Aurionpro Solutions Limited (AURIONPRO) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

All right. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I am your host. My name is [ Shaina ]. And it gives me immense pleasure to welcome each one of you to Aurionpro Investor Day 2024. We are so happy and thrilled to have each one of you here with us, for sure, it's going to be a wonderful evening. As we bring in together, I would like to take a moment and thank each one of you for joining us today and gracing this occasion with your kind presence. I'm sure you all are excited as well with those blank faces to bring in the evening. So as we start together, can we have a happy smile and a thunderous round of applause together, please? On this table, I still can't see a happy smile. The face was like this. For no smile, it's already 4, 5 evening time. All right. Let's start together, ladies and gentlemen, as a saying goes -- a very beautiful line, I would like to say, which I love, it's from Swami Vivekananda, he said this. Take risk in life. If you win, you lead, if you lose, you guide. Today, we embark on an exploration of dynamic world of digital transformation and reeling the incredible opportunities that lie ahead. Aurionpro is eager to share the company's progress with all of you. Ladies and gentlemen, as we move forward, to kick things off, we will begin with an AV representation capturing Aurionpro journey and its potential as a leading global tech provider. I would request my team to please do the honor. [Presentation]

Wow, what a wonderful showcase. Can we have a round of applause together? Thank you. All right, ladies and gentlemen, now moving ahead to set the stage for the day. I would like to invite and welcome on stage Mr. Ashish Rai, CEO of Aurionpro. Please give a huge round of applause and let's welcome him as he joins me on stage. Ashish is a fintech veteran with an impressive 22-plus years track record of building successful enterprise software business for global markets. Ashish joined Aurionpro in mid-2022, and became the CEO in October 2023. Everyone, once again, the man is here. Let's give a huge round of applause to this incredibly talented and hardworking man. Hi, very good evening to you, sir, seems like it's going to be a wonderful time having you here on stage. So there you go. I'm taking all the notes back stage. Thank you.

Okay. Thank you. Thank you, everyone. Thank you, [ Shaina ], for the intro, and thank you, everyone, for taking time out to see us here. We were in this -- I think we were in the same room last year and there were a few less of us, and there's a few more today and which is nice to see. It's been -- so we started this pivot 4 years back. I see a number of you even when I came in, it's been a personal journey for me. It's been a personal journey for many of us in this room, it's been a team journey for all of Aurionpro and as well as quite a few investors in the room that I see. We started 4 years back to pivot the firm away into building out a global product player, a global enterprise software player, a global tech player, rooted in India, rooted in Asia. It's not something that we've seen happen at least in India or India before -- India or Asia before, right? I mean, there's not that many enterprise tech players of scale. IT services comes very naturally to most of us, products don't come naturally. So it's been a bit of a journey. I came into Aurionpro 2020 as an investor, and I joined formally 2022 as many of you would have seen. Quite a few of you have been interacting with us right through that journey and really thankful for that support. We'll spend the next hour or so walking through sort of some of the key things that we've done over the years, some of the key things that we want to do. But if I was to present just 1 slide that more or less differentiates Aurionpro from everyone else, is the management team that we've built up over time. And many of them are in this room. Many of them are not, right? But those in this room, I'll probably spend a minute running through and if you get an opportunity, feel free to say hi, dig into it. Alban, sitting in the room, he's joined us a few months back as head of strategy. He used to work with me [indiscernible] before, but the lady of the moment runs the payment business in India, and we just got an acknowledgment from RBI, got the final approval, that's a huge thing. Bhaskar runs the enterprise business, and Jigger, Cloud; Juveri, Head of HR, has really single-handedly built out probably the best magnet for talent, this industry has seen in a long while. Ninad, General Counsel as well as pretty much responsible for everything, most of the pivot points that have gone through over the last few years, somewhere in this room, most of you would have interacted with him. Poonam, I mean, really -- I mean the power house when it comes to transaction banking has -- she -- Poonam and her team have shaken up the transaction banking tech landscape with some massive, massive wins that I'm sure Shekhar will talk about when we get into it. Sandeep, again, has built out a sales channel that pretty much everyone in the industry talks about. He is the head of sales in the banking side. Raj, head of U.S. is hanging around somewhere. Vipul, our CFO, has been through the journey for a very, very long time. And really, when I say it's not easy building out a product business in India, I think Vipul knows all about it and has really led us from the front on this. Vinay and Deekshith -- so you can count on your fingers the number of people who call themselves AI experts, who have only exclusively worked on AI use case in the financial world for the last 10 years. There really you can count on your fingers the number of people out there, and both of them are in this room, co-founders of Arya.ai. Nisha is the CEO of Interact business, who joined us recently and really has built out probably the most cutting-edge digital business that exists in the banking and insurance world here, she's here. So I think if you get a time, say hi, I don't need to present any more slides after that. If there was 1 slide I had to present, this is a team that has really led the change from the front. Getting into -- I think we -- where we were and where we got to. We listed back in 2005, many of you have seen us over that period. We've gone through phases, overall, in terms of how we acquired assets back in 2020, then we pivoted away in terms of divesting away whatever was not core to our focus to become the global products and platforms player. And that is where we moved the business to building out a sharply IP-led business. Some of the businesses that we divested along the way is just not core. But I think probably one thing that makes it -- it's quite relevant to look at the quality of the assets that we've divested over time. You have to look at the quality of the buyers of those assets. The IDM business, we divested to KPMG; the cybersecurity business, we divested to ForcePoint. I mean these are some of the best things in the world that stops to the quality of the IP, the quality of the teams that came and joined us and have gone on to other places, right? And the only reason we divested those businesses was because we had a longer-term plan to be in sort of different segments, right? But those businesses still continue to do very, very well. So 2020 is when we started, where are we today, almost 2,500 aurionites with us now. Over the last year, over the last 14 months, we've added about 800 people. A lot of people from global fintech firms, a lot of people from enterprise, tech firms come in and joined us in our journey. We're not a very people-intensive business, but the quality of talent really matters a lot. So that's really helped. We are now $100 million plus. I mean, you -- most of you would have seen our guidance. So we've been now growing at 30% plus 3 years running. And we intend to keep that up -- pretty global from the, I mean, market cap and all the stuff changes every day, but it's been doing okay. What did we do last year? So basically, if I was to talk about a few things. We -- I stood up here last year and we talked about 4 major bets, right? And we said this is where we see something transformative happening. This is where we see something transformative happening that gives us a demand runway that's long enough. It's very hard in the tech world to see demand 5, 7 years out, but we see something fundamentally [indiscernible] to happening that helps us to see that demand, and we will go and build a Tier 1 IP against this demand, right? So those are the 4 bets, transformation of banking, smartification of mobility, digitalization of India and then co-engineering IP together with other global fintech vendors. The bets more or less remain the same. We cut the corporate out there because we did feel that there are areas in banking that were going through a change that we needed to participate in, right? So we continue to invest on the corporate lending side. We continue to invest on the transaction banking side. We've also extended the business to digital lending, we also extend the business within track coming in on the retail side, right? So key wins. I mean I think Shekhar will talk about in his section when we talk about banking, but lots of really significant, significant wins, some of the most competitive largest deals in both lending and transaction banking space. Interact joined us, Omnifin, Abhijit and his team when [ Kishore ] joined us. Arya.ai will talk about that in a little bit. So lots of action there. Mobility side, significant market entry. Sanjay Bali will talk about in his session, but the wins in Central America, wins in Latin America, lot of wins in U.S., expansion in U.S. as well, expansion into Europe expansion into ANZ. So a lot of wins there, brand new products. And I think the important thing and probably useful to [indiscernible], Sanjay and team after the session. This is really, really hard R&D. There is -- we are the only firm in India, which, for example, when we talk about ECR, the only firm in India, which has a EMV certified card reader for example, it's -- if it was easy, everyone will be doing it, right? And this is the R&D set up sort of Istanbul or Singapore that Sanjay runs. I mean that is years of work gone into building out the new products, and some sensational new partnerships with Mastercard, Fime, Google, et cetera, that again we'll talk about. Digitization of India gained a massive bet for us and several significant successes. We talked about Haryana, high-performance computing centers, AuroPay getting final approval earlier, sort of like a few days back, right? So again, significant in there. And the last one, a lot of action over the last 12 months in terms of building out partnerships with global fintech majors, where, again, Sanjay Varma joined us to lead that. He'll talk about it today, but we really work -- in each segment, work with probably the #1 or the #2 player globally in that space to see where can we make a win-win proposition for the clients, where can we find an easier path to expanding into markets like Europe U.S. where we want to be rather than get sort of stuck in the Asian markets. So lots of success, lots to talk about there. A significant amount of investment went into new dev centers, that we set up in Pune and Noida expanded into [indiscernible] as well. A lot of work around AI/ML, a lot of work around R&D and a significant, significant expansion on sales channel and partnerships. I think this is where we have really, especially on the banking side, in terms of channel expansion. And on the TIG side in terms of partnerships, I think we made a significant progress from where we were 12 months back. So we'll talk a lot more about it. How did we do on the numbers front? I think more or less we know. So we've always -- we -- if you look at the [indiscernible] from the time we listed, we were INR 10 crore company when we listed back in 2005, right? So we've CAGR-ed at about 26%, 27% right through that period with its ups and downs. Since we pivoted, we've CAGR-ed at about 34% to 35%, right? And that is a significant uptick. Last year, we grew 35%. Earnings grew 40% as we declared, and the EBITDA at 33%. There is not -- there's no meaningful debt left in the firm anymore. So that -- I think debt-to-equity ratio is not significant. The -- I think the thing to note is now we are in the 16th quarter of our -- since we pivoted off our growth, right? And we intend to keep that up. We see -- honestly, the demand is unprecedented in each of the segments that we are in. So the question is how much do we really want to grow, how much can we grow while keeping the delivery reputation intact, how much can we scale the organization in a safe way. The idea is not to bite more than you can chew. The idea is to really scale in a measured way and have the stamina to run the long range. So we feel sort of comfortable around that 30% to 35% level. We have a very high return on capital ask from any incremental investments in the enterprise. We will expect capital to deliver at 25% when we go in and make fresh investments in any space. So I think that's how we've been operating. That's how we will continue to operate. How do we really create value? And this is something that we've been spending time on earlier. We said go out and build IP, that is absolute Tier 1, but where do you really build that IP? I think one, like I said, there has to be something fundamentally transformative happening in that space for us to get comfortable around the demand runway. Example, closed loop to open loop. We believe that is a very fundamental shift. We believe over the next 5, 7, 8 years, pretty much the entire world will move from closed loop to open loop payments. So this is a transformative event across the world. So you can see the demand runway out. We go back and we say, okay, this is a place where we go and build the stuff. It has to be a segment where the demand runways long. It has to be a segment where we feel the global leadership is contested. So payment networks, there's a Visa, Mastercard, not much space for the third one, not attractive space for us. Lending, a very fragmenting market. I mean you -- today, you go and ask someone who's the #1 lending software player in the world, you don't have an answer, right? And we say, okay, the market is fragmented enough for us to go and contest for leadership. Same thing with transit, same thing with the spaces we are in. And the third sort of aspect, it has to be a space where Aurionpro has the unique ability to create a Tier 1 asset, right? I mean the demand runway has to be long. Leadership has to be contested, but we have to bring in some strengths to the game, which allows us to build that thing. So that is essentially the place where we go in and we say, okay, we make the bet. I think the important thing to understand -- one of the regulations that we had about the technology world in general is, the first order value creation is always very, very easy. So you know I run a digital payment transaction, I make a cut from it, right? I think that is very easy. But usually, it's very hard to make money that way because the profits get competed away very easily. So you need to have a second order of value creation for you to really get comfortable around making a long-term investment products need capital, right? So that is where we see, as long as a space falls within these spaces, we say, okay, you can really create exponential value out of it. You can create a second or third order value, not just the first one, right? So I think that is the sort of way in which we look at the space, what are the verticals we are in, banks, insurers, financial institutions are the biggest ways for us. Banking and fintech was 53%, the revenue last year. Transit payments was [indiscernible] 15%. So I think financial technology, in general, is a sweet spot for us. Payments and mobility, a huge area, an area where we can create a differentiated domain-led expertise, right? So that is the sort of spaces that we will -- we've invested in, we'll continue to invest in, right? So that, in a nutshell, is what the sort of strategic playbook is in very, very simple terms, right? We published this, now I think 2.5 years back, it's not changed. I just keep the re-using same slide, someone keeps changing the colors. We said the building of a global leader when, it comes to the spaces, takes time. So this is something that we published, I think, 2022. We gave ourselves 8 years to get to the vision. The basic blocking and tackling is done. We are in the process of getting ready for scale. That is where we are. The ambition, the mission is to be a top 3 player globally in each of the spaces that we invest in, right? That is essentially the goal. I think one of the things that almost everyone has told me before, how does this 30% to 35% really reconciled with the ambition to be a global top 3 player. Each of the spaces we are in, whether it's data centers, whether it's AI, whether it's lending, whether it's transit payments, each of this is a double-digit billion dollar space. Enterprise AI is probably a $1 trillion space, if I start asking Vinay. So question is, how does the 30%, 35% really reconcile with that 2030 vision? I think it doesn't. I think a top 3 global player is a much, much larger player than the 30% growth shows you. But we like to scale in a measured way at some point between now and 2030. Some of the segments, I think will hit an inflection point where we feel safe about scaling it up and there probably, you do see a hockey stick. Till that time, we will keep planning at 30% to 35% but we will keep our eyes on, we, becoming the top 3 player. So that's essentially the goal. Where are we? So since we started the pivot, INR 375 crores in 2021, INR 505 crores, INR 660 crores, INR 887 crores. I think we are slightly -- so externally, we published a qualitative number because we don't like giving a guidance -- forward guidance 5 years, 6 years out. Internally, we have a quantitative number against each of the years from now -- from '21 till 2030. And so far, we are slightly ahead of the number. The number was at roughly 30% CAGR right. So I think, more or less, we were tracked to where we want to be, like I said, so far, so good will -- time will tell to what extent we succeed in getting there. How will it really add up from here to the top 3 global player? A lot of the growth comes in from the organic levers that we have, which is, one, keep expanding the product portfolio, right? Keep expanding into newer markets, as we've been doing. The third is, AI has given us -- so the enterprise AI, and I'd like to differentiate between the sort of Gen AI, enterprise AI. I will really talk a little bit about it. It gives us a lever to really accelerate that in the enterprise side. So the adoption of what you can actually get in terms of value capture from the mission-critical applications, we already have within banks, within insurers, right? So that's the organic levers. Inorganic levers, we did 3 acquisitions in the last 9 months. So you have seen what are the kind of acquisitions we've done, what are the kind of acquisitions we can do, how do we create value? It's essentially 3 types of things. One, India-based software assets who see value in joining up with Aurionpro because we built out a grown-up way of managing a product business on a global level. We've got a mature channel. We've got partnerships. We know how to build the product. We know how to manage the product. We know how to surround it to do the API frameworks, all that stuff, right? So Asia, India-based software players who by, themselves, are not worth a lot, but together with Aurionpro become worth a lot more. Second is Europe or U.S. or Western software players. We've already been doing a lot of these partnerships with the FIS, Finastra, MUREX, et cetera, where we help add more IP to their channels to sell. We help modernize their tech. We make their businesses more competitive. We can do the same with assets that we own, right? So again, software assets, based off U.S. or Europe, which are not worth a lot by themselves, but together with Aurionpro, become worth a lot more, right? And the third is services shops, necessarily not scale-based, who allow us to expand into markets and implement in markets where we are, right? So those are the inorganic levers. We'll -- we played over the last year, will continue to play as we go, right? And the third major thing that Aurionpro can do and almost no one else can do, is really expand our impact by tying up with the Finastras, the MUREXes, the Mastercards, the VIXes and the like, which is where we license our technology to global fintech players. The reason we can do it and almost no one can is because enterprise software is a game of depth on a PowerPoint slide also if I look the [indiscernible], the difference always is the depth and the maturity of tech. So the reason someone like Finastra, partners with Shekhar and his business and his team is because we build the right level of depth and maturity in there, right? So we -- that would again continue to be a major lever for us as we expand on the AI side, again, we'll talk about it a little bit more in detail later. I think that lever will get press a lot more in terms of can we sort of add prepaying models in terms of APIs, can we add more capability that can be sold through a consumption model working together with enterprise tax of others. So that's sort of the levers that we will press as we go from here to becoming that large global player. So looks like that is essentially the play in terms of what's important to us, what our strategic playbook is, how we look at uses of capital, what we expect from the capital, right? This is how we will progress. The goal is to build out a large meaningful technology player that really knows how to build Tier 1 IP and especially in the banking financial technology space, right? With this, I'll invite Vinay on to the state. Many of you would have heard, we made a recent investment in Arya.ai It's a key strategic bet for us. Like I said, Vinay and Deekshith are probably a handful of people in India at least who really know this space very, very well. I'll let Vinay do the talking by himself and I'll come back in a bit to sort of bring it together. Vinay?

Sure. Thanks, Ashish. Good afternoon, everyone. So my name is Vinay, I'm the CEO and founder for Arya.ai. Very quickly about us. We started Arya around 2013. So 10, 11 years back, we were an IIT Bombay. Our research was primarily into using a new technique called Deep Learning, which was then a paper was published in 2012 on using [indiscernible] at a large scale and applying for different set of problems. We thought it's an interesting approach to build fully autonomous systems. We want to explore that concept. So when we started, we started off as an R&D team, about 7 people out of IIT Bombay. Our first product was an open source framework allowing others to build Deep Learning models very quickly and faster. So we were very much one of the first to start using Deep Learning across Asia. Our approach was to build products that are truly usable across use cases. That's why our focus was primarily around how do we enable others, how can we democratize and all that stuff. Even though we started in 2013, so we actually started verticalizing the products and platforms since 2016, '17. We used to go to a customer like a bank and an insurer and tell them that, look, guys, AI is going to be the future. So this is what the product and platform that we built. We don't know how it is usable to you, but we would love to explore to see how we can work with you to identify the use cases. So imagine 7, 8 years back, thinking about AI, which was extremely premature and very new concept at that point of time. So we had got our first set of customers, which were primarily ICICI Lombard and Axis Bank, which actually gave us an entry point into the industry. So they gave us a knowledge of use cases. They gave us a knowledge of data sets as well, which we started deploying a platform and product to that vertical. Since 2016, '17, post that, there were a bunch of things that we were trying to solve, which is primarily around verticalization. We always believe that there are 2 sets of AI platforms that is going to emerge, which is horizontal players. One is vertical players, right? You take any technique. There are 2 ways that people try to solve the problem. I'll enable that across product or I'll enable that to that industry. Our focus was let's verticalize it because to able to compete and build products for a horizontal purpose, you need a lot of capital, you need a lot of bandwidth and you need a lot of market access. India was not prepared at that point of time. So 2015, '16, as I said, not many customers or enterprise, market itself was quite premature. We believe there is a lot of value add when we start verticalizing a tender for the BFSI space. For various reasons, one, data sets in the BFSI space are quite private, which means access to data set is as tough as me versus Google. So we sort of have a similar set of challenges. Google will have a similar set of challenges, while there could be -- nuances could be figured out. But we see that if we start verticalizing for the space, we could get -- we could build differentiable platforms as compared to anyone else who is trying to build a horizontal platform. So that became our biggest motivation for us to try to solve the problem specifically for the BFSI space. Typically, when you look at verticalization in the BFSI space, the typical problems is 1 is data. Second is data privacy and second is regulations and compliance, right? So if you look at our product portfolio, which I would quickly outline as well, that's how our products also have been built in that manner itself. So what we are aiming to build is the enterprise AI-OS specifically for the BFSI space. We want to become the best enterprise AI PaaS or an OS for banks, insurers and FS. If a bank wants to think of an AI use case, they should be thinking of Arya to deploy because we should be solving that holistically than anyone else in the industry at this point of time. So that's the main goal on which we are building our products too. So typically, how it works is you have different set of IT layers, technology stack, the front-end stack and then you have enterprise apps and then you have data lake/data intelligence. I mean you have intelligence layer. Like in the last 3, 5 years is when we have seen an explosion of use cases around how can I apply intelligence to a process, be it customer onboarding, which used to be paper driven now became a digital -- now it will become an intelligence-driven kind of process, same thing for an underwriting claims or flood monitoring. You can pick up any use case or a process in a BFSI space. It will have an AI-enabled process, right? That's the transition that we are going to see. That's exactly what our focus is. And if you look at our product portfolio, that's how we have built these product portfolio as well. So we have 3 key components. One is Arya APIs, which is our Models-as-a-Service tech. We want to provide a bunch of pretrained models, specifically for the BFSI space, the most and -- the most in terms of spectrum and also depth as well. So today, we have a total of about 80 different variations of models that we have serving the BFSI space. And then we have Fine-Tuning-as-a-Service. Certain use cases, you have to fine tune, then how do you expedite the fine tuning itself. For example, when I want to deploy AI in, let's say, underwriting use case, I'll have to do fine tuning for my business because a product between a bank or an insurer is very different, right? So then how do you make the models learn the nuances of the business. There, you require a Fine-Tuning-as-a-Service piece as well. The third is the ML Observability & Alignment piece. Take any technique, right? So I could talk about things like reinforcement learning or a deep learning model. If it has to be truly scalable in a BFSI space, it has to be explainable. It has to be compliant. Even though we do not have specific regulations related to AI, but we see that coming very, very soon because it's already happened in Europe, where there is AI regulations. But for a bank or a financial institution, they are already internally governed institution any which ways. So unless we solve this problem, no matter I come up with an AGI, it will not be acceptable because if it is a black bots, nobody wants to use it. If it is not consistent, nobody wants to use it. If it is not compliant, nobody wants to use it, even if it's an AGI, right? This is one of the most important problems that we are trying to solve. So these are the 3 components that we have that we designed as part of our enterprise AI-OS for the BFSI space. So this is where we are differentiated exhaustively. When we talk about verticalization, verticalization, you have to think of a problem more holistically and build products around it. So this is what we have done in our case as well. We have pretrained models, which gives us a scale. You can use a pretrained model by simply subscribing to it and deploying to any number of volume. And then we have Fine-Tuning-as-a-Service which we want to make it much, much simpler so that you should be able to fine tune SOTA neural networks or SOTA models for your own use cases much faster. And then third piece is the governance and regulations. No matter whatever you use, you want to be safe, you want to be compliant. You want to be scalable from the point of view. So we are solving these 3 problems for the industry through our AI OS. Today, we already serve more than 100-odd customers small and large size. In totality about 200 million APIs at this point of time. Now what do we do with Aurionpro, right? So it's a very classically organic story is what we always tell. So we have a substantial IP that we built for the industry. Now that, coupled with Aurionpro apps is going to give us an immense distribution channel across use cases, across products and across the scale as well. So this is what our vision of integration will be and we hope we will make that quite quickly and quite fastly so that we can start monetizing it for a different set of use cases.

I think the thing to sort of look at, there is -- there's obviously a lot of hype around Gen AI. There's obviously a lot of hype around LLMs, around foundation models. And there's a massive amount of dollars going into building out foundation models. That, to some extent, is an infrastructural play. That is -- there may be a couple of winners, maybe all elements converts to the same outcome. I think time will tell. But that is one end of looking at it. Beyond that, the usage of Gen AI is one proposition for banks and insurers, but there's not a lot of technical skill involved in doing it. I mean that is as simple as an API call, a 10-year-old child can do it. The way we thought value always gets created in the technology world. It sort of gets creative in the application layer. I mean one is you've got an infrastructure layer, someone is serving it. But most of the value in banks and insurance firms gets created the application there. This is where Aurionpro has always played the game. This is where Aurionpro is going to be the better players around in terms of building out mission-critical apps that banks use. If you go up to 100,000 foot, most applications are a fairly straight body. You've got some kind of a front end, we got a place where deal entry is happening, you got a workflow where a whole bunch of decisions are getting made. At the back, you've got some record-keeping back office, you've got RDBMS in the site. If at every decision point in the workflow, we can bring in a grown up intelligence approach, a grown up ML approach where we say, it's a fully autonomous agent backed by ML. It's a human assisted by ML. It's a blend of rules in ML, and we say this is how we can enable the sort of intelligence to happen in the enterprise where it actually adds value to where the businesses are really running their business. I think that is how value will get created. That is where we have the game to bring in our enterprise sort of AI stack together with a grown up ML model and create the enterprise AI strategy. We believe this is hundreds of billions of dollars of play. We believe there is not too many in the world who really have an answer. I mean, Vinay, like saying data remodel is easy, model to acceptance is hard. I think it is really, really hard. Everyone talks about AI, but most of it -- most of what you see is peripheral applications sitting in sandboxes, right, to really build technology that can be used by a bank in the running of the applications needs the enterprise application specialists working together with AI specialist to create that value, right? I think that is where we expect to play. We believe this is going to be a huge play for us. Every single part, every single application that we make, every single feature in every single application to the extent that we can enable it, we will -- with a grown-up approach to AI ML, right? So I think that is a play and a lot of it served out as pretrained models. And if we can solve that problem for Aurionpro's application, we can solve the problem for global fintech vendors pretty much everywhere, right? So I think that is the sort of approach. Again, we really focused on building this out. There's heavy investment behind it. There's a lot of commitment and team behind it. We believe we've got one of the best teams in the world to go and deliver this, right? And time will tell how successful we get, but we feel very good about it. So that's essentially the approach to enterprise AI that Vinay was building out, right. We can spend more time with Vinay and with Deekshith, he is in the audience side in terms of going out. Just to sum it up, and this is not new, this is something that we've talked about. Look, the one goal we have as a management team is to really operate on when we measure ourselves on the key metrics, top quartile across key metrics that we measure ourselves on. So we did guide to 30% to 35% this year because the pipeline is strong and the order book is strong. But over the long run, we'll always plan to be 25% to 30%. I think that is the sort of benchmark we hold ourselves against. We'll keep the EBITDA between 20% and 22%. That's the key goal for us. EBITDA to PAT translation is fairly clean. So that 22% goes to 15% to 16% on the PAT, right? We will consistently try to spend 8% to 9% on R&D. I think for those of you who've seen Aurionpro, we expense pretty much most of our R&D. It's as massive spend for an organization of our size, but we feel strongly that if we are to really be the catalyst to move Indian IT away from the outsourcing services play to building our own products, building our own IP, building our own brands, it really needs us to move the needle in terms of R&D spend every year. So we will essentially, as the economics of the business improves, we will keep EBITDA where it is and pour the excess back into R&D, keep building out more products as well. Most of our [indiscernible] revenue growth has to come from the existing base. I think this is the way software business works, this is the way tech business works. That's -- 75% is what we hold ourselves to. And if we really put capital to use, we better be getting 20% plus out of it, right? So that is essentially the long-term ambition. Like I said earlier on, we put a very high bar in terms of incremental capital. We don't really look at business plans that don't deliver at least 25%, if we are putting capital to use in the enterprise, but long term, ROCE will sort of strive to keep at 20% plus. So that is essentially it from a management presentation standpoint. We will have the key leaders come in and take a short session. We want to maximize the time we spent on Q&A. So we've got our 3 group presidents in the room. Shekhar, many of you have seen last year on the Banking Solutions Group really been on a [indiscernible] growth. Once we reset and build out whole product stack, we'll talk about some of the successes we've had. Sanjay Varma, who very kindly was running Global Head of Client onboarding for firm called FIS and decided to join us last year and has built out the FinTech solutions group, which has really been again on a [indiscernible] growth over the last year. A lot of what is happening in that business is new and that whole co-engineering piece, Sanjay basically has built out. And Sanjay Bali, most of you would have seen it, has really built out the whole transit business for us, the TIG for us has been a key sort of growth catalyst, right. So I think they will come in and talk about the groups and then we'll get into Q&A. With that, I will pass it on to [ Shaina ] to take us here. Thank you very much. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you so much, Ashish. Thank you so much, Vinay, for sharing this insightful presentation with us on AI strategy. Well, with this, Ashish has already mentioned, I hope you take down your notes, we have Q&A at the end, so don't miss this opportunity. Well, now moving ahead our spotlight to our next speaker. Ladies and gentlemen, it gives me immense pleasure to invite on stage, Shekhar Mullatti, President and Global Head of the Banking Solutions Group. Shekhar has been with Aurionpro for more than 10 years and he oversees sales, operations and delivery across Asia Pacific, the Middle East and Africa. Ladies and gentlemen, let's give a huge round of applause to him. Thank you.

Great to see all of you here again this year, right? And so far, you've heard about what we've been doing as an organization, what is our vision and how we are making strides to get there. I'll now start peeling the onion a little bit and talk about how we did on the banking side. Last year was really a big year for us. And it was a great validation to see how our strategy started getting materialized into customers, into revenue and into repeatable revenue. We had a bunch of new logos. I think many of these logos are no strangers to all of you in the room. I mean, SBI, the big giant of India, we are now transforming their entire transaction banking stack. So this is all of corporate payments for SBI, right? And it's just notable. PNB is also one of the largest banks in the Philippines. So a big bunch of new logos, but not just the number of logos, also the quality of those and the depth of the relationship with each one of those, I think that was a really big notable aspect of what we managed to achieve last year. And all of this came in the face of very established and globally leading competitors, right? So we went into the playing arena of where the big daddies were already playing, and we've managed to win against them. And this is just the beginning of what we're going to do over the next -- at least the next 7 to 10 years, as you saw as part of the Vision 2030. This progress has not gone unnoticed. So this -- these are the industry watchers in the application software business. Chartis, which watches the risk technology space. So all of lending, they are the preeminent global industry leaders there, and they have placed us in the leadership quadrant as one of the companies to watch. Gartner, of course, anybody in technology knows. And they've called us out as active players in the banking and FI space, and [indiscernible] as well. We continued building on whatever is our mission-critical capability. Whatever we do for banks are mission-critical applications on the lending side, on the payment side, covers the asset side of the balance sheet, covers the liability side of the balance sheet. And we said as we go deeper into those, let's find more points on the value chain and try to occupy every point on that value chain, either we build or we grow inorganically. As part of that, the Omnifin brand, which focuses on the retail lending side, right, that we have added that to the portfolio. Omnifin came into the fold, I'll say, around October, November of last year, yes. And they're working rapidly on improving their portfolio and digitizing and building up the AI capabilities. I'll talk to that a little bit. The Interact Suite, cutting-edge communications platform used by many banks and insurers across India, the Middle East and Southeast Asia, came into the fold as well, adds in a very coherent way to the way we surround our capabilities to our customers, giving them -- making it easy for them to deepen their relationship with us. And this year, this is really where the two main areas that we're going to be focusing on, right? One is do more of the same. We think whatever we are doing is the right thing. We think we have great capability. We have capability, which is very, very difficult for competitors to copy, to emulate, to improve upon. So we are there. We are in spaces where the leadership is contested, right? And we're in spaces where the demand is so high that our forecasted growth of 30% is really not a big deal in terms of the size of the opportunity, but on top of that, we are going to really, really lead with AI and that to the embedded AI, right? I think Ashish talked about how we see value in the creation really happening at the application layer. We're already there in the application layer. There are not many Asia-based companies who are deep in the application layer for mission-critical applications, right? And on that, we build the AI capability to work with private data sets that enable really intelligent decision-making at every point on that decision flow, right? So this can really be transformative. And with this, it can potentially start triggering that inflection point for the hockey-stick kind of growth. Even without that, right, we know where we're going at that 30% trajectory anyway, right? So that's the story of the banking business for the last one year. There's a big red sign here, which says my time is up, but we'll be around and happy to take questions later on during the session. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you so much sir for sharing this insight with us. Well, ladies and gentlemen, moving ahead to the next, let us welcome Mr. Sanjay Varma, President and Global Head of the Fintech Solution Group. Sanjay brings a wealth of experience and insight into the fintech space. He has spent more than 22-plus years with global fintech provider and joined Aurionpro in early 2023. Everybody, I would request you, once again, if we can give a huge round of applause and welcome our next speaker. Over to you, Sanjay, sir. Thank you.

So when we talk about the Fintech Solutions Group, who are we and what is it that we are trying to solve, right? When you take organizations which are very, very focused on creating the best intellectual property, which are very focused in differentiating themselves with either that be talent or that be solutions, which are market-leading and innovations, and you pass them around to larger organizations, the global fintech like the Finastras, like the MUREX, like the FIS, there has been a lot of payment fintechs in U.S. You get a good combination of organizations that have a large distribution network, but lack the top end innovation and intellectual property. And organizations like us, which have created that world-class intellectual property and which have created that world-class innovation and differentiation. And ladies and gentlemen, that's what the Fintech Solutions Group does. What have we been doing so far, right? We have taken four very, very distinct verticals created a differentiator in each one -- the ones here and gone and tied up with one or more than one global fintechs, leveraged on the distribution channel and been able to both sell, distribute, develop and also implement our own intellectual property and services with them. With Finastra, we co-engineered a limits management solution for their trade finance segment, went on very well. We already had success with Maybank. And now we have three more deals in the pipeline, which we should be, within the course of this year, executing around. We signed a contract with a large global U.S.-based fintech company, which does pretty much everything from payments banking to capital markets. We focus this time purely on the lending portal, taking the differentiator that [ Shekhar's ] business has, productizing it, filling a gap in their business. We created a digital portal. We created something that was very innovative, which is a good step in for AI. We've already signed contracts with two large global auto finance captives, one in New Zealand, one in U.S. We are in the process of signing at least two more this year and rolling them out. Similarly, when we looked at our payment stack, Ashish mentioned about the payment system that we had, we just got an aggregator license from RBI. We took that. We worked with a couple of U.S. finance payments majors, tied up with them. And today, we are distributing. We are pretty much there de facto intellectual property platforms and businesses. And then lastly, with the capital markets favorite MUREX. We tied up with them a couple of years ago. We moved away from just being a services providing shop to actually going -- implementing with them, codeveloping intellectual property around the [core] MUREX treasury. And last year, we won BNI, Bank Negara Indonesia, one of the top PSUs in Indonesia. And now we are going across pretty much all the markets in APAC with MUREX as their preferred SI and implementation partner. So that's where we were. Where next? The objective is very, very simple to create and develop new offerings through strategic partnerships. These strategic partnerships are large, well-established giants. They have the distribution channels. They have the -- they have an established presence. They have established client bases. We are a niche player. We have differentiating intellectual property. We have top-of-the-end talent and we also have very, very rapid innovation and transformation abilities. When you put these two together, you get the best of both. It's a win-win situation, right? You leverage their infrastructure, their distribution, they will leverage your innovation. And that's what we plan to do. So create and develop new offerings through strategic partnerships, leverage them, make ourselves grow much faster. Co-engineer and co-develop adjacent products like we did in the previous slide that I showed you where we took, for example, this big fintech lending core, created digital platforms on top. We have taken the MUREX core. They have an API-only strategy. We are creating distribution, small, small distribution application on top of it. Provide domain-led solutions. It's very important. The domain-led part out here is the key differentiator. You differentiate yourself from just being a services shop by creating that domain differentiator, suddenly, the market becomes attractive to you, and you can penetrate this marketplace. And largely, we have already established ourselves in APAC and U.S. Now we're looking to expand into Europe. This would be a combination of both organic and potentially inorganic growth, right? So that's pretty much where we are planning to go. We have had a very good growth this year. We have had a stupendous growth rate this year. We plan to replicate or better it in '24, '25. That's about it for my time.

Thank you so much, sir, for sharing these insights with us. Ladies and gentlemen, with this moving ahead to the last speaker of this evening. Our next speaker is Mr. Sanjay Bali, President and Global Head of the Tech Innovation Group. Sanjay oversees Aurionpro business in the government and public sector. Sanjay has been with the company for more than 10 years and he has been instrumental at Aurionpro to build its mobility offering. Once again request everybody to please give a huge round of applause. Thank you.

Good evening, everyone. Good evening. Of course, my introduction has been given. I just want to take you through what Ashish said and brief you about what we do in Tech Innovation Group. So I lead the five businesses in Tech Innovation Group, which is mobility, which has micro mobility, transit as services, automatic fare collection, manufacturing. Then we have enterprise business. Enterprise business has data center services, hybrid cloud services. Then we have public sector services, which has -- we do a lot of -- we have partnered with NIC and many of the government bodies where we make application softwares and other smart city projects. Then we have our manufacturing unit, which is Aurionpro ToshiAutomatic, where we're doing a lot of automation services. Then we have our customer experience where we build kiosk and digital kiosk for everyone. So this is what I do and lead. So these are some of -- we had a very eventful year last. We did a lot of things. We created multiple products. We did multiple partnership as what Ashish was saying. I just want to start with apart from many logos, I've just put a few here because these are very, very special in its own way. First is Haryana Roadways. You might have read in the newspaper where the Government of Haryana came out and they said that we are going to do something for the socioeconomic backward people, the BPL families having annual income of INR 1 lakh, they will provide 1,000 kilometers free services. And we have been chosen as the partner to deliver that very, very technically required services. As we were the incumbent there, we were shortlisted. And with the launch of the new product of ours, which is issuance platform and Auro Switch, we could deliver the NCMC [RuPay] card. Normally, 22 lakh families were shortlisted in the first round, having 80 lakh people. So we have already delivered 10 lakh cards and we are in the process of delivering many more. So this was the one thing which we did. That's why we have put this logo. Another thing, as I said, enterprise business in the data center services. We just ventured out of India, And we started delivering our first service in the Southeast Asia, one of the neighboring country, is Bhutan Telecom, where we are building a data center for them. And this has given us more edge as we move out of, not only in India being a lead player in data center services, but we provide outside in the neighboring countries as well. IIT Mumbai, again, it's one of -- IIT Bombay is one of very prestigious organization where we are building a hyperscaler for them so that they can use in multiple R&D and innovations. Cherry on the cake was -- we have been a part -- I'll just take a little bit a bit -- 160 companies or the projects were short-listed across the globe. And out of this -- and from India, it was 3, out of which 2 was ours, right? And transport ticketing is one of the global industry players where all come together and appreciate what's going on on the globe. So out of this, DMRC was one, UPSRTC project, which we are leading was another. And the third one was Maldives project. So we got shortlisted in UPSRTC, which is 2 million plus people traveling per day using our AFC system, and less than 2 million, again, 2 categories, 2 million was Maldives where we got selected. And the award went to less than 2 million, where we got it in Maldives. And along with Mastercard, it was, again, a journey which showed that we are one of the leading players in the mobility services. So I want to just clap for the entire team who did very well in bringing this business across. As what Ashish said that we are just growing our business across the globe. And with this, we are partnering with the leaders in this industry. In the payment side, we were the partners last year on the services -- on the Southeast Asia side with Mastercard, which they upgraded us to the global partnership. And one of this thing is do we partner, and even Mastercard got the first after 20 years -- maybe 15, 20 years, the first award in transit ticketing along with us in Maldives. So this was one thing. Second is VIX. Again, VIX is one of the global players in the transit business, which we have partnered with them and not only partner, but we have participated in many global RFPs with them. We co-launched the product which you see there, it's called MDT, Master Driver Terminal, which if you go to any European countries or in U.K. and everything, you see a driver console in front of the drivers where we control everything right from automatic fare collections to having the cameras and other things on the bus. So that is what, and this is one of the products which has been accepted in many of our RFPs being a world best kind of product. Another thing we launched ECR. It's again, as what Ashish said, that we are the first Indian company or we can say that who launched the card reader, which was dominated either by the Chinese companies or by the German companies in India, mostly in the transit side, it was German company who was doing it. And we successfully launched it, and it has been certified by NPCI now, and we will shortly be implementing across all the projects which we are doing right now or we're going to participate in many other projects coming up. So NPCI is also very much very happy with us being an Indian company to bring this product, and we are working on many of the use cases with them. Another big thing which we launched was Auro Edge as you see that 5G is coming up, a lot of data consumption is happening. So we launched a product called Auro Edge. It's an edge data center, which can be used in remote areas and with a lot of -- all these OTT platforms coming in, everything, a lot of data being used. So having a hub-spoke model. So this is what we are going to do. And we have launched this and we have successfully implemented 5 right now and they are working very good. The final thing, which I just want to talk about, another big product. And last year, we got in principle approval from RBI. And this year, we have been -- we have recently got the license of payment aggregator, and we launched our product, AuroPay, finally getting the license. We are already using from last year, our payment gateway services, which are implemented in the transit side and everywhere, but the aggregator services will use shortly. My time is up, but still I have the privilege because I'm the last here to talk about. So as I continue talking about this. So this -- we recently tied up with Google. And with Google, the first thing which we launched with them is the wallet services. This is something like especially for the transit side of business where you do the entire booking through the portals or your mobile apps. So the first product, which we launched is with UPSRTC, which will be in services soon, and we are doing with Google. But apart from this, we are doing -- we are going to work on some of the -- launching some jointly developed products, especially for ease of transit, transportation, that's the first side and then we'll see where all we can use the Google products. So that's -- we have a long [MOU] thought process to work with. Second is the offering which we said the edge computers, which I talked about. This is, again, innovation and product, which will -- we will be distributing along with not only directly, but with our partners and system integrators, telecom service providers, armed forces and everywhere, which will be used. It's a mobile data centers, easy to use, easy to implement and start working. As everyone, we have Arya.ai and we've been working on it and what not best to implement in all the services which we are doing, especially on the transit side, where we -- especially we will start with the two use cases, which is Haryana and Uttar Pradesh. UP every day between 15 lakh to 20 lakh people travel using the bus services on our platform. And Haryana being a smaller state, so roundabout 8 to 9 lakh people travel using our services. So the kind of data we have generated and what we are trying to bring on table for the customer is how they can increase their revenue. As they increase their revenue, our revenue will automatically increase. So that's what we're going to implement the AI services with them. We are on the way. And maybe next year when I come here, we will announce some of the good things we have done on the AI side. New markets, of course, mobility and the micro mobility services are coming big time. And as we are working with the giants like Mastercard, Visa, Fime and many other players on this side. So the transit is one thing where you use your normal metro services, you use your bus services, your taxi services, but to reach there, especially on the European side, even in India, if you see a lot of things are coming up, is the micro mobility services where you use electric scooters, cycles, shared taxis and everything. So coming with ECR and Mastercard, and we are just trying to see and shortly announce also, we have won a project together, one in Europe and one in India as well where we are creating this special services where it's going to be tap in and tap out. Now these days on the micro mobility, you go or you want to hire a cycle you just go on to an app and then you download the app and pay and then you get your cycles, but what we are coming together is -- including NPCI also, we're working with them. You just go pick up, buy, tap it, start it and automatically the distance you traveled, it will get deducted. So with this, the new markets in Europe, we will shortly announce at least 3 projects in Europe and 2 projects in U.K. We have already participated with our partners. I can talk more, but thank you very much. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you so much Sanjay sir for your enlightening presentation. All right. With this, ladies and gentlemen, moving now to our Q&A before we begin a friendly reminder to each one of you. I would request everybody to please make sure one question, one person. And if you have any more questions, you can connect with us during the tea time or you can mail it to us on [email protected]. So I hope all of you are set and you are ready with your questions as I invite on stage our speaker for the evening. Before I invite, I hope the one behind are not speaking -- sleeping. If you are not sleeping, can I see your hands up in the air, please. Lovely. Only this side, people are very active. That's why I guess, almost they are gone. On the left-hand side, people are you awake for the Q&A. [Operator Instructions] So all the best to each one of you. So who would like to ask the first question, anyone?

It was a very impressive presentation. It's my first time introduction to the company. So we've highlighted a very good growth plan for the next couple of years. I just wanted to understand what can actually go wrong or what do you see as the risks as to your plans not panning out the way you have thought them?

Yes. Okay. Thanks for that. Okay. So look, I think -- the risk questions usually come towards the end, but that's fine. I'll start with it. Look, I would say the segments we've selected, right? So I think the demand side of the equation is in a pretty good place, right? There is -- in most of the spaces we are in, demand is very, very strong, right? whether it's transaction banking, the number of RFPs in the market is probably 4x where it used to be just 2 years back, lending, again, Shekhar will talk about it. If you look at it, I think data center, there is way more demand than you can keep up. AI use cases, again, there's a lot of them. So I think from a demand and pipeline standpoint, we feel very, very good where we are. The question is not how much you can grow, but the question is how much do you really want to grow, right? And for us, we said -- because I think what really happens is in the services business, scaling up is easier. If you wanted to double your revenue, you double the number of people. Of course, you need to look at the right skill sets and all that stuff, but it's not that complex to scale. In a product business, it's fairly complex to scale. There are lots of interconnected pieces. If you try to grow too fast, you're taking on too many risks. You are risking your delivery reputation and you fail a couple of projects and the whole thing is gone. Right? So we're trying to calibrate the growth at a level where we feel we can scale in a safe way. I think the primary risk that really comes from this level of growth is the ability to scale, can we really keep scaling delivery to meet the demand? And we already see, can you scale the management teams? Can you grow the organization if you never been a INR 1,000-crore organization before, right? Do we have the right structure? Do we have the right processes? Do we have the right ability to deliver in geographies we've gone into for the first time? I think that is sort of the primary risk, I would say the thing that -- and I discussed within our internal calls as well, right, the thing that can stop Aurionpro right now is Aurionpro, right? I think we will -- if we fail to grow in a meaningful way over the next 5, 7 years, it will come from failing to execute against the demand, failing to scale properly. And that's what we spend more or less, at least I spend most of my time worrying about, right? Do we have the right talent? Do we have the right managers? Do we have the right structure? And we've been lucky we've been able to probably attract the most powerful group of talent this industry has ever seen, and I hope we continue to do that.

Sure. And just another question. So we made three acquisitions in the last couple of months. So in the next couple of years, how much do you think you stressed on the fact that -- I mean organic will be more important, but how important will inorganic be for us in the next, say, 3, 5 years?

Look, we are very -- I think it will be important, right? But so we will pull the trigger only when we see the value for the Aurionpro shareholders, right? So we've got 0 promo when it comes to deal making. We are not out there actively going to bid up assets and go and buy, but what we have discovered over time is we've become a very attractive place for, especially a lot of Indian software businesses who see that Aurionpro is doing a few things right to come and join us and say, okay, how about we scale together globally, whether it's Omnifin, whether it's Arya, right? So I think we will continue to be attractive because we've built out a sales channel, we've built out a set of partnerships. We've built out a discipline of execution that people see, and they see that together with Aurionpro, Indian software business can scale a lot more, right? I think so it will be there, but will we really do 3 acquisitions in the next 12 months, we may end up doing 0, right? So we will pull the trigger only when we see the value. If not, then we are very happy with the organic growth.

Thank you. All right. Yes, sir. Can I know your name?

Vimal Gohil from Alchemy.

I know the name, yes.

So thanks, guys, for the detailed presentation. Ashish, again, coming back -- coming to your long-term aspirations on margins. It's sort of counterintuitive when you say that you're targeting 20% plus. You're already at that level right now. You are comfortably placed. But if you're talking of a long-term growth runway of more than 20-odd percent, you are not as employee-intensive as your IT services folks are. Your R&D probably is at -- will remain at 7%, 8%. So why are we sort of [ under falling ] this EBITDA margin number at 20% plus and not -- and especially having a lot of IP in our banking and payment space. So ideally our margin should be -- we should be aiming much higher. So what is the delta that we are missing here?

Yes. No, I think, Vimal, I think this is not the time to max out the margin really. We're just not trying to optimize on margins, and I'm not going to set the expectations that. I think what we are -- the message is very simple. And this is basically a next 2- to 3-year message. We are saying we'll keep EBITDA at the levels we are, and we will keep on increasing the size of the R&D budget. So I don't think we'll keep R&D at the same level. It was INR 82 crores, INR 83 crores last year. This year, we'll do probably INR 110-odd crores. It was like probably less than INR 60 crores the year before. So R&D budget will keep getting scaled up. And the reason for that is just the sheer size of opportunity in front of us. I don't think we do justice to the Aurionpro shareholder if we really start kind of lowering the gas in terms of R&D spend right now, right? Whether it's, as Sanjay talked about, open loop -- closed loop to open loop transformation across the world, whether it's the partnerships that Sanjay Varma talk about, whether it's -- because even these partnerships, it needs IP to get built up, we do recycle a lot of the IP, but it's not fully finished. We need to build that out. I mean, that whole lending portal that you're talking about, it's completely built, rebuilt from 0. We had a previous product, but we built it up. But now we will be in a couple of deals in Australia, U.S., et cetera. And as we go into Europe, we'll need to build again. Same thing on the banking side, transaction banking, what Shekhar talked about, the win with State Bank of India, this needs -- the win is great. It's INR 100 crore-plus deal. But when you go and pick up a deal that large, you also need to do a lot in terms of the product, right? So you are right, it's not a [ services ] play, not starting from 0. You are 80% there, 75% there, 90% there when you get in, but the incremental build as the enterprise scales to INR 1,000 crores, INR 1,500 crores, INR 2,000 crore, even the incremental build is quite a bit, right? Then every geography you go in, banking is a regulated industry. Insurance is a regulated industry. Every geography you go in, you need to build a little bit more. Now with this whole AI-first, I don't like using AI-first because very much every CEO talks of a AI-first these days. But the intent we have to rebuild the whole portfolio centered around AI, that again is a massive spend. So I would say, yes, products are built out. Yes, we are competitive in the market, but don't underestimate the size of the task in front of us. Over the next 2, 3 years, I would not set the expectations that we'll max out the EBITDA, this is not the time. I think when you are much, much bigger or the product stack is really global and present everywhere is the time to start thinking about it. That time is not in the next 2 to 3 years, right? So I think the expectation is very clear, 20% to 22% on the EBITDA, we will not max it out. There may be an occasional year, you get to 23%, 24%. Your point is correct. We see that on every product. As the business is scaling, the economics is improving, right? So there is no question about it, right? But we will use the excess in R&D rather than excess in getting the 2 points on EBITDA.

Understood. Just one question on the -- again, the banking services. You mentioned a couple of large accounts that we signed up. Can you name two or three core parameters on which Aurionpro scored over peers, concrete points here?

Shekhar.

Sorry, I didn't get your question -- the second part of your question, could you repeat that?

So you mentioned a few logos that you added over the last couple of quarters or more. I just want to know, over peers, what were the 2 or 3 core parameters that Aurionpro gained over peers? What was the competitive edge that you had over peers that got you that logo?

And every deal tends to be different . Great question, by the way. So one thing that's -- so let me talk about three factors. First of all, on the product. Yes, these banks, when they go to market for a solution, they have a very -- expectation of how that product is going to help their problem go away. And our product matches that massive spec to the closest fit relative to any other competition, right? So in the enterprise software business, your product is always getting refined. It's getting nearly there, more and more nearly there. It's never completely there. So that's number one. We are best on the product and the IP compared to any of our competitors. The second is a customer is interested in software only to the extent that it can genuinely solve its problem. So our ability to implement and deliver that customer success is unparallel. We have a 100% success rate in our deliveries. And we really -- when we commit to a contract, we don't -- we count our internal success metric when the customer goes live. It is not at the point at which we signed the contract. So that discipline and diligence in being able to understand how the customer wants to implement the software in their environment to solve their problem, this is where we really have cutting-edge differentiation. And I do believe we do that better than any IT products company, big or small, Indian or international.

Points on being flexible, were the customers asking you to be a bit more flexible with the contracts, also in terms of pricing and other aspects like they want you to add more features probably at the same employee intensity that we have or maybe even lesser, were those demands true? Or how does that work? Because these larger players may or -- because the feedback that we get from outside is the larger players may or may not be as flexible with the smaller asks of these clients. Maybe we were probably more flexible. I just wanted to sort of check on that.

Yes. And that was going to be my third point, right, which is the way that you structure the deal, right? As a smaller player, we have agility on our side. We have flexibility on our side, not just because our product helps us be agile and flexible, but also because that is our attitude, right? We want to be customer-centric. And we have -- at this size and scale, we have the ability to make every customer feel important and give them the attention that is due to make their implementation successful. So that is always a demand. Every customer has their own unique set of demands. And everybody wants to drive the best deal for their organization. I mean our customers are big banks, right? They have very structured and sophisticated procurement organizations, and they're very demanding business users to say, I want this problem to be solved. So our ability to walk that journey with them because remember, the sales cycle is not short. It's like sometimes a 12- to 18-month sales cycle. So it's that ability to walk, to understand the customer, adapt and walk the journey together.

[Operator Instructions] Yes, sir. Can we pass the mic, please?

Jeetu Panjabi from EM Capital Advisors. Great presentation. So the question is around AI and its implications. It's -- you've heard a lot of commentary from a lot of people. The implications are huge. On one side, it's a disruption you guys haven't seen or the whole software industry hasn't seen in the last 20 years. It's going to be nonlinear. So I would just love to understand. I'm going to give you 2, 3 aspects if you can dwell around those aspects on the implications. One, you hear about software coders or software writers becoming redundant in some measure? How do you think about that? Two, are there nonlinear implications on productivity for you guys? Three, is there enough talent for you guys to hire from to achieve the goals that you need to achieve? And four, are there other implications that we've not talked about that you see that could maybe change the equation or change the status quo over the next 2, 3, 4 years?

Yes. So thank you. Great question. And that's actually a number of different points, right, but if I -- so one -- look, I think it's quite obvious to anywhere in the tech world or outside that we are going through probably one of the most fundamental shifts we've seen in technology for a fairly long time, right? People compare to Internet, all that stuff, but honestly, I think this is just a very, very fundamental shift. I don't think anyone knows how big or small, at least in the medium term. But over the long term, it is very large. What does it mean for coders and all that stuff. Look, I think -- so I think a lot of people don't fully see the impact. When it comes to GenAI, I think a lot of the functions will get affected quite significantly just because you have to think in terms of not -- this is how I use technology, and that's how it changes. It's -- this is what a human does and this is sort of kind of replaceable. So I think every CEO who goes out and say they have trained 100,000 programmers on GenAI and all, I think they basically don't know what's happening. It's like -- so in a large case, if you look at what's happening on GenAI, to a large extent, domain skill becomes a lot more important than the technical skill when it comes to using one of the sort of large language models out there, right? And that's not a technology thing. That's a domain thing. So the developer, probably a child in school can do a better job than a developer when it comes to that because from a technical standpoint, it's just an API call to the model, right, which is what you think depending on what the model does, we do it all the time. We believe that is only one side of the story, right? Like when I was saying, right, if GenAI becomes a part to AGI, then obviously everything changes, right? But how long is that path and where that happens, we don't know. Until that happens, businesses are centered around the processes that they run using technology, right? It's not a generative function per se. It's an execution function. It's a decision-making function, right? We believe we have the right approach when it comes to tackling those in the enterprise. The other thing to think about is banks and insurers are highly regulated industries. It's not easy for them to adopt technologies. It's always easier when you are centered around what is relevant to the banks. So there will be a usage for GenAI. There will probably be a reduction in the amount of coding you need and all that stuff. That's fine. You can probably analyze your whole code bases using models, large or small, that is also fine. But I think there is a fundamental value-add to the enterprise when you bring intelligence at every single decision-making point in the enterprise. That's what we are going to tackle. I think that is a massive case. The point that you talked about implications that we did not talk about, I think what really happens is the enterprise software industry has a pecking order. At the top, you have the FIS, the Fiservs and all -- at some level just in terms of revenue scale and presence and all if you look at it, right, in sort of somewhere above the bottom quartile, you've got an Aurionpro at $120 million, whatever, right? And one, what would have happened, I think, is you incrementally sort of do your 30%, 35% and try and get to the top in 15, 20 years. I believe we have once in a lifetime opportunity to break that pecking order, right, you really have the ability to step jump up if we really get much more relevant to the banks and insurers through the strategy of building out enterprise API, going -- if you look at technology, any technology, it doesn't matter what it is, the value, ultimate value always gets created on the application level. When ERP came along, we all these -- you do -- you've got an infrastructure layer where someone will win, but eventually, it will get commoditized but the application layer is where you have the most value, that is where you have the most reliable value, right? So we will -- if we get there, you've got this very, very unique opportunity to really climb up the pecking order very rapidly, right? So I think that's what we think. That's what we are going after. There is a massive amount of movement in that space. There's a lot of things that will happen, right? I don't think it's an amount of scale of talent problem. Like you said, can you attract the right number of people and all? I don't think -- I think it's the quality of talent issue. I believe we probably have built out one of the best teams in the world to tackle this problem, right? Or what we don't have, we will build out. It will be a quality thing, it will not be a numbers game. It won't be whether you have 1,000 sort of data scientists or 1,000 engineers. It'd be what is the quality of people you have and what your building out? I think we've built out -- I mean thanks to Vinay and Deekshith one of the best sort of teams to tackle this. I mean it's a complex problem, but I think this is a massive opportunity for us.

You gave a 25%, 30% guidance over the next few years, does that embed nonlinear implication of this -- something coming out of this?

No, it obviously doesn't. I think the thing is, look, when it comes to guidance, we like to be conservative, right? Because there is no point in -- you're a listed firm. You have to be responsible when it comes to giving out numbers. You're not trying to be a unicorn, soonicorn one of those things. So there is no need to go out and paint this is a $20 billion opportunity and I'll be so much. I think we need to guide to what is a responsible level of growth. We need to plan for what is a responsible level of growth. If an inflection point comes, I think it will happen when it does not need a lot of scale to -- a lot of human scale to scale the revenue, right? So it has to happen in a very productized fashion. When that time comes, we'll come and talk about it, right? And probably we are a quarter behind in talking about it, right? But I think from a guidance standpoint, the philosophy we had the last few years, we will -- we said 30% to 35% last year, we came in at 35%. I mean the earnings came in at 40% or whatever, right, but we were not being either over aggressive or overconservative. We said 25% to 30% year before, we came at 31%, right? So I think we will try to be at a number where we say we guided, we delivered. We are not way above or below, right? If a point comes where we're going to be way above, we'll come and talk about it maybe a quarter late. But yes, I mean, there's no need to get aggressive on this.

One question per person please. Yes, there. Hi can we know your name?

This is Anmol from DAM Capital. Sir, I have a question. So as the company -- as you have been talking about that we want to scale up in the banking sector. And as we scale up in the banking sector, do you think that it will be more and more difficult to get partnerships with the other product companies like Murex, Finastra, FIS, and we'll start competing with them in some sort of way? And if that happens then, how will we expand into U.S. and Europe?

Yes. No, I think that's a good question, Anmol. And I think we've got just a different philosophy of how the tech world should work. Time will tell how right we are. But banking tech has always been very proprietary tech-driven, right? So you've had players not working with each other because you say, I build a core banking stack, I stay here. I build a capital market stack, I stay here. We are very, very open about partnering and we are saying we create win-win propositions. We genuinely mean win-win propositions. When we go and partner with the Finastra, it's because we have a very deep product. It is a very capital-intensive and time-consuming task with a lot of risk for Finastra to replicate that piece of technology, right? It's real-time trade limits that we build it. We've got charges with tech leaders quadrant product capability in that space. It's not so easy to build that capability out, right? So we feel, one, there is an inherent moat when we have a successful product for someone to come out and replicate it. If they could, they would have, right? Second, we will always be very, very open-minded about partnering. We believe you create a lot more value for the bank that way. We are aware, banking world has not worked that way, right? But we feel it's changing with the open finance with the sort of acceptance of open banking. I think it's generally changing. How Arya APIs, for example, work the whole framework that Deekshith has built out. I think we can embed more and more of those API calls quite easily within the stack of not just Aurionpro, but every other application vendor in the world because this is fundamental value, which is, one, hard to replicate; second, it's just easy to consume, right? So we see us becoming a way, way stronger partner for most and having consumption-based API call-based offerings out there, which we see a much wider spectrum of vendors consuming purely because the alternative is much more capital intensive and much more time consuming, right? So that's where we are going. The other thing is none of this is a marriage for life, right? We -- our -- as we get into Europe and U.S., we build out the references and all, and we say it's no longer a win-win from either side, you can always walk away, right? So there is no real thing but we'll get to scale. And we still compete with the FIS and Moody's and all these on the lending space, but we collaborate on some of the spaces, right? So it's sort of -- there will always be some competition in the industry. But look, right now, we are too small to worry about it. I mean, $120 million player is nothing in this space, right? So you're tiny mosquito in a giant industry. I think this is not the time to worry about that stuff.

Sure. Just a related one. Are we also building up a team maybe in U.S. or Europe setting up more salespeople or something like that?

Yes. So we've build the channel out. I think the Asia team, both on the banking side as well as the TIG side is probably double what it was 12 months back. U.S., now we've got, I think, 3 salespeople running, which is better than where it was last year. We'll continue to build the channel out, but we'll not get overaggressive in terms of sales numbers. We will always be a blend of partnership-driven sort of channel as well as direct sales guys. I think there is -- just in terms of productivity gain that you get, the incremental gain from expanding the sales team is not very high, unless everything else is set up. The local references just because you sell to a UOB, it doesn't mean you'll be able to sell to a JPMorgan, right? I mean you need to be -- product has to be ready, the references have to be there, all that stuff, right? So we'll take our time. The good thing is there is no rush, right? I mean both sides of the business don't need that many new logos to continue to scale. So we'll keep scaling the sales channel every year. It's probably double what it was 12 months back. Maybe in the next 12 months, it won't double. It will go up 40%, 50%, but we'll be measured and we'll keep scaling.

Thank you. Anyone else? All right, there are 2 hands. We can -- whoever you wish, please step forward. Yes.

This is Ashish from Goldman Sachs. I had a question on the tech innovation group. So I think you spoke about a host of solutions over there pertaining to data center, public services, the edge data centers and maybe ERC, et cetera. So at first glance, outside in each of these look like with their own significant TAM and particularly at your base. And at the same time, they also look like very disparate systems on their own. So the question really was in terms of bandwidth, are you having to create a very separate bandwidth for each of these? And how do you go about doing that with such a host of solutions at your scale? And the associated question is, do you think over time, narrowing down on some of these bets in terms of what will be proving more scalable than what you would have earlier envisaged or are you kind of doing the whole hog in each of these areas that you mentioned?

Yes. I mean, you take it if you got the question, I'm going to ask -- so [ Ashish ], just so I'm clear about this, right, Sanjay is going to answer. But one, you are in many areas, do you have the bandwidth to handle those many areas? Second, as you go further, would you want to narrow your bets down? That's is the question.

Yes. And on the bandwidth side, particularly, do each of these need a completely separate bandwidth because these look like completely disparate solutions, right, while they are all within 1 group?

Do you want to answer that?

Yes. So what I understood that is that do we have a bandwidth to run the businesses? Yes, we do have the bandwidth. And every business is interlinked with other business. We have the leaders in this who leads the business, whether it's transit business or enterprise business. Enterprise business has a leader as we showed [indiscernible] right? We have specialized people running this business. When we say interlink, like we say hybrid cloud services. Hybrid cloud services are required by every product which we are running, whether it's our lending product or transit business or any other businesses, which we are doing. So it's been used internally as well as we are selling to the customers, right? So this was the first question. You're right, did I answer well? Yes, we do have huge bandwidth. And all the businesses are very scalable, whether you see transit, transit is required globally, it's B2C and B2B both, right? So it's been running. Enterprise business, when we say data center, hybrid cloud services. So hybrid cloud services or IT infrastructure services are part of every application, every product, everything what we do. Data centers, again, it's scalable because the kind of requirement as we're moving from 4G to 5G or we're moving to -- we started talking about 6G and above, so as we consume data, so data centers are going to be built and I don't see anything, which is going to slow down. And India is going to be one of the largest data center hub for all the key players coming up. Public sector services, of course, is as you see -- just don't want to be political, but if you see the current government, 3, they are talking about digitization across and a lot of things they want to bring it to India. And as we see the key players coming to India and are we going out, so there's a huge requirement of talent out here and partners from the globe, right? So that's what I feel.

Yes. So [ Ashish ], the key thing to understand about TIG's side with Sanjay is, first of all, pretty much everything in there has been built over the last 4, 5 years. So it was 0. It's started from 0, it's been scaled up. Now it's what INR 500 crores or sort of increasing overall. But -- so you sort of constantly scaled up, but how you scaled up is you build a box, that box works, then you double the box, then you double the box, right? He's not talked about a lot of the other smaller bets going on; otherwise, you think it's even wider than what he's talking about, right? And that is the reality of technology innovation growth. We have a lot of bets in areas we see demand. As we see a scale coming in, we hire the right management talent. So Bhaskar, who runs his data center business, he talked about. Jigger who runs the hybrid cloud business, these are extremely high-quality people building out very high-quality teams. And think of it as -- so actually, it's not just TIG, the whole of Aurionpro, right? I think, think of it as a fairly decentralized group of product and technology P&Ls backed up by a very strong corporate function, a very strong process framework around how you build a product, how do you really manage the life cycle? How do you AI enable it? How do you API-enable it, all that stuff, right? So basically -- but a fairly decentralized when it comes to it. So your risk is in those boxes. Your scale of challenge is in those boxes and we'll keep doubling the box as we see success, right? But then there'll also be several small bets where we fail at, right? So we will scale only when we see that success. I mean there is a lot of fairly small bets across the enterprise and that's just the pace at which we operate, right? But will we narrow the bets down? I don't think so. I mean the way I see it is there's just a sort of ever-expanding sort of scale of bets. We narrow -- we drop some bets where we fail. But the overall stand will not narrow. I don't think so.

This is [ Arpit Agarwal ]. Coming from the earlier question, so you have quite a disparate products. How do you allocate your resources in terms of, say, R&D spend, right? You spend about INR 100 crore-plus now in R&D, so how do you spend that in various products? And second is, like you made a point in your presentation that at some point of time, some products will go to that J-curve, so being a CEO, which of the products you see like closer to your heart or which you think would be faster to reach that space and you'll probably allocate more resources?

Yes. Okay. Good question, [ Arpit ]. So look, scale-up is a fairly easy question to answer. The businesses we are talking about right now are the ones we feel very good about scaling up, right? So whether it's lending, whether it's transaction banking, whether it's enterprise AI, whether it's the data center business, whether it's transit because we're talking about businesses where we are successful, where we have now built out probably one of the most competitive models out there where we've gotten comfortable around economics and where the headroom for growth is very large because each of these spaces, I mean it looks like a lot of space and if you see Aurionpro as a whole is $120 million. So most of these are $10 million to $20 million place or $25 million at most, right? So in spaces where the biggest player is a multibillion-dollar player, right? So the headroom for growth is enormous. We will keep on scaling -- I can't think of, among the spaces I mentioned, any space we will not invest in. Having said that, they don't always need the same amount of R&D dollars. So there, we need to prioritize. Just the scale of these bets is, if you say INR 100 crores-odd of R&D spend, it's not enough to build products in every space at the same time. So we prioritize last 2 years, I've been fairly transparent about it and Shekhar has been transparent about it. We said we are slowing down the growth in banking. We are focusing on rebuilding the product portfolio, right? So banking was growing at 14%, 15% the last 2 years till the middle of last year, and we said we are just investing most of the capacity and rebuilding the product stack. We rebuild the product stack, we rebuild the sales team, we go out and sell. And in the second half of last year, banking is like in solid growth. I mean, Q4, it grew 80%; Q3, it grew 50%-plus; for the full year, it grew 37%, but if you look at the first half, it was very slow, right? So -- and then again, what I've been transparent about, TIG was growing at 55%, we said this will slow down this year, which Sanjay is working on. We said, okay, we want to divert more capacity towards more productization, so this year, banking will grow much more strongly. TIG will grow slowly, right? So we will keep on shifting the bets. One that helps us prioritize the R&D dollar. Second, it also helps us scale up the structure, right? Because you cannot keep on in this business, growing the business at 50%, 55% for many, many years, right? So you need to keep slowing down. The beauty of Aurionpro's portfolio is we can keep pacing our bets. That's the thing. Having said that, if instead of INR 100 crores, you said take this INR 1,000 crores and invest, we'll find use for it, right? But the way we are operating is -- and if you are a start-up with some private funding, you'll probably do that, right? But we feel the way the discipline with which we invest gives us the stamina to run the long race. We keep building incrementally on what we have. I think most of the core product rebuilds we wanted to do are done. So most of the R&D sort of in the future is incremental builds. So we'll keep on pacing where we see the whole thing. But yes, and there is a lot of small bets we've not talked about, right? So which we again will sort of keep investing small dollars in to see if they become successful, then we'll scale.

Just leading it if I may -- so like you have in your presentation said that you want to be in top 3 in some of these spaces and all of them are pretty large, right, multibillion-dollar spaces. So obviously, right now, you're like -- you have so many bets, so I'm trying to understand that which of these bets do you think that you will really have the right to win to reach in the top 3, which is like quite an ambitious target?

I think the top 4 or 5 bets, we work -- we are working towards being top 3 globally in each of those spaces. I mean, why not? Look, I think the thing is this, right, I mean, I don't know the future, you don't know the future, right? The question is what are you going for, right? I don't see any point in building a product if you want to be the tenth best in the world, right? So when we go and build, when Aurionpro goes and builds, we go and build an absolute Tier 1 product that can go out and compete with anyone in the world, right? That is the goal anyways, right? Have we been successful? Look at Sanjay's business with Transit, we probably have one of the most integrated end-to-end offering stack in the world. Between his R&D setups in Istanbul and R&D set up in Singapore, we've built out every single part of the whole chain in the last what, 3 years, 3.5 years, right from scratch. How many teams, forget in the country, in Asia, can actually go and build out the EMB certified card reader, it took the guys in Istanbul probably 2 years to build it, another year to get it certified. But when Sanjay launched it in that -- what is that UITP in Barcelona probably a year back and all this, practically a queue outside of Aurionpro's stall, everyone wants to talk, right? So this is hard work. But the thing is there is an easy way to do stuff. And then there is a way which says, okay, when I build something, I build it to be the best in the world. I mean sometimes you succeed, sometimes you don't. But that is the ambition anyway, right? So each of those 5 things we talked about, I mean, we want to be a top 3 global player. We believe -- look, I think the way to think about things is this, you look at any industry anywhere in the world, you look at electronics, auto, semiconductors and look at the big exporters: Japan, China, Korea, right? Everyone starts off with building something for someone else. Toyota used to be a handloom maker, Samsung used to make black and white televisions in collaboration with Hitachi, which even the Koreans will not buy. Huawei used to sell PBXs for Nokia, right? Eventually, all industries who want to my own IP, my own product, my own brands, right? The whole $250 billion Indian IT will move to my own IP, my own product, my own brands, right? When you build these products out, you will compete globally, whether it's Aurionpro doing it, someone else doing it doesn't matter, that is going to happen, right? So this game will get played. I'm not saying we are going to be the trillion-dollar company. I'm saying we have a ticket to the game. I believe we have one of the strongest tickets to the game today, and we intend to play the game. That is the thing. Where we get to, time will tell.

There's a girl there who would like to ask. Yes, please.

[ Krupa ] here from Electrum PMS. Sir, my question was on Arya.ai. So it's been 10 years since Arya.ai was founded. And with such a revolutionary product, why just INR 20.5 crores of revenue? And besides that, so we gave a INR 200 crores valuation for Arya.ai, so which is almost 10x of its revenue, so what drove such valuations? And besides that, you just said that you could be integrating all the Arya.ai solutions with your banking solutions. So what is the opportunity size there and what is the competitive landscape there?

Yes. I know, Vinay, do you have a mic?

No.

I will tackle the valuation question, but -- can Vinay get a mic?

Yes. At least I'll answer the first part. What are we doing in the last 10 years? As I said, I think when -- earlier when we started in 2013, it was primarily a new problem that we're trying to solve, but largely it's not solved nor thought in India, right? So we have researchers coming all of it, looking at a technology called [indiscernible] was not studying that. So we have to reinvent a lot of cycles to productize initially in the first 5 years, which is open source frameworks, enterprise platforms, to able to build ML models and all of that. Once we had the product in 2015- '16, we started looking at what is the revenue maximization opportunities at that point of time. So we had a lot of internal events. Like if you look at the AI platform leaders or AI solution leaders in the last 10 years, right, you could think of players like, one, OpenAI in the last couple of years, but they have been building for almost 8 years with funding backing of more than $1 billion before they started realizing that first set of revenue dollar, right? And then before that, we have a bunch of small players like Scale.ai U.S. and then you have Databricks, DataRobot, for example, Databricks and DataRobot is 15-year, 20-year kind of company, right? So this is a very new technology. We didn't want to look at revenue maximization until we solve the scale. There were multiple revenue opportunities in the intermediary time periods, but we had to let go of it. We said, "no, we want to solve a bigger problem," right? Once we fix the bigger problem, which is verticalization for BFSI. We looked at revenue checks -- sorry, scale checks in the meantime, like our first customer was in 2016-'17 ICICI Lombard and Axis, why didn't we go after 50, 60 other banks to do that? If -- you have to look at the preparedness of the user and the market and then the scale, that's how the scale comes. Preparedness of the market is quite premature. It's not there 5 years back. Preparedness came in the last 3, 4 years, right? When COVID happened, some -- I think I would probably thank to it because there's a lot of digital revolution happened. People started capturing data, people started building systems. Now you have the preparedness to be ready. What is the stopping point, right? So the stopping point is the regulation is part of it is still unclear. Like given the payment space, which has been there in the industry for 20, 30 years, you still see regulatory inconsistencies and all that stuff. That is something that we want to solve in the last 3, 5 years. That's what we invested in the last 3, 5 years to see if I have to scale this to 100x, what is the problems that I foresee. I see -- foresee problems of preparedness, which are solved. I see the problems of data readiness, which is kind of getting solved because everybody is kind of gathering the datasets. The third is the acceptability problem. I think that's what I was saying. So data to model is quite easy now. I can build a model for any problem very, very easily. But model to acceptance is very hard. That's why even though ChatGPT was there for the last few years. I'm taking a ChatGPT example because it's a very marketed use case, right, but nobody uses for this thing because it's a black box, not consistent, you can't audit it nor look at it. Alignment is a very big problem. People have replaced ChatGPT implementations for simpler use cases also. Then you have to look at solving those issues, which is stability of the models, model risk management, model governance, for example. Those are very, very, very hard problems. Very few people look and solve those kind of problems. Net-net, the 10 years trajectory that we set is a learning curve for us because the industry is new. Second is the problems are something that we want to solve, which is achieving that 100x kind of growth rate. That's why we spent last 10 years, 11 years to be solving this whole problem. We believe in expertise. I mean right now, mediocracy is automated, right? So any mediocracy in any job function can be completely automated. The differentiation is the excellence. That's what we were building towards to. And Ashish can...

A few years before that -- in the 24th year or 23rd year, you were a INR 375 crores company that was 3 years back. In the 26th year, you're INR 1,000 crores-plus company, we're guiding to INR 1,200 crores, right? So you went from -- so you come to a point where you say you can scale, right? So that is one. It happens in pretty much all product-based shops. The second is, for us, honestly, from a valuation standpoint, it was a no-brainer, really because one, you look at 10x revenue, it's not 10x revenue, first of all, even in the past year. The second is the business scale from INR 8 crores to INR 20 crores-plus in the past year, you can see the scale curve. So even from Arya's own revenue numbers, we are talking about 3.5x, 4x. The thing is when you look at valuation, looking at revenue gives you a very partial picture. Aurionpro operates at 22% EBITDA, Arya operates at 50%, right? So that also is a huge earnings difference. The other is the sum total is what really attracts us, right? Because we were already collaborating with Arya on State Bank of India, on Canara. We are already using it in our stock. So there is a substitution opportunity that exists that would not exist with some other players, right? So when you look at the valuation and you add that things together, you're not even talking 3x, right? So I think it's important not to get sort of look at some headline things. I think one is what is the -- sum total parts, and I'm talking this year, right? When I say 3x, 3.5x, it's this year, right? So one is how much can the number grow by itself? Second, how much can the number go together with Aurionpro? Third, what is the substitution cost to Aurionpro using something else? And all of that too -- plus, the earnings. If you take that equation together, it was basically a no-brainer, right? I mean it took us, I don't know, maybe 17 minutes to decide. Maybe after that, it was just paperwork.

Thank you. All right, so we'll take 2 more questions. Yes, sir.

I'm [ Akshit Mehta ] here. I'm fairly new to the company, so I have a basic question here. In the top 4 or 5 spaces that we are really looking after, who are our competitors globally as well as in India?

Okay. So look, competition landscape for us really varies with the product set. Maybe, I don't know, so I think Sanjay Varma is on the collaborative side. So basically, I think he has probably no competition, right? But other than that, on Shekhar's side, maybe Shekhar, would you want to talk about the competition?

Yes, like Ashish said, right, it is very diverse and very specific to the space in which we are playing at that point in time, transaction banking, you have Intellect, you have Finastra, right as some of the names. On the lending side, on the wholesale lending, you have FIS, you have Moody's, chalk and cheese, they are very different, right? But when you're competing, you have to compete at that deal at that point in time in that space. I mean when Sanjay is competing for the ECR, right, he mentioned the Transit -- in the Transit space, the ECR is typically the Germans. So we have a -- it's hard to paint all these competitors with one brush. But in each of the player spaces that we are playing, we see, a, that there is significant headroom in that space; and b, that leadership is contested. There is no one 800-pound gorilla which rules that space with such -- and has such an ironclad grip. We are able to -- as we showed last year, we are able to go into the home markets of these leaders and win against them on a deal. So that's what gives us the confidence that, that competition is even though it might be big at this point in time, it is shakable and that validates that if you play in a space where the headroom is large and the leadership is contended, then we have a fair shot at being the global top 3.

Maybe let me pose that to Sanjay Varma, again. So Sanjay, for your business, it's mostly the in-house teams or when you're working together with Murex and Finastra's it's basically the -- be the other big players, how do the competition...

It's a combination of both, right? And it's a combination of us competing directly with the partners where we sometimes collaborate with. And it's also the third parties that come along with them. And that leads to a very interesting question. While you talk about competition, right? And this also maybe refers to a question that was asked earlier on why when we start competing with the partners that we collaborate, why is that these big technology players collaborate with us, right? And I think -- or at least year has shown me that because companies -- Aurionpro is very uniquely in what we call the Goldilocks zone of technology companies. The large companies like FIS, like Moody's, like Murex, like Finastra, have very heavy technology debt, right? And their ability to innovate their ability to be nimble is way down because of this technology debt. Smaller companies, which are start-ups, which are very innovative, which have got AI and everything unlike Arya. But they don't have the credibility. Aurionpro comes in the Goldilocks zone where we don't carry the technology debt, but we carry the credibility. And hence, we become very attractive as well as competitive against these large companies. So there are players -- times when we have competed against them and one because of us being in this Goldilocks zone of low technology debt, high innovation. And that is also what has attracted the same players who want to collaborate with us because we take care of the aspects around innovation that they count, right?

And I take it to probably -- I mean this is an important question. So maybe, Sanjay, would you want to talk about the competition set?

Yes, sure. So as what rightly Sanjay Varma has said, that it's somewhere collaboration, somewhere competitive, we are competing with the same partners. Some of the products where we want to -- we are bringing like ECR or ECR-related products, we will be among the top 3 already by -- in the next year providing on the transit side of the business because there are very few who has this kind of products. But on the competition side, on the transit, we have competition like Thales. Now it is Hitachi there. It's Vix. Now we have partnered to Vix. But some places earlier we were competing now, we are collaborating. We have Cubic. In India, we have more SIs who are competing with us rather than our product companies. So we are just looking forward for changing some strategies out there and be more collaborative with many. That's it. I think so rest of the things Sanjay and Shekhar have already told about the product and competition.

I hope you got your answer. One last question. So there's only that one gentleman who has already asked, but maybe we can give him...

[ Vimal ] gets one more question.

Just, I'll take the liberty to ask 2. One is on AuroPay. Now basically, once you've got a license, I just wanted to know what regard this step. Was it that our customers were asking for this particular solution because maybe they thought that we'll be able to integrate it well with our existing solutions or is there a definitive strategic step from us that we can probably cross-sell? So is the demand from the customer beforehand or are we still supposed to sort of integrate? What's the plan here? That's question number one. The second question is around data centers. How does our revenue model work here? Does it sort of scale up with the increase in the megawatts or the gigawatts that the customer or the colocation guy adds or how does it work there?

Okay. So look, on the payment side, we've been in the payment space for quite some time, right? I think we've been supplying payment technology to U.S.-based fintechs. We've been operating with the issuer's side, we've been in transit payments, we are on the more prominent player in the transit payment space. So we've been in the payment space. Why does -- why do we need the license to come in? I think the idea is to bring together the -- so look at more end-to-end solutioning, bring together the software capabilities, the domain capabilities that Aurionpro has together with the payments sort of transaction capability, right? I think the way to look at it is -- the running of payment transactions, if you look at just the first order value creation, that is actually very, very small, right? It's just you got some sort of a discount rate as you run a transaction and it comes to you, right? But when you bring that together as a part of an end-to-end technology, right, then you have a fairly significant place. So we will, at least the initial use cases specialized around areas where we are already in. So for example, transit, I mean Sanjay's business is running literally billions of transactions, if not billion, right? I mean if you look at the transit space and look at organizations like UP Transport, Haryana Transport and all, you're talking probably more than 1 billion rides a year, right, on just those 2 organizations together, right? I mean, it takes several million a day. So you are already in a position where you have an end-to-end stack and have been licensed from the regulator in the space just allows you to expand margins, right? It's not necessarily also a revenue play, it allows you to extract much more from the same stack, right? Same thing with B2B supplier payments, both on the payables and receivables side, we've got B2B SaaS platforms out there, we can actually help bring a much more comprehensive offering out there, right? So the idea is not to really be a vanilla sort of gateway operator, which gets a small discount rate, but to really go into the market with a much more stronger end-to-end positioning. We have been working at this for quite some time, having the approval from RBI and sort of commencing business on the gateway side helps us just consolidate the play in the space.

Ashish, one example would work -- would help here. So let us say, we are currently working with Haryana State Transport, how do we sort of integrate AuroPay with that particular solution that we are providing to Haryana...

Sanjay, do you want to take that?

So if it's online reservation system or your mobile app, when you do a payment through booking these tickets, so the payment gateway is required. If you see that GPay or all those payment solutions or credit card, debit card, everything, that's how it gets integrated. So that's the complete solution you get. So you started from just giving a hardware to the platform automatic fare collection system. And then on the online reservation system, it gets -- so we have the complete suite now to offer.

I think it's important to understand how Aurionpro really creates value, right? I think when we look at the space, the difference between us, like Sanjay was saying on the transit side in India, pretty much everyone you compete with is an SI player. You buy some units from China, you take AFC software from someone else, you sort of bring it gates from some third guy and you bring it together and then you make 6% margin on the business, right? On the same space, when Aurionpro comes in, you make a 20%. Why do you do that, right? Because when we look at the space, we say, okay -- and then Shekhar mentioned that during his presentation, right, can I look at the whole value chain end-to-end. First, let me go out and occupy it, occupy every single point. My own offering, someone else is offering, but do that. But once we are in that space, then we go in and engineer our own IP at every single one of those points, right? And once you have that, that is what gives you the right to extract a differentiated margin compared to someone who's doing a side job, right? So the goal for Aurionpro always has been every single point we want our own IP, our own solution out there. Sometimes we do it in 3 months, sometimes it takes us 3 years, right? So why do you go out and build that card reader? I mean, why -- no one in India builds a card reader because that's an input into the validator that you make. That's a huge cost component. Once you start building your own, your margins shoot up, right? It's another thing that once we built it, pretty much everyone wants it, and you can also work with other players just on that piece, right? But why you build it is because you want to occupy every single point on that value chain, engineer your IP in every single point, and that is what gives you the right to a high margin compared to anyone else. And that applies to every space, not just transit and payments.

And sir, on the data center as well, if you can answer that one. What's the -- how does our revenue model work? Does our revenue scale up on every gigawatt or megawatt added? How does it work?

So I'll probably start off and Sanjay can add to it, right? Most of the spaces on the TIG side are spaces where we start off doing a services business, right? Transit was similar thing, now we've got an end-to-end stack, but initially, it was almost like a services piece where we're also learning and taking things from everyone. Data center has again been on a journey, largely to -- from a services-led revenue model, where we got probably one of the best data center design teams in the country do very high-end design job and program manage the bills. And from there, the business is on a journey to product ties and get the nonlinear economics out, that was the edge compute that Sanjay was talking about in his presentation. As we mature in a space, sometimes it takes you 2 years, sometimes 4, we then try to build products and then we try to productize, scale and get the nonlinear economics. I think data center is probably where transit was a couple of years back in that journey. The revenue model is shifting, right? And then over time, it will shift even more from a services-led to a much more nonlinear model. I don't know, Sanjay, you want to add to it.

Yes, I think so you have answered it.

So we can continue now this at the tea break if any one of you have any questions. I'm sure all of you are waiting for the break, but give a huge round of applause for what a detailed answers. Thank you so much for joining us today and thank you to each one of you for such enthu participants. [Operator Instructions] With this to conclude this session, I would like to invite on stage, Ninad, our company's Secretary and Legal Head to deliver a vote of thanks.

So I wish to thank each one of you for your presence in this event. And I must say thanks to all of you for the questions inside full discussion, which made this event very fruitful. I wish to assure all of you on behalf of Aurionpro that we'll continue to work hard and create value for our stakeholders. I also wish to thank all the team members and the hotel staff who made this event possible. Thank you so much. Thank you, Ashish, and each one of you.

Yes, thank you.

Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for joining us today. I hope you had a wonderful time. I would request everybody to please don't forget to visit our booth and immerse yourself with a wonderful experience. Once again, thanking each one of you for joining us today and grazing this occasion with your kind presents. All right, thank you, ladies and gentlemen. With this your host for the evening, [ Shina Khan ], is signing off. Have a wonderful evening.