IRIS RegTech Solutions Limited (540735) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, friends. Welcome to the H2 and full year FY '21 results of IRIS Business Services Limited. [Operator Instructions] This call is being recorded. Joining us on the call today from IRIS are S Subramaniam, the CEO and Founder; K Balachandran, Founder of CFO; and Deepta Rangarajan, the Co-Founder. Swami will present an investor deck that highlights the business model, products, financials and outlook for the future. [Operator Instructions] Before we proceed with the call, a disclaimer. During the course of the interaction in our materials, we may make certain forward-looking statements, and this -- they must be viewed in conjunction with the risks the company faces and may not be updated from time to time. More details are provided at the end of the investor material and other filings that can be found on our website at www.irisbusiness.com. With that, I would like to hand over the call to Swami to take us through the company's vision and strategies. Over to you, Swami.

Thank you, Diwakar. On behalf of my colleagues and everybody else here, I extend you a warm welcome as well because Diwakar's first interaction with us as handling our Investor Relations. So thank you, Diwakar, for accepting the assignment. And I'm hoping that with Diwakar inputs, we will be able to literally engage with investors in a much more meaningful manner than we've actually done in the past. Not that we've not done it, but I think it's useful to have the professional inputs from someone link Diwakar. Is my screen visible?

Yes.

Okay. Lovely. Okay. So actually disclaimer has been given by Diwakar already. I think many of you have been to our past earnings calls and seen our annual reports, know that we have 3 segments in our business, what we call collect, create and consume. Collect is where is basically a software -- business software through which regulators collect data from those that they regulate. Create is a suite of software products used by enterprises to create data for submission to the regulator. So let me give you examples from both sides. So Reserve Bank of India uses our platform to collect data from all the banks in the country. All the banks in the country submit data to RBI, using our platform, using our software. So Reserve Bank of India uses our product called iFile through which banks submit data to RBI in a format called XBRL. The banks use our software, which, in some cases, has been given free to them by RBI to create the documents for submission to RBI. Many other banks use our priced software as well, which allows them to automate their submission to RBI. So the software used by RBI is the collect segment, which we have implemented in a few -- in about 24, 25 countries with about 30-odd regulators. And the software that we implement for the enterprises to create the data for submission to the regulator is what we call the create segment, there are multiple products there. And finally, we have the data and the analytics segment because there's no point in collecting all this data if you're not going to analyze it. So we have a software business sitting there as well as data as a service business sitting there. So what is this thing called XBRL? It's an information standard. Across the world, there are many, many information standards we've actually come up with. So if you were sending money to your grandmother or to somebody else across the country, and you had to go and add a beneficiary in to your bank account, the banks would use a messaging protocol to ensure that the money reach the account to which you want to send the account, that's a standard. In the securities market, there are standards that are fixed that are very common that people use. XBRL is now a standard used across the world for financial reporting. Some 70 countries in the world have adopted it. In Asia, for example, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and so on and so forth. Apart from Africa, where there are only 2 countries adopting it, in every other continent, there's a significant utilization of XBRL by various regulators. We are one of the early birds in the XBRL space. We stumbled on to XBRL quite by chance in 2005, and we've built our business around it, but we also work with standards other than XBRL. So in the collect business, we work with regulators, helping them collect data in XBRL and other formats. In the create business, we work with enterprises, giving them software to submit data in XBRL and other formats. And in the consume segment, we help with not only the collection of data -- not only the analysis of data, but also cleaning of data and also data as a service. People talk about data being the new oil. People talk about AI, people talk about ML. If you can't get your data right, all intelligence will only be artificial. There's nothing called artificial intelligence then. You need data to be structured properly, you need data to be structured properly in a manner where it can be exchanged with each other, you need data to be structured properly so that it's trustworthy. And only if you structure data, do things downstream like AI and machine learning, everything actually come into play. If data has a been issue at the beginning itself not structured properly, then what you will get is garbage inputs. What we are focusing on is basically ensuring that the data is structured properly. If the data is structured properly, you can build the AI business around it. If data is structured properly, you can build other businesses around it. To come back to my slide here, we've been around for a long time. We actually stumbled onto XBRL, as I told you, by mistake in 2005, when a company in America outsourced their XBRL work to us. We developed the first XBRL filing platform for the Bombay Stock Exchange in 2007, 2008, which SEBI made the common filing platform by 2009. And thereafter, we won the mandate from RBI. And from then on, we've never looked back. RBI is one of our favorite clients. We are very happy with the way we're working with RBI. In fact, in the pandemic, 3 of my colleagues have been also locked up with the RBI team to ensure that the data that flows into RBI continues to flow into RBI without any kind of hindrance. And today, we've also ventured beyond XBRL by creating a GST platform, which is now used by some of the top companies in the country. And we've basically worked around creating products that meet various data standards. So if you want to look at the way business is structured, in the area of collect, getting the country started, getting the regulators started with XBRL is about giving them a dictionary of data elements that they need to report, that's called taxonomy. There is a strong consulting element of the business in the area of collect, where we charge on the basis of the effort that we actually put in. Then we have the product called iFile, which is implemented on-prem at the regulators end to help the regulator collect data from those that they regulate. We are trying to move this on-prem model to a cloud model, to a SaaS model. When you look at regulators, banking regulators are very, very finicky about data on the cloud. They don't like it in most countries. Capital market regulators are less finicky, and business registries are the least finicky. So we have been engaging with regulators to see whether we can take the whole thing from an on-prem model to a cloud model to a SaaS model. We currently have one cloud -- one SaaS model working in the case of collect segment. That's in the case -- that's in Mauritius, where companies file with the company registry using our software. The create segment is mostly Saas, except for iDEAL , where we have moved to -- even though it's on-prem, we have moved to a monthly billing model, where basically, we are charging for software rentals effectively. Though it's not in the cloud. Therefore, there are difficulties in terms of monitoring it, but it's not on a per filing basis. It's on a per unit of time basis. So Carbon, which is our tool used for filing to ROCs in different parts of the world and capital market regulators is a completely SaaS-based solution. It's used in different markets around the world for different activities for filing the business registries, for filing the capital market regulators, most recently, even for filing to energy regulators in America and so on and so forth. That's a huge growing opportunity. We'll talk about it. IRIS GST is a completely SaaS model. The Carbon works on Microsoft Azure. IRIS GST works on Amazon, where we have some of the top companies in the country using our solution. E-invoicing is a new mandate that's come up after the GST mandate actually came up, where again, we've acquired customers independent of just the whole GST solution. iDEAL, as I mentioned to you is what's used for banks and that's an on-prem solution, where it's more a rental model. In the case of consume, we have 2 products that are currently getting us revenue. One is what I call Credixo and one is Peridot. Peridot is not yielding too much revenue as Credixo has right now. Credixo basically data as a service for digital lending. So many new age lenders use us for fetching data about the borrowers, which they didn't consume in their credit models. IRIS Peridot, which is a free app on the mobile, allows you to track compliance of your vendors. At the same time, there's also a Daas model there where people take feeds from Peridot into the systems to decide who to actually work with. These are some of the customers that we actually work with globally. And these are marquee customers. They are very, very big customers. I mean you will see some top names from India like Larsen & Toubro. We'll see some great names from the U.S., like -- we have great names from the U.K., like British American Tobacco, BAT. You will see names from across Europe, Colruyt Group is the biggest retailer in Belgium. BMW, who doesn't know BMW. We worked with BMW in a couple of countries. We work with the entire Bajaj Group, Bajaj Auto, Bajaj Finance. We work with Reliance Industries. We are a trusted solution provider for enterprises who need to comply. In the compliance space, we serve over 6,000 enterprises who provide -- who file the data using our platform. The iFile product, the collect segment, are the first 3 columns you see here. So business registries in Thailand and other parts of the world, including Singapore. So when people ask me how good we are, I mention the example of Singapore. Because if Singapore uses your product, there's nothing -- that's great endorsement. So Singapore's company registry called ACRA uses our solution for receiving the filings from the companies registered in Singapore. Among the central banks, we have Reserve of India, Bank of Mauritius. Most recently, we've got Nepal Rastra Bank, and we also have the Bank of Jordan. We are expanding that market gradually. And among SECs and stock exchanges, we owe a deep bit of gratitude to Bombay Stock Exchange for being our first customer. And in fact, it happened after meeting with SEBI. Thereafter, we've expanded our footprint across the world, through the entire Middle East and also other parts of the world. These are some of the customers we actually work with. We obviously couldn't fit in names of every customer that we actually have, but that's the way it is. And these are all reference customers who are good for us. One of the things we actually take great pride at IRIS is our quality of governance. I don't know how many of you know this. We're probably the fastest IPO in the history of India. We filed our prospectus in September 18, and our IPO opened on the 29th of September. Not because we knew people, which we did, but most importantly, our governance has been absolutely top class. From day 1, we basically said, if we are creating a company that will ultimately go public, we need to pay attention to governance. And therefore, while we, as founders are certainly on the Board, the people that we're really grateful to are our independent directors. Under the law, we don't need to have a majority independent directors, but 4 out of our 7 directors are independent. I cannot overemphasize the -- well, all of these are friends of mine. These are friends of us. But at the same time, every one of them when they came on board, they basically said, do you want us to be a rubber stamp or do you want us to question you. They questioned everything that we do, sometimes it's very [indiscernible], but we are extremely grateful to every one of them for literally keeping us on our toes. Vinod Agarwal is an eminent lawyer, who many of you may know about. He was working with [indiscernible], then went to a company called Vigil Juris. He also helped set up, and now he's on his own. Bhaswar Mukherjee, is an old hand in the world of oil sector. In fact, we joke about it saying that if you cut his veins, you'll actually find oil in his body. He was Director, Finance with HPCL. He knows oil industry inside out. He's got deep experience in the world of finance and accounts. He Chairs our Audit committee. Vinod Agarwal is the Chairman of the Board, when we have our meetings. Ashok is a brilliant marketeer who works at Hindustan Lever and worked with media for a number of years before he quit, and he runs his own start-up. And in addition to that, he's also on our Board. Haseeb Drabu, you may know from his columns that he writes. He's a very well-known media personality. He's a very good economist, a very famous economist. He was also recently the Finance Minister of Jammu & Kashmir. And before that, he was Director and Chairman of J&K Bank. And he adds tremendous amount of value. He was also very, very important in the GST council where he helped shape the GST policy of the country. The pandemic has, of course, affected us. I mean but for the pandemic, hopefully, our revenues would have been much higher. The reason -- the way the pandemic actually affected us was we couldn't travel. When you are a company based out of India and then you want to convince people to look at XBRL, you need to go and physically meet them. Most of the world still lives on a face-to-face model where they like face-to-face meetings. We could not have face-to-face meetings, which is the reason why you will find that in the collect segment, our revenue has actually dropped because there have been absolutely no implementations. And even the existing implementations have got delayed because in many offices across the world, people have not been coming to office. And when people don't come to office and in those countries where they don't have the facility to work out of home and monitor work done by people like us, it becomes a problem. So our revenue drop in the collect segment is largely because of the pandemic, and the lack of revenue growth is also because of pandemic. In the case of the create segment, while we do have 2 colleagues in Europe, one who is out of Barcelona and one a new recruit out of Paris, both Europeans. I think it's important to have [Foreign Language] to sell in Europe. We have not been able to travel to meet companies. Whenever we met companies, we've done extremely well. In fact, our experience from the pre-pandemic day shows that whenever we met with companies we've come off as extremely persuasive people with an excellent product, which shows up in the revenues that we actually got from Europe this year. The second thing that actually happened in Europe was the European mandate got postponed by a year. Out of the 27 countries in Europe, the 28 before U.K. left -- left the -- left EU, out of the 27 countries, it's almost a 50-50 split, some have postponed the mandate by a year, and that's led to a deferment of revenues. But those that have actually continued the mandate have given us a fair amount of business as well. And we've not done too badly. It's over 6% market share in Europe in terms of the number of companies who actually signed up with us. In the case of consume, there's not been a very major impact because we really not launched too many products there, and that's mostly domestic focus. At the corporate level, the virus, of course, affected us. I've lost my mother in the course of this virus. I was down with COVID. Balu was down with COVID. Deepta was down with COVID. We've all been affected by it. We've also lost 2 very valuable colleagues to the virus, and we've not kept our office open. In spite of that -- for a rat to come into your house, you don't need to keep your door open, a small hole or a drain pipe is enough. So we kept the office closed. And we've basically been annealed about it saying that people should not come into work until they get vaccinated. But even then after that, only when the air clears, people actually come in. But what we have learnt in the course of doing this is the ability to reach out to customers without a face-to-face meeting. So we've significantly strengthened our marketing team to deal with the new normal. So that even if this pandemic persists for some time, we are prepared to launch significant marketing initiatives to be able to acquire customers. Also on the HR front, we're realizing that if there are very good accountants, very good chartered accountants available in places like Jodhpur, we should recruit from there, and not get them to come to Bombay. So we should be able to recruit from anywhere in the world, in a world where people are actually working from home. That's been a significant change in our whole approach life. I will invite Balu to take you through the financial numbers. Balu, you want to take over?

I will do that. Thank you, Swaminathan. I hope all of you can hear me. Good afternoon. It is good to be back here, speaking to all of you. I'm happy that all of you have joined in good numbers. We'll go through the financial performance of the company fairly quickly. I trust all of you would have seen our filings with the BSE as well as the press release. In that context, I'll try to quickly go through the financial numbers. Before that, let me also say that as I've mentioned in the past, that our business to some extent is seasonal. This falls true -- falls to reporting here as well. The reason I'm saying that is that relatively a large part of annual compliance filings by enterprises typically fall into the second half of the year. So having said that, let's look at the numbers a little more in detail. So can you scroll the before that Swami, just see the screen before that?

Before that?

No, no. There is a starting screen...

This is first slide. This is first slide, Balu.

Okay. Fine, fine. So if you look at the trend in terms of performance as a company post the IPO, you can see the trajectory steadily going up. We had a revenue of about INR 27 crores just before the IPO, we hit about close to INR 57 crores. And we have grown at this CAGR of about 15%. Of course, our aspiration to grow at a much higher rate, but we have managed that. And more importantly, we have kept the expense growth low. And with the reserve that with operating leverage kicking in some extent, we have been able to start doing well from FY '20 onwards. If you look at our FY '20 performance, we had an EBITDA of about INR 8.2 crore INR, EBIT of over INR 2 crores. And from there, we have moved steady to the current numbers, about INR 10 crores EBITDA and INR 3.8 crores in terms of EBIT. And from a PAT point of view, it's about INR 2.72 crores as well. So from a year-to-year basis, can you go to next slide, please?

Yes, yes, yes. I'm trying, Balu. I'm trying, Balu. There it is. There it is.

Okay. So there is a typical way the stock exchanges wanted to report your numbers. If we look from this point of view, you will see that on a full year to full year basis, our top line has grown about 10%, while half year basis, the growth is 15%. But more important, the EBITDA growth has been 23% on a year-to-year basis on a full year basis. And from a half year basis, it is even better at 43%. And of course, PAT has done quite well as well. And one main reason is while revenues have been actually growing, we have been able to manage our expenses -- contain our expenses with the reserves that our margins have expanded to a bit it will be exchanged. Can you go to next slide, please. Let's look at the balance sheet. So from a balance sheet point of view, a couple of key points I want to highlight here. One is from a debt aspect. We have repaid our long-term borrowings. The INR 14 lakh you see there is on account of a financial lease transaction that we entered. But if you take that out, we have repaid our long-term debt. And we have now overdraft facility, and we have changed the bank as well. With the result that our industry cost also in this year should be at a significantly lower rate, we got good grades, and that should start kicking in from FY '22 onwards. Overall, our total debt has clearly come down. The other important point I want to mention here is in terms of receivables, we always had slightly high receivables, partly driven by our regulator customers who takes time to pay, and they pay in a lumpy fraction. But this time with higher revenues coming from the enterprise segment, we have been able to rein in receivables also to some extent. And we are down to about INR 13 crores, about 25% drop compared to the number in the previous year on a higher revenue as well. So these are 2 key points I want to mention when you look at the balance sheet. Can you go to next slide, Swami, please? Okay. This is some other point which I already mentioned, but just for the purpose of reiteration, that we mentioned that outside your revenue growth and your expense growth, which have been there, contained at 8%, even the employee cost has gone up a little more 10%. We have grown at 10% on the top line, so that expanded EBITDA. But outside that, let me say that we are seeing quite a significant increase in our cash flow from operations. And that is partly because of better receivables management and also because we have grown our revenues as well. So the cash flow from operations have moved up to INR 11.2 crores from INR 1.8 crores, which I think is quite remarkable, given the condition that we operated in the previous year. So of course, our focus, if you look at the previous year, was to make sure that we sustain the business, number one. And number two, we enhance the liquidity. And to that extent, our cash flow from operations increase has really helped us. With the result that the cash and cash equivalents moved up quite substantially to INR 8.45 crores from a level of about INR 1.69 crores in the previous year. So these are a couple of key points I want to mention in the financial highlights slide. Now, maybe we can look at the revenues a little more. Can you go to the next slide, please? Okay before that, just one quick once-over on the key ratios. Obviously, ratios are improved compared to what the numbers were in the previous year with better performance. But it is not where we want to be. We want to, of course, improve further, but the trajectory is firmly upward. That's what I want to say. Within the rations, I also want to highlight the debtors in terms of days, which has come down 85 from 125 in the previous year. And debt to equity has come down to 0.22. On withdrawn net worth, this is a very important metric. If I look at -- if somebody asked myself, what should I be monitoring? I would say, I would look at maybe 3 things. One is, of course, the annual recurring revenue. And second will be return net worth and third could be perhaps the cash flow from operating activities. If we look at net worth, we have gone up to double -- gone into double digits. But as a company, which is fully reliant on IT and which believes by its software products and its IP, we expect this to improve going forward because that's the nature of the business. Can we go to the next slide, Swami, please? Okay. So here is a look at the revenues, how the revenues have moved in the last 5 years. So the key thing I want to mention here is that look at recurring revenue, what we call revenue, which come on an annual basis without too much extra sales suffered because we have long-term contracts. And if you look at where we were in FY '17, we were at INR 12.96 crores, and we moved up to INR 40.23 crores, and that is a 25% CAGR. So this is something which we are focused on. And this has shown decent growth rates. And this is where we want to make sure that we sustain our performance in this direction. Coming to the segments, Swami did mention that our collect segment, where we work with regulators, did take a small hit because of the pandemic and because the public sector spending slowed down quite a bit during the pandemic, and we could not get any new contracts during the previous year. Of course, we were implementing our existing contracts, and we are also managing existing clients as well. But nevertheless, the revenues took a dip. But to our relief, the create segment came to the rescue in quite spectacular fashion. So you can see the create numbers moving from INR 18 crores to INR 29 crores in this year. And of course, the proportion of period revenues, which has better characteristics in terms of its cash flows, margins, et cetera, has also been on the higher side, it accounts about 52% of our overall revenue pie for the year FY '21. And in terms of even segment profits, even though the collect segment took a small dip, not a small dip, it came down from 33% to 15% in terms of profitability, the create segment turned around. It soared to profit in a telling fashion. Now we are running at about 20% of the margins and with the operating leverage, the game is actively played out. And recurring revenues now contribute to 71% of the top line revenue as compared to 68% in the previous year. Can you go to the next slide, please? So here is a geography-wise view of our revenues. You could see revenues from India has pretty much remained stable and strong. Of course, our GST revenues did improve with E-invoicing mandate coming in. So that helped to the -- helped in bring up the overall revenues. outside that, one thing I want to show here or to point out here is the Europe revenue. The Europe revenue has moved up sharply from INR 4.7 crores to INR 11 crores. And that even notwithstanding the fact that the mandate for listed companies that file in Europe has been postponed in many countries in Europe. And some countries are doing it voluntarily. So many of the customers that we have is our large customers. And they were keen to still go ahead and file voluntarily. And we did get a decent set of revenues from Europe in the year -- the reporting year FY '21. Next slide, please.

So where do we go from here? I'll take over. Where do we go from here? So in the case of iFile, which is a product that we sold to regulators, the collect segment, our focus is in trying to convert more and more people to a SaaS model, if we can. The problem here is completely RFP-driven. Regulators want to move to it. For example, recently, we had a conversation with the CEO of XBRL International. XBRL is an open source standard, maintained by not-for-profit body located between the U.S. and the U.K., and we were talking -- we basically said if 70 countries have adopted it, by when will we see a situation where every country in the world has adopted it? It seems to me if I'm talking to him and from looking at what the world Bank and others are doing that in the next 5 to 10 years, every country in the world will adopt XBRL. In every -- when you see the RFPs from different regulators, and when you look at the numbers across the world, we typically win more than half the contracts awarded across the world. We have 3 other competitors: one is a company called Vizor in Ireland; a company called CoreFiling in the U.K.; and the company called Invoke in France or we also have Fujitsu in Japan, so 4 companies. And even though there are 4 of the competitors, we end up winning more than half the mandates awarded globally. Today, anybody wants to invest -- any regulator wants to implement a regulatory filing platform in XBRL and which is the most preferred standard today, we certainly get called and we end up, as I told you, winning more than half. In the case of iDEAL, while we have had great success in the case of the banks in India, we are now getting inquiries from across Europe as well because we've created a good brand in Europe. Today, we're getting calls from Cyprus and Greece and others where there are banks that need to report a new -- under a new compliance rule that's beginning to happen in the month of September. And we have started getting customers in Europe for iDEAL. iDEAL is already currently got customers in India and Mauritius, and I think it's a good thing for us that there are banks in Europe will look at it. So what's our whole focus there for is to improve our marketing and marketing communication to be visible as a reliable provider of compliance solutions for the banking sector in Europe, which will lead to this. Our big idea, of course, is Carbon. Carbon is now used not only in the U.S. and Europe and India and several other countries. There are some big moves happening in the U.S. well. You would have seen from the numbers that Balu showed you that U.S. is still a weak spot. We are not making enough money in the U.S. right now, even though it can be a potentially a very large market. We were late to the party about 5, 6 years ago. At that time, we had no funding to go after those markets. So now we need to go and compete a little bit harder to be able to snatch customers away from our competitors. We have good reason to believe that people will do that because in quality reports, quarter-after-quarter, we come out on top. You would have -- you may recall that in the last 3 earnings calls, I've been talking about how we've been figuring the top of the quality charts, that continues. That's a great source of confidence for us. And the other big mandate that's actually come up is the U.S. energy regulator, who basically now needs to have basically said that all the energy companies also have to report in XBRL. In fact, a big move that's happening in America is every state government is now requiring all data to be submitted in this standard. That's also a huge opportunity. So we are now looking to strengthen our U.S. operations. In fact, to force stall the question that you might have ask, I mean even when we throw up cash, we will invest in growing our market share in the U.S. market. And I'm hoping that shareholders would approve that because I believe the return on that is much, much greater than anything else that you can actually get here right now at this point in time. So we're actually going to be investing very heavily in the U.S. market in terms of acquiring more and more customers. Deepta, can you possibly take us through the FERC mandate, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission mandate and talk about how we are approaching it?

Sure, sure. So the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission that governs all energy and utilities companies in the United States, and -- they have mandated now that energy companies need to start reporting in XBRL format. So this mandate much like other mandates, it rolls out in phases. So the first phase, which is going to kick in end of this year, November '21, is going to impact over 800 companies, roughly about 830 companies. And next year, FY -- that is -- sorry, in the 2022 end, it's going to increase to over 3,000 companies. So it's a new big market or a new big opportunity. This is listed and unlisted companies in the energy sector, of course. And we are already beginning to sign up our early customers and contracts. And we've got a couple of large partnerships as well, specifically around this FERC opportunity.

Thank you, Deepta. So we're quite optimistic about making a significant breakthrough in the U.S. in the next 1 year. And finally, of course, GST. GST started off with a huge promise, but it became a damp squib, but even so, we're very fortunate to still be among the people standing and making significant inroads in the market. And the E-invoicing thing has also given us some tailwind in terms of getting more customers in. Finally, our IRIS Peridot application, which many of you are using, has now been relaunched with significantly more features. If you -- so if the next time you invest in a company, you can actually verify the GST compliance of the company using IRIS Peridot. It's a free app. So please if you've not downloaded it, please download it and look at the new features there. So Peridot again is getting us a significant amount of visibility in the market. But at the same time, 2 things are going against us. One is, I mean, people are dropping price to acquire more customers. There are a couple -- there are basically 1 or 2 VC-backed firms who are basically willing to do it at throw away prices, which are not viable to acquire customers. We have held fast, and we said we're not going to drop our price below a certain level. Even though the traditional cloud model may basically not resonate with the approach that we're actually taking and people talk about going out and acquiring customers at no matter what the price is, we are mindful of the need to not do something that's ludicrous. Therefore, we've held on, and we've not done too badly. And when you do a benchmarking of our performance on the GST front compared to our competitors, we're not too far behind. So we're quite happy with that. So going forward, how do we see this market operating? This is a little document that we put together based on what we see around the world and the red tag opportunity. One major thing happening around the world is the following. It's got nothing to do with the pandemic directly as far the pandemic thing is at the last. Digital compliance is the order of the day. Digital compliance is not submitting data and PDF because if you submit data in PDF, somebody at the other end has to still take out the PDF, pull out the data, input into the spreadsheet and do multiple things with it. Digital compliance is about submitting data. And the moment you start submitting data, you have to submit data using certain data standards. And the most common one that's being used today is XBRL. So we see the red tag opportunity in the space that we actually occupy as being huge, and we actually see creeping regulation happening across the world in so many different areas. So when you look at countries like Australia, Finland, the U.S., where the entire government is moving to adopting data standards, it gives us great hope. We have the products to meet those markets. What we are now investing in is getting the marketing muscle in place to be able to do that. And being out of India, we have a cost advantage that others don't have. That still doesn't mean that we do it at throw away prices. We try to hold our price. At the same time, we try to strike a balance between being profitable and dropping the price. So we do drop the price. We don't -- we're not as expensive as some of our western counterparts. But we believe that in that red tag market, in the red tag opportunity, a company like IRIS, for example, has about 35 different compliance requirements that we need to meet, about 350 forms that we need to fill every year. So I believe that over the next 1, 2, 3, 4 years, more and more of these things will move to digital filing, and that's where the opportunity lies. An integrated filing platform could be the way the world will actually go, and we are ready for that. What we have created is deep domain understanding. There are -- many of you who might have seen XBRL at play for quite some time may actually look at the MCA website and talk about the many companies offering XBRL solutions. Many of them use solutions to convert data into XBRL and submit it. But let me say, there's nothing except rocket science is rocket science. But at the same time, to be an expert in XBRL requires significant amount of expertise, significant amount of knowledge to be able to deliver solutions. In fact, I -- my mind goes back to the day when RBI had the first tender where of the 5 other bidders, others were disqualified because we were the strongest in terms of domain. Even the current phase of RBI's implementation of XBRL, we have partnered with TCS because it's a much larger project that includes hardware and many other things which we don't do. So the system indication done by TCS while the XBRL component has been provided by us. But RBI has also added one more data standard called SDMX into this whole grind. So we've been -- we understand SDMX quite well. So we've been building a business around data standards. So if you believe that the world of data can be powered only if there's an underlying set of data standards, we're extremely well positioned to be able to take advantage of that. And increasingly, it will be SaaS driven. Now there will be regulators who will not like cloud-based solutions. But majority of regulators will actually also like cloud-based solutions for the simplicity it offers as long as issues like data security are taken care of. At the same time, in the regulatory world, while people in principle, do long-term contracts, if I made a mistake, I could be thrown out immediately. So customers are very, very sticky. And customers stay with you as long as you don't make a mistake and you're able to meet their compliance requirements on time every time. So I think we're in the right place. I think we are on the cusp of a turnaround. I think we started turning around last year. I think we did well this year. I hope the trend continues. I hope the pandemic ends soon because I think the pandemic certainly will have an impact on how fast we grow going forward because in many countries, they've still not come back to work. In many countries, they've come back to work partially. I think those are all good things. I think the U.S. coming back to work is very good news for us. The U.S. is also a market which can be tapped sitting out of India, unlike Europe, where it's much more difficult. The conversion rates are much, much lower. So we are building an inside sales team to be able to tap into the U.S. market for the FERC reporting as well as SEC reporting and other kinds of reporting. We have a person on the ground in the U.S. There will be a significant amount of focus on the U.S. in terms of making it happen. And the products that we have are repurposeable for different kinds of compliance requirements. And that's what we're trying to do, take advantage of literally. I'm going to stop in. I can go on and on for the next 2 hours. I don't want to do that because it's a subject of great interest to us. And I'm happy to take any questions that you have at this point in time.

Thank you, Swami; thank you, Balu; and thank you, Deepta for your opening remarks. [Operator Instructions] Okay. So the first question is from the line of [ Rohit ].

First, let to convey my condolences of -- on having lost people in the pandemic. It's been a difficult time and my condolences to all of you.

Little louder, if you don't mind. I'm sorry, little louder?

Is it better now?

Much better, much better. Thank you.

Yes. Sorry. Yes. So I was just saying that I just want to first convey my condolences to you, it's not easy to lose people, and this pandemic has been difficult on all of us. My first question is on Europe. We have done a spectacular performance in Europe. But I would -- I mean, I was wondering if you tend to have more details. How many customers -- I mean, with regards to ESMA ESEF filing, how many customers have we won up till March 31? And what is the average revenue per customer that we are earning over there?

[ Rohit ], can you tell us where you're from?

Yes. Sorry. I am a shareholder in the business. I'm based out of Mysore.

Okay. I just wanted to be careful that I don't have a competitor on the call. I have to worry about things again. Deepta, you want to take the question? Deepta or Balu?

Balu, I'll leave it to you to take the question.

Okay. Sure. Sure. So we don't normally give very precise numbers when it comes to companies and average yield. There are certain competitive significance to it. But let me say that we have around, say, 150 customers in the market at this point of time and the revenue yield, it varies a bit based on the size of the customer and the kind of the nature of the contract, there are certain parameters there. But I would say that it would be somewhere between EUR 3,000 to EUR 5,000.

So [ Rohit ], let me add to what Balu said by answering the question slightly differently, which will give you a better idea. When you look at the compliance filing, we have companies filing to ROC, and the pricing there typically is anything between $150 to $300, $400 per filing. And that happens once a year. In the capital market filing, typically, the pricing is anything from $3,000 to $5,000 at the lower end of about $10,000, $12,000 on the higher end. We have 2 models that we follow. We have partners to whom we do a transfer price and then they do a markup, in which case, we don't do the pricing. In some cases, we do a revenue share with the partner, in which case, we know the pricing. So when you look at the total revenues from the cloud offerings, you have the ROC customers who, depending on the country, could be anything from $150 to $300 to $400 per filing to the SEC customers and the FERC customers and other customers who could pay anything from the $3,000 to $5,000 to $10,000 to $15,000, depending on what we're talking about. So putting it all together into 1 churn is often very difficult. And I know you asked about EU. Even on the EU, for example, there are differential pricing depending on which markets you're from. The capacity to pay and the ability to pay in countries like Germany and France are very different from the East European countries. And therefore, we do horses for courses, and we recognize this when we do our pricing.

That was very helpful, sir. So broadly, I understood the horses for courses bit. So it would broadly be, let's say, between $3,000 to $10,000 -- EUR 3,000 to EUR 10,000 am I right -- in euros in EU, right?

Absolutely.

Yes. Great. So following the next question is also...

But please don't do a simple multiplication of number of customers because very often, there are many factors that go into it. Also I'll tell you one thing, [ Rohit ], this thing is very important. Because of the pandemic, we launched an initiative that we called India Cares, where for small caps, we offered the solution for free for 1 year with no conditions attached. Many of them have signed up for 3 years, but first year was free. So it's traditional. It's normal in the cloud-based solution model to offer a freemium -- take a freemium approach where you offer it free for 1 year in the hope the customer stays with you longer. So it's a fairly complicated structure, which is why coming up with one single number will end up being misleading.

Yes. I did read your letter on LinkedIn on the India Cares initiative, and I thought it was a great initiative, to be honest, and kudos on that. The reason I asked a little bit of detail on Europe is because -- I mean you mentioned we've had to speak with some of the customers. it...

You have to speak louder. You have to speak louder, please.

Sorry. Can you hear me?

Yes. Much better.

Yes. So my next question is, again, on Europe. You mentioned you have 6% market share. So could we have more details how many -- so question number one here is, how many companies in Europe have to do the filing for sure by next year? How many have already done it so far?

So there are 4,500 companies in Europe, of which about 1,000 are from the U.K. where the mandate has not gone live so far. That leaves 3,000. Out of the 3,000 companies, many companies are from countries where the mandate is still not operational. In the countries where the mandate is operational, in the countries where we have tried to do, we have an effective market share, about 6% to 6.5%. So that's the broad lay of the land. And given the success that we had in these countries, we are confident that we can continue -- it's not unexpected -- it won't be difficult. We know how to get to that kind of number. And we are hoping to do the right things to get to that kind of number. This is not a forward-looking statement, which is basically saying, I want to finish my marathon in less than 5 years, which I have never done my life, but that's how my next marathon goes.

Sure. Again, if you could give us a broad idea of how many companies in Europe have already shifted -- off the 3,000 ex UK that you mentioned, how many have already shifted as on 31st March and how many are still to shift?

I don't have aggregate numbers right now. I will try and get the numbers, but the reason is you see many good companies have gone into what's called voluntary filing. So you need to combine voluntary filing along with mandatory filing, when we try and put something together and have it sent to you.

Great. That was helpful. And on GST, could you help us -- I mean, with the similar details that we discussed in Europe, what is the average -- I mean how is the pricing structure there? What is the average pricing, et cetera? And has E-invoicing added a lot to the revenue per customer that we are earning there?

Balu?

Sir, the second question first, if you look at the E-invoicing part, the E-invoicing would have added maybe about, I would say, about a 50% to the top line compared to the previous year. So that has helped quite a bit. The E-invoicing and the competition is even more fierce because it is from a solution complexity point of view, maybe it is less complex. Of course, it is much more critical. But the reconciliation module is not really important there. So there's a lot of competition. So average yield per customer would have come down if we look at the E-invoicing and combine that with the overall customer base. So if you want to look at how much would be our -- we don't disclose the GST revenues separately. We haven't done that so far. But if you look at the average revenue we could get from enterprise, for example, it could be something be INR 1 lakhs to INR 2 lakhs. That was again very small companies as well because we do get small companies, some of them come to us because of reputation because of the parent is using us. So we have many small companies which have come to our fold especially from certain sectors, such as logistics, during the E-invoicing period, which started from October 2021.

So, [ Rohit ], a joke that's floating around on the GST space among the vendors is that very soon, you will get free GST filing coupons with your morning -- with your Kellog's cereals. It's quite possible. That's the way the market's headed.

Okay. Understood, sir. That was helpful. I'll ask one more question on collect and then I'll get back to the queue for other participants to ask. Just curious to know, one, how do you -- how is the outlook, let's say, the coming year and the next year in the collect business? And second, I was also curious to know, is our project with RBI that we did, one with TCS, has the entire revenue flowed into our P&L already? Or there is still more to go over the next -- and how -- in what time will it flow into our P&L?

So the outlook for the collect business next year is a function of how the regulators think. And I think it's only now that many of them are started coming back to their offices. So I do not have any information available to tell you how that will pan out. As far as the RBI is concerned, yes, there is still a fair amount of headroom available, and there is still some revenues to flow into the company on account of the RBI implementation.

So will it be over 2 years? Will it be over 3 years? Is there anything you can say about that?

I think it will be over the next 12 months.

The next question comes from the line of [ Sajeesh VS ].

I'm a retail investor. I work in TCS, too. I started with the company since the IPO, and I have been an investor since last year. My question is regarding Credixo. So is it like a credit bureau, something like the likes of CIBIL TransUnion?

No. It's not. It's simply APIs that fetch data that goes into your digital lending platform. Since we are a GSP, or what's called the GST Suvidha provider, we have the right to fetch data from the GST servers for powering with consent, for powering digital lending platforms.

Okay. So now one more question is that, is it correct if I say that the create segment really offer higher areas of growth than the collect segment because you only have around 200 countries in the world. And regulators -- the number of regulators are also limited. And so what percentage of the total pie in the world has adopted XBRL?

So 70 countries in each country, about 4, 5. I'm glad you asked this question, but let me tell you what's happening in India right now, which I think is a useful indicator. So India, for example, Bombay Stock Exchange was the first to implement it, followed by RBI, followed by ROC. Very recently, IRDA has started implementing XBRL. And very recently, because RBI has issued a certain circular, NHB has started looking at XBRL. So the moment 1 regulator does it, others do it. In every country in the world, 1, 2, 3, 4 regulators have done it. In every country, there are about 5 to 10 regulators who could potentially implement XBRL. So 70 countries, if there are 10 regulators per country, that's 700 regulators. But only less than half of them have actually implemented it. I think the conservative estimates are that 180 regulators in the world have today gone down the XBRL router. So if you say there are 200 countries and 2,000 regulators, 180 is a very small number, only 10% of the regulators, but 70 countries. But as you can imagine, the smaller countries where you may not be able to make as much money will be the ones still waiting to implement it. But there are some very large companies as well. We also believe that the use case for XBRL will also expand. So there's still significant amount of headroom. But to answer your other question as to whether create is where the action lies, in many countries, create is seeing a lot of action. And since we are 1 of 2 companies with a global solution, with a cloud-based solution and so on and so forth, we are well positioned to capture market share. It's easier to do it in markets where the mandate is just starting as opposed to markets where there are entrenched players, which is why I'm saying it's more difficult to get SEC customers than to get FERC customers. But we are optimistic, but your point is well taken that create is where significant growth will happen going forward, and that's also largely cloud and SaaS.

And one more question that I know that our business is highly seasonal, that I mean, we report the financial results 2x in a year. Is there any plan to go to the main board platform in BSE or NSE?

So once you finish class 4, you have to go to class 5, you can't stay back in class 4.

The next question comes from the line of [ Manan Patel ].

Can you hear me, sir?

Yes, Manan, I can.

Sir, I'm Manan. I'm an individual investor. So I wanted to ask about the opportunity size that your company has. While you mentioned that X billion is the current Regtech market, and it will go to INR 16 billion. But I understand we will not address the entire isle. So what kind of size of the market are we looking at? And adjacent question is, you mentioned there are 4 competitors for you. I would like to understand the size of those competitors.

So the 4 competitors, Fujitsu is a very big company where XBRL is a very small division for them. So looking at the Fujitsu's big numbers is not meaningful. As far as Vizor is concerned, Invoke and CoreFiling are concerned, they're all around the $10 million, GBP 10 million, EUR 10 million range. They're not much bigger than us. And as far as the addressable market is concerned, I think the market is big enough to support any growth that we may aspire to. So the question is, can we grow at 5% a year? Absolutely. Can we grow 100% a year? The market is big enough to accommodate that. Can we grow 200% year? The market is begin to accommodate that. What will be limiting is our ability. What would be limiting is our resources. What would be limiting is our vision. So I think the market's big enough to accommodate any aspiration that we have. But at the same time, because we can only chew off as much as we can digest. And that's what we're trying to do. So market's big enough.

Understood. Sir, if market is...

When you're a small company, a INR 55 crore company, I think talking about a $15 billion market is actually meaningless. But we just want to give you -- it's like looking at the sky and saying, "Well, the plane flies to the sky." I mean it doesn't need to fly to the sky. It just needs to figure out what we can do profitably to ensure that our shareholders' aspirations are met. I'm also a shareholder. I'm also a shareholder. So absolutely.

Sir, adjacent to the question along with that would be, you said your vision might be the limiting factor. So I would like to understand over next the 3 to 5 years, what kind of vision do we have? Because opportunity size is huge, competition is also manageable sort of. So what kind of vision do we have for the company?

When we were a loss-making company, I couldn't look beyond my notes, and that's what it was like 2 years ago. Now we are profitable. Now we are throwing up cash. Now that we're throwing up cash, the possibilities are much, much more. And therefore, we do have serious desires in the world. How much of it will materialize? The -- the competition [Foreign Language], even they are here to try and do something, some turbo stuff of in the market. So for that -- which is why I believe that now that we are throwing up cash, we are much better -- we are in a much better position to try and grow faster than we were 2 years ago.

Right. And sir, while the size of our cash flow has improved substantially. So do you think you would go approach debt or capital markets to significantly, like, take a quantum leap in terms of your -- in the size of the company for growth of investing in Europe or U.S.?

If there is one thing we have learned as a company in the last 10 years is that money is not everything. We've been starving as a company. And we have done -- we've gone to a place where we're very happy. I think throwing money at it does not guarantee results. So will we create significant amount of money or even a smaller amount money to grow to the next level? The answer is no. At the same time, if somebody wants to come and say, you know what, I'll give you $1 billion value or give you $1 billion valuation and give you this money? Sure. I think it's worth taking it because the shareholder will also benefit from that. So I think it's really we have learned how to grow in a very frugal manner, and we will try to continue to grow in a frugal fashion.

Understood.

This is Balu here. I just want to add here from a funding point of view. You mentioned about competition. Competition, you said, might not be that intense, which might not be the truth because the AI is picking up, the segment is picking up. And we do see combinations coming in from adjacent areas as the market unfolds. So we need to be prepared for that.

And one more thing Balu, which I think we should also add, our biggest global competitor in the area created a company called Workiva. It's an extraordinary company. It's a brilliant company. If you should look at the company, you look at the company and the company's performance, and you see what they have done. They came in, they disrupted the U.S. market and walked away with a giant market share. And that is the company to emulate. If there's one company that I want to follow, it's Workiva. So please take a look at Workiva, look at their financial performance and look at what they've actually done. They have done magic.

Understood. And sir, so my last question is in terms of a company like us, a very important part of assets is the employees. And you said throwing money is not the only thing. But obviously, having great employees is one thing. So I wanted to understand, with the size that we have, what kind of ability do we have to attract talent? And how do we incentivize them to stay with us?

So recently, we recruited a CTO who used to be at Accenture for many years. So we are able to attract good people. See, ultimately, people go to successful companies, people go to companies, which are on a growth path. And what we have demonstrated in the last few years is that we've turned around. So we were a KPO, we were a services company. We pivoted to products. Now we've pivoted to SaaS. And people like things like this. People want to be at the cutting-edge of growth. People want to grow. People have aspirations, and people want to be part of a company that's growing. So we are hopeful that we will be able to attract much better people going forward, not that we have bad people, we have great people today in the company. It also allows people within the company to have a growth path in their own careers. So we are able to attract people. Yes.

Understood. And sir, related to this, I...

That's the last question. That's last question because there are parties waiting as well.

Yes. Just if I can finish this question please.

Sure.

So I was going through your annual report, which is brilliant for the size of the company we are, very good disclosures. In that, we have payables to promoter directors amounting to INR 1.6 crores, which essentially means that you and your fellow promoter directors have not taken salary in cash or it's still outstanding. So I wanted to understand why is that?

It is still outstanding. The reason why the company is at this stage today where it's growing is because the promoters and many employees have made tremendous sacrifices. In fact, not only promoter directors, even employees are owed money. And we have committed to clear off all the dues in the next 1 year. And I have not been taking a salary since 2015. And I will not take a salary until every rupee of every employee is cleared. So the dues that you see there is because of salaries owed to us. We are -- and I think it's because of sacrifices made by my colleagues that we are as strong as we are today.

I hope you get every -- is compensated in the...

No, no, I just want my salary back. I don't need more than that.

The next question is from the line of [ Girish ].

Individual investor for the last 2.5 years. First of all, my condolences for your personal loss.

Thank you.

Swami, one question, maybe more directed towards Deepta. Last time in the November con call, you did explain about the FERC opportunity. What I want to understand is, are you able to reuse any of your existing products like Carbon or one of those? Or do you need to create a completely brand-new product for FERC?

It's a simple question, which even I can answer. It's same Carbon. Carbon is used for everything. It's the same product. The only thing that we need to do is the nature of the filing will be different. So the forms will be different. Therefore, we have -- so Carbon can consume multiple taxonomies. And that's one of the beauties of Carbon. Carbon can also consume taxonomies in multiple languages. So Deepta, I took the question because it's very simple to answer. Do you want to add to it, Deepta?

So I think Swami has answered the question. It's IRIS Carbon itself, which is being used for the FERC opportunity, too. So in fact, what happens is companies in the U.S. that need to comply both with the FERC mandate and the SEC mandate can use the same product for dual filing. And we have this kind of situation in many markets. So ESMA ESEF filers that are also listed in the U.S. and need to do dual filing use the same product Carbon for both filings. It can consume taxonomies easily, and therefore, it's used across multiple mandates.

So Carbon can be used for ROC filing. Carbon can be used for capital market filing, Carbon can be used for FERC filing. Carbon can be used for German filing. Carbon can be used for Hindi filing.

Swami, does it also mean that companies like Workiva, who is well entrenched in SEC filing can come quite easily to FERC then?

Workiva is a competitor in FERC. Of course, they are. And they're a very meaningful -- very strong competitor in FERC. But what we have done is we have tied up with one of the outstanding companies in the space. So the whole XBRL movement in the U.S. was led by a guy called Hudson Hollister, who now runs a company called HData. And for those of you who wonder how many people it takes to change the world, you should really check this guy out. He's actually single-handedly changed the world in America by bringing a level of transparency, which is not there before. hdata.us is their website. They are our partners. And HData is led by Hudson, who made XBRL happen. And that gives us tremendous advantage in the U.S. markets. So yes, Workiva would be a very strong competitor, and we're completely mindful of that. But working with Hudson, we believe we have a significant opportunity in the American markets for FERC and thereafter, for SEC.

So my next question is more on the consume side. Last time, you mentioned that we can expect some announcements on the consume side. But I've not seen anything. Anything you have still work in progress? Or is it delayed? Just some follow-on...

I think it's still work in progress, it is still work in progress. And I think it's -- if you look at the numbers of the company over the last 3, 4 years, our losses were because of the investments made in the consumer segment. So -- but at the same time, we found that the market and by and large, investors, we have a complicated business. When you have a complicated business, it's important to keep it -- so people say, you know what, profit can make it through, our plea can make it through. So we said, consumer is still a very important segment. And we need to figure out what to do with the consumer segment. But we have launched [ Adexo ], which is a consumer segment product. We have launched Peridot, which is a consumer segment product. And you can expect more products to come going forward. We have some ideas. We are working on a few things. But at the same time, it will be a function of how much cash we can throw up quickly to reinvest in the consumer segment.

So it will be more like an APA-based economy that you're targeting?

Absolutely right. Absolutely right. Absolutely right. There will be products, but there'll also be APA-basing, feeding into end use. Feeding into intermediaries you can then serve end users.

Right. I happened to see that you had some APAs in the infinite.im site. What exactly is it you're targeting there?

No idea about that is. Balu, do you know?

This must be the [indiscernible]. Am I right? This is in the -- you're talking from an Indian context?

From an Indian context. Yes, I saw it...

The NPC, the National Payment Corporation is starting a APA kind of exchange. We offer some APAs as well. This must be related to that. We have been offering our APAs, especially ESG data, public APAs to a number of digital lenders and marketplaces.

Yes, I happen to see it together with like Ujjivan Bank trying to get to this?

Yes, yes.

We have a follow-on from the line of [ Rohit ].

I just have a couple of follow-up questions on Europe. I noticed that recently, there is a CSRD directive that mandates ESG disclosure in Europe in XBRL. So what does this mean for -- when will it be implemented? By what time period? And what does it mean for us in terms of market size?

Balu?

Anyway, Deepta is better placed, but I can give my 2 bits as well. So these are very important. ESG, it has come at the right time. The ESG reporting in Europe used to be earlier done through the paper PDF mode. And that is for a limited number of companies, what is called the NFRD, directive -- Non-Financial Reporting Directive. Now the EU has come together and are looking at the next phase of reporting from an ESG perspective and expanded the universe to a minimum of 50,000 companies, which includes both public and nonpublic companies. That's one part. Other part is very clearly, unequivocally saying that -- unambiguously saying that this reporting would be to be in an in-line XBRL format, similar to what is being done for the ESMA companies' financial report. So both financial and non-financial reporting will come together in an interactive reporting format for ESG. The other important part is ESG reporting would need to be auditable as well. So a company which are going to report, say, on carbon emissions for plan A or plan B will need to make sure that really is maintained and is original. So all in all, I think it's a very ambitious directive. This would take a couple of years to fortify. Our sense is that companies will start looking at it from 2024 onwards. But the very stark timelines are yet to come. But the direction is very clear. This is going to be not just reporting in a big way. So there's going to be a taxonomy which is going to be developed by the newly constituted international Sustainability Reporting Board, which is analogous to IRIS before audit account reporting. So they will come with a taxonomy, and there is also a move to converge a few independent bodies in this space together. So we have one place where the data that is simplified is very clearly defined along with that electronic attributes. And that's what -- not only countries in Europe, we expect something happening from SEC in the next year. And this should also move into Asia as well. The green financing aspect is linked to ESG reporting. So there -- these are 2 sides to the same coin. So this is exciting. And this is an area wherein corporate reporting XBRL is going to play a bigger growth.

Rohit, the other message I want you to carry away from this green, from the ESG thing is the following: every country where XBRL has been implemented is now looking at using XBRL for any new reporting. So there are countries where you will soon see IPO documents being filed in XBRL. Don't be surprised it happens soon. Don't be surprised if we see fund documents filed in XBRL. So the XBRL mandate is actually expanding gradually all over the world. I'm glad you raised the ESG thing, surmising -- talking about it. So the opportunity on account of this new filings will all come from XBRL, and that's where we are extremely well placed. And Carbon is one product that can take on everything.

Was a very detailed and very helpful answer. My follow-up question is on U.K.. As you mentioned, there are 1,000 companies in U.K. So what is the XBRL filing status there in the U.K.? And also, you mentioned in the last con call about HMRC where we already have some customers and we are seeing some progress. So could we speak about that as well?

So all ROC filings in the U.K. happen in XBRL. All tax filings in the U.K. happen in XBRL. The new mandate is basically capital market filings also need move to XBRL. That's the new mandate. So in the ROC filings, we still continue to retain a reasonable market share. We work with a partner who delivers customers to us, and they've been backing us, and that actually has grown. And we are now beginning to work with local partners to try and acquire customers for capital market filing as well.

So that is a 1,000 customer market that is available there, and even that has to be done by next year. Am I right?

The filing has to start from January onwards. And we now have people on the ground working on it. On the ground working out of India, but doing it.

So do we have a market share -- rough market share there?

Zero. The mandate has just come out. We actually are trying to sort of get started there. And I think with the lockdown happening in the U.K. more than once, things have been a bit slow. Within the first customers, we'll start signing up by about end of Q2 or Q3 this year, or beginning of Q3 this year.

Okay. So so far in U.K., nobody has signed up with anyone yet.

And nobody has filed either.

Okay. Great. Understood. That was helpful. And my last question is on so -- I mean, one, I was surprised to see us throw so much cash because I expected -- I mean given we are a growing SaaS company to invest heavily in sales and marketing. So going forward, sales and marketing and R&D, how do you see that? I mean where do you see more of a cash investment? How much will that be? And how do you see this going forward?

So when you look at a lot of the SaaS companies coming out of Chennai, they're addressing markets of a different variety and their approach to whole sales and marketing is very different. We work extensively with partners in different countries, especially because we can't get in front of customers. Compliance is a very serious business where customers like a CEO face before they actually sign up a queue. So one of the ways in which we kept our sales and marketing costs under control is by leaving significant revenue share for our partners. By leaving significant revenue share for our partners and supporting them through marketing collateral that we deliver from India, our marketing spend has actually been kept under check. When you look at companies like Workiva, they are driven significantly by the marketing spend. They're able to acquire customers also because of that in the U.S. markets. But our approach has been cut your cloth according to your size, work with partners.

Will that be the same going forward? Or as we saw you appointing 2 people in Europe, 1 in U.S., you see yourself appointing more and more people on the ground.

It will be a blend. It will be a blend.

Understood. So could we maybe in future, in the presentation, also share these partners we have in each of the geographies that we work in?

Sure. Sure, we can do that. We can do that. Yes. We can do that.

We have a follow-up from the line of [ Manan Patel ].

Can you hear me, sir?

Yes.

Sir, I wanted to understand, this year, our collect revenue fell down and along with it, receivables also came down. While collect is a receivables-heavy business, so I wanted to understand what kind of receivable days are sustainable going forward?

Balu?

See if you look at the numbers for this year, you'll see that our receivables are at about 85 days. So my target is to bring it down to 75 days going forward. If you take maybe a year or 2, I think that is similarly doable with higher revenues coming from the create segment. And maybe even further down the line, maybe in another 3, 4 years, it could be even much less.

Even if the collect segment bounces back after the pandemic?

That's right.

Understood. And sir, my last question is with significant AI capabilities and, like, software is available, which can read PDF, so can they disrupt our business in any way -- or I might not know more technologies, but I wanted to understand, are there other things that can come up, which can disrupt or lead data directly from PDF and file it with the regulator. So are there any risks like that, which can obsolete our business?

In a world where man can send man's craft to the moon, in a world where we can send Mars Rovers and monitor them from here. One can never rule out any possibility. But every company, which gets into a certain space keeps adapting constantly to ensure that it has a growth story. I was watching a BBC serial some years ago, where it said that every company reinvents itself every 20 years. We are very mindful of that. We started as a company with myiris.com with the information portal. We then said, let's go back into data standards. We metamorphosed -- we transformed into a software company. Now we started with a KPO, then we went into products. So companies that recognize the right -- see the writing on the wall keep modifying it so that they stay relevant in the market. And I'm hoping that we do the same.

[Operator Instructions]

Diwakar, somebody called, [ Gaurav Singh ], says how do you ask a question?

You can go ahead and ask a question before [ Rohit ] does.

This is [ Gaurav ] from [indiscernible] Capital. I wasn't expected to so sort of unmute. Sorry for the delay. I missed the initial bit of the presentation. So pardon me if I'm repeating the question. So I just wanted to know what is the stickiness of once you sign up with the customer. What's the stickiness of your business -- because it's a SaaS model, what's the stickiness?

Unless I screw up or offer it for free to the customer, the stickiness is very, very high. If you see, we've only been growing the number of companies who are signing up with us. We haven't lost a company yet, touch wood, and I hope it stays that way. Also, we have not had the SaaS offerings long enough to come up with data in terms of customer churn. The big risk that we actually see, Gaurav, and I think it's a great question to ask, and I'll tell you why. ROC filings happen once a year. And it's quite possible that by the end of the following year, people forgot which software they actually use, it's a once-a-year filing. So the need to stay abreast with the customer and stay in touch with the customers is fairly high. Fortunately, we've not lost customers. We have lost a few here and there, but nothing significant for us to worry about. So the stickiness as of now is fairly high.

And what's the cross-sell opportunities like once you sign up with the customer, probably in the U.K. and the U.S. So what's the cross-sell opportunities like?

Again, a great question. See there are different kinds of customers. ROC customers, the cross-sell opportunities are very different from the capital market customers. In the capital market situation, for example, there's something called MiFID II that's come up in Europe, which requires companies to look at Investor Relations very differently, where we see some opportunities. So there are some cross-sell opportunities and like the example I just gave you. In the case of ROC, for example, in certain markets, we combine ROC data with, for example, in India, with the GST data that can spur digital lending. So there are some possibilities. And we are mindful of that. But at the same time, for that to happen, certain other systems and other things in the ecosystem have actually got to fall in place.

And what if you were to sort of sell all your pseudo-products to a particular customer in a country like Europe, what ticket size you'll be able to generate on a SaaS or revenue basis per customer?

I have never done the calculation, therefore, I don't have an answer to the question offhand.

And one final question. What's your competitive advantage since you're working out of India? Is there some competitive advantage you have vis-à-vis all your competitors will be working out of Europe?

Significant, cost. Cost is a significant competition -- significant advantage. Also the fact that there's one -- an example. So we recently acquired a company in South America who want to do a filing locally, who also needs to do filing in the U.S. So Carbon can address both possibilities. And these are the advantages that we actually see. So we're able to offer one platform, the question that somebody asked earlier, do you need to have a different product for a different filing? The answer is with minor repurposing, Carbon can deal with multiple things, and people like to have one platform for multiple things. Diwakar, there are a couple of questions at the chat box, can I take them?

Yes, sure. Yes.

So [ Rishab ], you asked the question about status of migration to SME and BSE main board. You also asked why do you have to pass the resolution again. Well, the last year, we had a resolution passed for BSE migration. The reason we did not do it at that point in time is because we are changing the auditors. Our strategy at the end of 10 years have to move on to a different auditor. And we basically said that now that we have moved to Ind AS, let's give the strategy a little time to settle down before we actually move. Because audit is a very important role in terms of conversion of the accounts to Ind AS, which is now happening. And -- but the resolution was valid for 1 year, which is the reason why we had to take a resolution again to get the permission from the Directors -- from the shareholders. Now after that, there's still a process to be followed. The process includes submitting the documents to the stock exchange for their approval. That typically, I think, takes about 1 month or so. But we've initiated the Ind AS conversion, working with the auditors right now. So once these things happen, we hope things then will come to -- will come to a situation where we can migrate? That's [ Rishab's ] question. The question from [ Rahul ]. I think the bulk of the customers actually came from the U.K., we had a significant jump. South Africa, we had a significant jump. We actually had a jump in many different markets across the world. So we've actually done well in South Africa. We've done very well in Europe. We've got significant number of customers in the U.K. as well. Significant number of customers in India, also for GST, also for ROC. All in all, all around, there has been significant improvement. The only market where the growth was still very modest, where we went from 6 customers to 15 customers, was the U.S. where we are hopeful that we can take it to a much larger number. One second. The other question from [ Rahul ], I'm reading it. I understand that these are pay-per-use product. Can you quantify how much of the realizations have increased in usage? [ Rahul ], these are once a year usage. And so it's not really -- it's not that they use it every day. They use it once a year. But the bulk of the growth in the case of our create business has actually been from Carbon and from GST more than from iDEAL. So if you're basically saying is Carbon the reason why it's increased significantly? The answer is yes. And those are the questions so far. Yes, [ Rohit ] has a question.

My question is on R&D. So you mentioned that Workiva, and I did spend some time on Workiva and IssueDirect. And I noticed that they have moved -- I mean XBRL is probably one of the most basic things they provide. And they have moved on to a lot of other pseudo-software where they offer much more value-added services to the customers and thereby, increasing stickiness and the yield per customer. So do we have -- I mean how big is the product pipeline? You mentioned, we've hired a CTO from Accenture. So could you speak about the R&D and the product development pipeline going forward?

Just a small correction. We hired a CTO who used to be at Accenture then started his own startup, which even folded the start-up and joined us. So he didn't come directly from Accenture. Just so that you know. My point was that he came from Accenture. And therefore, we are able to attract good people like that. That's number one. Number two, in terms of value-added products, just like others have a disclosure platform, we also have a disclosure platform, which we have not launched in a big way in Europe just yet. To do complicated products requires that you win the trust of the customer. And requiring -- that's the first step to -- once you have the trust of the customer, you can pretty much sell multiple things to him. It's also important to have retail street. You can't sell complicated product. You can't sell an airplane sitting in India on the phone. You can't sell disclosure platform in India on the phone. You need to have somebody on the ground. So it's been a slow, arduous process. Maybe Deepta, can you just answer the question about the disclosure platform?

Sure. So on the R&D side, you talked about, right, [ Rohit ]. So one thing -- the one thing that we're doing is Carbon is a SaaS product. It has, like, a basic disclosure management platform. So disclosure management essentially allows people to collaborate and create reports, right, not just XBRL-ize them, if I can call it that. And the disclosure management platform is being used in a limited way at this point in time. So one of the big focus areas is actually getting a comprehensive disclosure management platform in, that's one of our targets for this year, which will also mean that if we are able to upsell the disclosure management platform to our existing customer base, Carbon will also start getting used on a more even basis, not only for -- not only during filing time basically. So that's one, let me call it, big area of focus. There's also a lot of other projects which are on -- in the area of automation. So automation, I think somebody asked about, like, the complexities of XBRL, and would there be ways that people can hide it. And that's something that we ourselves are working towards, to bring in more automation to make it easier and simpler on the margin. The third is, of course, working across kind of consuming different kinds of formats basically. So it's not only XBRL as an output, but other output formats that we see being required and other input formats. So there's a couple of, like, R&D pieces -- some clear R&D pieces going on apart from the whole range of product enhancements.

And [ Rohit ], to answer your question about where you will get the presentation, it will be posted on our website and also filed with the Bombay Stock Exchange. What's fascinating for me is that we have 62 participants on this call and not long ago our market cap was about INR 77 crores. So I'm grateful to every one of you for being on the call, and it puts things into perspective in some ways. [ Rohit ], did I interrupt you? [ Gaurav Singh ] wants to be unmuted, Diwakar.

So just wanted to know, since you're into the SaaS business. So there's a fixed cost that you're working with basically more and above every which everything sort of goes down to the bottom line. So since you have not taken any salaries for the past few years, so once you onboard all of that, what's the fixed cost that you're working with on that front?

The fact -- Gaurav, the fact that I'm not getting a salary doesn't mean it's not provided for. It's provided for in the book's expense every year. I'm just not taking the money from a cash flow point of view, which had an impact on cash flow and not the expense for the company. It's fully provided for.

Okay. And one final question since you sort of accrued a lot of cash this year. So what's your stated growth target since you've been sort of -- as far as the top line is concerned, okay, there's some bit of the fact that the on-premises business or the non-SaaS business was quite heavy. So the SaaS business didn't show up as much on the revenue side, right? And the total revenue sort of was looking a little different optically. So now that SaaS is probably 70% of your overall top line and it will show up now in the forthcoming future, what's your stated growth targets with the cash that you have and the marketing dollars that we have to do and more specifically with that?

A small correction, when I say 71% recurring revenues, it has 2 components to it. It has a SaaS component to it, and it also has a component that's not SaaS, which is also recurring. So there are multiple kinds of recurring revenues. Significant portion is SaaS that's a fact. Number one. Number two, as far as now that we're generating cash, small companies can grow at any percentage you talk about and it's actually meaningless to talk about percentage when you talk about small companies. So I think our focus going forward will be the U.S. market in a big way and the EU market in a big way. And also to see sort of -- we are at the mercy of a regulator when it comes to their priorities from the point of view of launching an XBRL or some other disclosure platform. That, we cannot really predict. But we see opportunities in America. We see opportunities in Europe, and we see opportunities in a couple of other places, which is what we're going to focus on going forward. [ Rahul ], you were talking about which annual report, reported of last year perhaps or 2 years ago. I don't know annual report you're talking about [ Rahul ]. What's in the annual report, has 1,200 users, I'm not sure what it says there. Okay. FY '20 had 1,200 annual customers. It suddenly goes 6,095, excellent question. So when we contract with customers, for example, especially, for example, in Europe, we have several partners. The partners contract with customers and over the last 1 year, you actually started getting into tripartite customers with the -- tripartite agreement with the customers, so their customers are as much our customers as the other partner. For example, South Africa. The big jump has actually come from South Africa. So South Africa, we have a partner called XDS, who we've been partners with for a number of years. And while there are certain customers who XDS has given to us, we've also got customers who we hooked through XDS to get into Africa. Those -- so we've now started now started recognizing every one of them as our customers and not just our partners. And that is the reason why you will see a significant jump. In addition to this, we've also added customers of almost about -- so like-for-like, if you actually compare, we've added about 1,700, 1,800 customers this year. So when you said 1,200 the previous annual report, that 1,200 and has to be seen in the context of 6,095 minus 1,200 -- minus 1,800. That's the like-for-like comparison. Thank you, [ Rahul ], for pointing it out.

So Rohit here, just one last question, if I may.

Yes, please.

I'm not very clear, still on the pricing model in the GST product that we have. So could you explain that?

It depends on the number of GSTINs that the company has. It depends on number of invoices that the company is to file. It depends on the complexity of the filing. It depends on how often they need to raise invoices. So we have a fairly detailed model that we use into which we plug-in all the data per company and out comes a certain price. And finally, after we come up with a price, the customer will still negotiate it downward and lower it.

Swami, there are no other participants in the queue. You're closing comments, please?

Sure. I mean, I want to thank everyone of you for participating in this. [ Rohit ] are you still there?

Yes, sir.

So I have a question for you now. May I?

Yes, please.

So I recently had an exchange with 2 sets of investors. And I am left flummoxed. So one investor who came into the company at a price of INR 12, said, great company, you've given us 6 [ bagger ]. Another investor who bought at INR 79 said [Foreign Language]. As a promoter, as the CEO of the company, I'm focused only on fundamentals. I'm mindful of the price, I see what the price is, but I'm mindful of the fundamentals. How do I -- which investor do I serve? Do I serve the investor who got a 6 [ bagger ]? Or do I serve the investor who's lost money because the price actually went down? Or do I basically say, sorry, you know what, I stay focused on fundamentals. Now what should I do, [ Rohit ]?

I mean sir, I mean, I can speak only for the way I think. And so I generally look at companies that are well-run for a period of 4 to 5 years at least as a holding period. So the short-term can never be predicted. You can't predict very short movements of prices because you can't predict the behavior and the emotions of investors. You can -- as you say, focus on the long-term fundamentals of the company. And as long as you're doing right over a 5, 7-year horizon, that's the best thing that can happen for all shareholders in my opinion.

So is the answer to my shareholder, saying, that I focus only on fundamentals, is that the correct answer?

I focus on growing the company for the next 5 to 7 years or 10 years. That's what I'm thinking the best answer.

That's all I do. I don't think -- as a company internally, internally, for example, I don't have a trading account. So as a company internally, we basically focus only on fundamentals. We are mindful of the stock price. We are mindful of returns of shareholders, but at the same time, our focus is only on improving company fundamentals.

That's the answer I'd love to hear from any company we've invested into.

Balu, any closing comments before we close?

No, except we would like to express our gratitude for the people who have come for this open forum and listened patiently to what we have to say. And raising questions. So that's a very meaningful discussion. Thank you again.

And again, last word from me, if I may. I really am grateful to every one of you for spending as much time as you've done. It's almost 93 minutes since we started the call. I warned Diwakar that our calls go very long and that we get more people than we've seen in many, many larger companies. And I think that our experience in the market may either get a few more SaaS companies coming in or not coming in. So I basically -- I'm grateful that I went that we went public when you did. Many people have had comments about how small we were. We had no option but to go public at that point in time because our shareholders wanted it at that point in time. We're glad that we did it and the money that we raised, we've used it well to grow to where we are today. And that's where we are. So I'm grateful to you for your participation here. And feel free to ask any questions. I do -- I'm fairly active on Twitter. So I don't talk about company pricing and other things on Twitter. I talk about the company broadly in terms of announcements that we make. We also make filings on time to the Bombay Stock Exchange when something happens, something material happens. So once again, thank you very much, Diwakar. Do you want to close it?

No, that's fine. Thank you.

Thank you all. Bye-bye now. Be safe, stay safe.