarter, following which Jayesh will take you through the financial performance in detail. Before I discuss our quarterly performance, let me briefly touch upon the current macroeconomic environment and industry outlook. The operating landscape continues to be influenced by global geopolitical uncertainties, concerns around an uneven monsoon, and the potential impact of El Nino. Reflecting these challenges, the Reserve Bank of India has revised its FY27 GDP growth forecast to 6.6%. While the domestic economy continues to demonstrate resilience, global conflicts, elevated energy prices and weather-related uncertainties remain key risks that could impact both urban and rural demand. After the relatively dry June, monsoon rainfall during July is expected to remain below normal due to El Nino conditions, which could impact kharif sowing and reservoir levels in certain regions. At the same time, retail inflation increased to 4.38% in June from 3.93% in May, largely driven by higher food and fuel prices.
Against this backdrop, the Monetary Policy Committee has maintained the repo rate at 5.25%, while retaining a neutral policy stance, reflecting a balanced approach towards supporting growth, while keeping inflation under control. Turning to the industry outlook. ICRA expects domestic commercial vehicle wholesale volumes to grow by 4% to 6% in FY27, reflecting a normalization after the strong growth witnessed in FY26. While the pace of growth is expected to moderate due to higher base, the underlying demand environment remains healthy, supported by continued government infrastructure spending, replacement demand and better affordability following the reduction in GST rates. The used commercial vehicle segment continues to present an opportunity driven by replacement demand, rising new vehicle prices and the lower cost of ownership. CRISIL also expects used vehicle financing to remain a key growth driver for NBFCs, which augurs well for our business. As we highlighted earlier, FY26 was a defining year in our transformation journey, and we are building on that momentum by strengthening our vehicle finance and Micro LAP businesses. Our focus remains on improving collections, enhancing technology-led monitoring and early warning systems, system-integrated underwriting through proprietary and product-specific scorecards and investing in digital tools. Let me now move to our operating performance, beginning with disbursements. As discussed in our previous calls, we strengthened our credit underwriting framework starting in Jan 2025 and continue to refine our customer selection, asset selection and risk filters based on portfolio trends and experience. While this led to a conscious moderation in disbursement growth initially, it has helped us build a stronger and a more resilient portfolio. In parallel to refinement in credit underwriting, we also took several steps to spur growth like launch of Prime segment, alignment of channel payouts, about 30% increase in our field sales force, addition of new branches, conversion of micro branches to full-fledged branches and significant hiring of specialized talent, including for verticalization of vehicle finance business across our 4 key verticals of commercial vehicle, passenger vehicle, construction equipment and farm equipment. As a result, our retail disbursements stood at INR1,235 crores compared to INR1,306 crores in the previous quarter and INR858 crores in the same period last year, reflecting a healthy 44% year-on-year growth. The improvement in origination is clearly visible in the quality of our customer base. The share of customers with a CIBIL score above 725 has steadily increased from 63% in FY24 to 79% in FY26 and further to 84% in Q1 FY27. At the same time, our new to credit exposure has reduced from 13% in FY24 to 4% in Q1 FY27. These numbers reflect the disciplined customer selection and stronger underwriting standards that we have consistently implemented over the last 2 years. Our vehicle finance portfolio also has become more diversified. On a year-on-year basis, the disbursement mix during the quarter continues to diversify further with the share of passenger vehicle disbursement increasing to 30% from 28% and construction equipment improving to 11% from 9%. While it's often easier to drive growth through large
ticket financing, we have consciously chosen to build a more balanced granular portfolio across multiple product segments. The benefits of this disciplined approach of growing our business significantly with focus on portfolio quality are clearly visible in the data. Our early delinquency ratio has reduced from 5.55% in Q1 FY26 to 2.29% in Q1 FY27. While the non-starter ratio has declined from 3.76% to 1.65% over the same period. Although both metrics have seen a marginal seasonal uptick in Q1 FY27 compared to Q4 FY26, they remain substantially lower than year ago levels, indicating that the quality of new originations continue to improve. The AUM component of our book post the start of tightening period since January 2025 has now increased to 68% in June from 60% in March '26. This percentage will keep increasing at a good rate since loan tenures of the VF books are relatively short in the range of about 3 to 3.5 years, and the new book percentage should increase to about 85% by Q4 FY27. As of June '26, almost 80% of our NPAs pertain to the old book before Jan 2025 and fresh addition in NPA in June quarter is almost 70% contributed by the old book. And hence, we expect significant improvement in headline GNPA and NPA numbers and reduction in credit cost as the old book runs off significantly in the next 2 to 3 quarters. Let me now turn to our Micro LAP business, which continues to scale up in a disciplined and calibrated manner. During Q1 FY27, disbursements stood at INR50 crores, up 85% year-on- year, while AUM increased to INR217 crores, nearly 3x the level a year ago, of course, on a smaller base. Importantly, this growth has been accompanied by strong asset quality with 99.7% of the portfolio remaining current and 90-plus DPD at just 0.17%, supported by a weighted average LTV below 40% and portfolio yields of over 20%. The business continues to operate on a fully digital journey with 100% e-application, e- agreement and e-NACH, while leveraging our existing vehicle finance branch network, allowing us to scale without any incremental branch capex. We now operate from 125 co-located branches versus 108 in last quarters across Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Gujarat. Our MLAP business after 2 years of launch has GNPAs of only 0.17%. The delinquency will inch up as the book ceases, but we have made a very good start with regard to portfolio quality. We have also consciously started working towards increase in average ticket size. Our average ticket size on disbursement in Micro LAP business is growing quarter-on-quarter in a gradual way and has gone up from INR5.9 lakhs to about INR8.2 lakhs in the last 1 year. We are still, however, able to manage disbursement yield of about 20% plus besides processing fees and cost to income.
As shared in the previous earnings calls that we will have a calibrated expansion of MLAP business in other states. We are all set to launch MLAP business in UP and Bihar in August and September. We remain on track to double our Micro LAP AUM during FY27. Coming to our financials. On profitability, our pre-provisioning operating profit stood at INR93 crores this quarter. Our PAT stood at INR11 crores. The operating leverage in this model is coming through exactly as it should once disbursement and AUM scale ahead of our cost base and credit costs stabilize. On the liability side, we continue to strengthen and diversify our borrowing profile. During the quarter, our weighted average cost of funds declined by nearly 80 basis points year-on-year. We also continue to maintain a strong liquidity position and a comfortable ALM profile with positive cumulative mismatches across all buckets. Moving on to our progress towards FY29 guidance of 35% CAGR growth in disbursements and a target PAT of INR450 crores to INR500 crores. Number one, with significant improvement in portfolio quality, we had taken significant steps of growing our business. In the last 6 months, we have increased our front-end sales team count by 30% already, and our target is to increase it further so that we have about 50% higher sales headcount by March '27 over March '26. On the distribution front, we added 14 branches during the quarter, taking our network to 468 branches across 24 states and union territories. We target to cross 500 branches this year. We continue to invest in capacity, ensuring that our distribution network and operating infrastructure are well positioned to support high sustainable growth. Second, our disbursements last quarter grew by 44% year-on-year, which is higher than our 35% CAGR 3-year plan. Our July disbursement trend gives us comfort that we should be able to meet and potentially exceed 35% Y-o-Y disbursement growth target this quarter as well. Along with our investment in resources, we continue to digitize, improve our processes and loan journeys towards improving productivity. Our login to disbursement TAT in VF has shrunk by 44% over last 1 year due to all these digitization and loan simplification processes improvement. With our continuous refinement in credit parameters since January 2025, including the last refinement done as late as in April 2026, we are on track to reduce our credit costs and improvement in PAT significantly as old book runs off. We built a good momentum on PPOP growth and PAT growth will follow in the next 2, 3 quarters. Going forward, while we remain mindful of the evolving global macroeconomic environment, our strategy remains unchanged. We will continue to focus on disciplined execution, prudent risk management and sustainable growth. Over the last few quarters, we have built a stronger foundation through enhanced underwriting, a higher share of prime customers, a more diversified product mix, investment technology and a calibrated expansion of our branch network. These initiatives have strengthened the quality and resilience of our portfolio and position us well to capitalize on the growth opportunities ahead while maintaining our focus on long-term value creation.
Let me now hand over the call to Mr. Jayesh Jain for the overview of our financial performance.