K
Kfin Technologies Ltd
NSE:KFINTECH
Kfin Technologies Ltd
NSE:KFINTECH
Price:
967.5
INR
1.36%
Market Closed
Market Cap:
₹166.9B
Add Note
Add Target
Capture your thoughts and set a target
Decide at what price you'd be comfortable buying and we'll help you stay ready.
Based on
Margin of Safety
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
Your Price Target
Linked to
current price
· In Buy Zone
Loading
Note attached
Choose the stock you wish to monitor with a price target
Popular Picks
|
Johnson & Johnson
NYSE:JNJ
|
US |
|
Berkshire Hathaway Inc
NYSE:BRK.A
|
US |
|
Bank of America Corp
NYSE:BAC
|
US |
|
Mastercard Inc
NYSE:MA
|
US |
|
UnitedHealth Group Inc
NYSE:UNH
|
US |
|
Exxon Mobil Corp
NYSE:XOM
|
US |
|
Pfizer Inc
NYSE:PFE
|
US |
|
Nike Inc
NYSE:NKE
|
US |
|
Visa Inc
NYSE:V
|
US |
|
Alibaba Group Holding Ltd
NYSE:BABA
|
CN |
|
JPMorgan Chase & Co
NYSE:JPM
|
US |
|
Coca-Cola Co
NYSE:KO
|
US |
|
Verizon Communications Inc
NYSE:VZ
|
US |
|
Chevron Corp
NYSE:CVX
|
US |
|
Walt Disney Co
NYSE:DIS
|
US |
|
PayPal Holdings Inc
NASDAQ:PYPL
|
US |
Earnings Call Transcript
Earnings Call Recording
Other Earnings Calls
Ladies and gentlemen, good day and welcome to the Q4 and FY '25 Earnings Conference Call of KFin Technologies Limited. [Operator Instructions] I now hand the conference over to Mr. Devesh Agarwal from IIFL Capital Services Limited. Thank you, and over to you, sir.
Thank you, Steve. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the Q4 FY '25 Earnings Call of KFin Technologies Limited. Today from the company, we have with us Mr. Sreekanth Nadella, MD and CEO; Mr. Vivek Mathur, CFO, and Mr. Amit Murarka, Head of Global Business Finance, M&A and Investor Relations.
I would now hand over the call to Sreekanth for his opening remarks, which will be followed by a Q&A session. Thank you, and over to you, Sreekanth.
Thank you so very much, Devesh, and a very good morning and a warm welcome to all the listeners. It gives me great pleasure to be back once again in front of you calling out the financial performance of the organization. I'll give out some qualitative information beyond what is obviously visible. Your organization continues its resilient performance quarter after quarter. As the saying goes, tough times don't last but tough men do.
A quarter that saw a significant erosion on assets under management, maybe even to a certain extent, investor confidence in the overall market. KFintech continues to deliver to a resilient performance with its very diversified portfolio of solutions and services. We continue to maintain our position about risk management being one of the most effective strategies this organization has adopted and will continue to do so. Risk management from the standpoint of not being a single asset class, single country, single business process entity, but to diversify into multiple asset classes, multiple business processes and into multiple geographies. It is times like this that help the investors understand in terms of the power of the true diversification.
In terms of the overall financial highlights, the quarter that had gone by, our revenue from operations stood at roughly about INR 283 crores, up 24% year-on-year. Indian Mutual Fund business obviously has seen a slight degrowth quarter-on-quarter, but year-on-year, it continues to swell up. Overall, International and Investor Solutions growth has been around 16.5%. I will call out more specifically in terms of our consolidation of Global Business Solutions into this particular line of business, which was erstwhile mortgage business.
If not for the consolidation, our overall growth stands at about 27% and the overall full year growth of the international business stands at about 46%. Our EBITDA stands close to about INR 122 crores. It's up nearly 17% and a margin at about 43.2%. The PAT itself has been around INR 85 crores, and it's up about 14.5% and its margin remains at about 30% broadly. So, in terms of the overall quarterly performance, it's in relation to the -- whether it is the number of demat account reductions in the form of retail investors not necessarily staying put in the market or the mutual fund mark-to-market AUM erosion. As you could clearly see, the overall organization stood resilient in terms of the overall growth year-on-year. And even quarter-on-quarter, it is a minor dip of at about 2% in terms of revenue and similarly on the margins.
The full financial year highlights, of course, stand at about -- we crossed the INR 1,000 crore turnover threshold, close to about INR 1,100 crores, up nearly 30% year-on-year. And nearly every line of business has clocked about 30% growth, whether it is pensions or whether it is mutual funds, international, so on and so forth. We continue to stay extremely focused on our approval engineering delivery capabilities, delivering cost efficiencies, driving productivity. We have begun our initial journey of embracing artificial intelligence. I'll speak about that a little bit more later in terms of how we foresee that to help in terms of driving revenues up, customer centricity as well as optimizing the cost structures along the way.
We have a cash and cash equivalents as of 31st March close to about INR 660 crores. And a dividend of INR 7.5 per share has been declared by the Board and subject to shareholders' approval, which shall be disseminated. Overall, in terms of the business, the biggest highlight KFintech has had to offer, which many of you might have already heard in the earlier analyst meetings was about KFintech signing a definitive agreement to acquire a controlling stake of 51% in the Asset Fund Services, Singapore-based organization. This is a testimonial to our confidence in our abilities to deliver to the strategies that we have choked up.
M&A, as I've always maintained, is always a long protractor and it is meeting of minds more than anything else. This is a large acquisition for KFin, by KFin standards by the stretch of imagination, both in terms of its ambition as well as its financials that have gone into it. With this, we would have summarily closed our large M&A ambitions for the foreseeable future. There will be minor plug-ins, which we may still continue to evaluate. We have a very thriving and active M&A board. But by and large, I'd like to believe that the large acquisitions over to the near foreseeable future, we wouldn't be looking at it given our current intent is to complete the structure, integrate, assimilate, scale up and drive to our global ambitions properly.
We continue to win mandates across business lines. Issuer Solutions, a business which has seen over 20% plus growth. We have had a stellar year. We have added nearly 1,000-plus corporates into our roster, getting the number closer to 8,000 by terms of market share. We now are the service provider for nearly 50% of all NSE 500 companies, listed companies. We have done the top 3 of the biggest IPOs that have happened in this country this year, whether it is Bajaj Housing Finance or Hyundai, so on and so forth. The next bunch of large IPOs too are being managed by KFintech.
We continue to expand our market share in the alternate investment funds. We continue to expand our market share on the national pension system, in fact, by a factor of 3. The overall industry has been growing at about 12%, whereas KFintech Market Spain, market share has been growing at nearly 3x of that, close to about 33%, 34%. Internationally, too, we have expanded our roster to about 76 clientele, independent individual clientele with a total contract of close to 100 at this point in time. As we all know, we deliver both to transfer agency and fund accounting. Included in this international client win is a very large deal, again, in the context of the international revenues that we speak about. It's a multiyear fund accounting platform given to a very, very large, trustee by the larger trustee in Malaysia. And overall, it's going to be a full-service DTA deal. DTA stands for the distributor transfer agency as well as the end-to-end transfer agency and fund accounting for the trustee, which means that all the asset management companies who fall, who roll up under that particular trustee will be serviced end-to-end by KFintech.
We have also won a full-service TA deal in AMC -- large AMC in Philippines. We continue to have a very robust pipeline into the international mutual funds business. As we all know, KFintech -- the international business is mostly mutual funds and transfer agency and fund accounting being the business services we tender for them. Whereas Ascent to delineate and call out the complementarity we have with them is broadly a private mandate fund administrator, which means your hedge funds, your private equities, venture capital, high-frequency trading funds, digital currency funds, so on and so forth. So, they specialize in that. KFintech specializes in largely mutual funds, pensions, private retirement schemes, so mass retail, so to speak. And these 2 entities together will be able to provide a full suite of service to any asset class to any country in the world.
As an organization, we continue to expand our scale of operations into countries. As we all know, we have initiated starting of our services into Thailand last year. The contract has gone fully live into this year and with the resounding success, we are now able to see organic growth of pipeline in Thailand, which is an area of geography, which is of very, very strong importance for us, even as we have reached nearly 55% market share in Malaysia of all asset management companies that are present there. We have since then added my market share, as I said, in terms of NSE for Issuer Solutions, close to 50%. The new RTA mandates in the quarter includes several of the fintech companies, including Gem Aromatics and biosciences companies, so on and so forth. This, in conjunction with the IPOs that have happened in the previous year, adds a robust annuity revenue into the coming year, even as we are expecting and hoping to have a pretty robust IPO year even into the coming one as well. That ensures that the businesses which are not linked to mark-to-market movements continue to grow beyond 20% to be able to provide that amount of hedge and risk management and diversity, should there be a sideward and downward movement of the markets. But lo and behold, we have seen a very sharp turnaround in April, which you all must have witnessed yourselves to. Very early days, but we have already seen a reasonably quick turnaround of the AUM in the month, of course, April is not done. But looking at where we are, the initial estimates point to a growth over March. And in fact, looking -- the numbers looking closer to the numbers that were there in Q3 of the previous year, so to speak.Â
In terms of the alternatives, a quick milestone. We're reaching nearly 600 alternative investment funds as we speak today, and market share has increased close to 37%. The overall AUM is at about INR 1.5 trillion, and it's grown nearly about 50% year-on-year as investments stand today. We continue to add marquee logos apart from, of course, adding the new schemes of the existing clientele. Some really important clientele that have added at this point in time include Kedaara Capital, ValueQuest, of course, been there for a while, and we continue to add more schemes from each of these marquee global fund managers.
We have also ventured late Q3, that is around October into wealth business, trying to orchestrate a similar amount of industrialized and innovative solutions, what we have done in asset management business into wealth business. We have created what we'd like to believe as the country's premier wealth management platform called mPower Wealth. The platform is built on top of mPower, which is the core platform of Hexagram, which we all know as an organization, we have acquired a bunch of years back. So, whilst Hexagram continues to deliver value in terms of order management solutions, fund accounting solutions such as net asset value computations, what have you. On the back of that platform, the wealth platform has been created. And within a matter of a few months, very happy to inform you that we have signed up with 5 large wealth managers.Â
Some of this was already announced in the previous quarter. But in this quarter into the previous 3 months, we have signed 2 more wealth management companies called Thrive Wealth and Northern Arc Capital. The pipeline for this business is pretty strong as many different wealth outlets well set up in India, even as many of the legacy outlets are also looking at innovative partners such as KFintech to be able to move their noncore functions such as operations and technology and focus largely on customer acquisition and delivering value to the customers by generating significant alpha for the investments that they are making.Â
Broadly, in terms of the overall industry performance, you have seen some of the charts clearly speak about FY '25 was a breakout year by any stretch of imagination for the Indian Mutual Fund industry, spectacular growth overall, nearly 25% year-on-year if you compare to the previous year. Notwithstanding the reduction in the Q4 of the previous year, the year would have ended on a much, much more robust manner. But these are financial markets, and there is always a cyclicality. One should always brace for it every once in 3 to 4 to 5 years. And for us, it's business as usual. There is nothing to panic. And as you've already seen, there's been a sharp turnaround in that area.
KFintech continues to have a very robust SIP market share, close to 40%. I believe and I continue to believe that, that is probably the most important metric to track to, which over a period of time, would drag up or drag down the overall AUM market share because the SIP market share is one that truly is the resilient, sticky and retail investment portfolios, unlike large lumpy investments, which come from corporates, which tend to have a sporadic impact in terms of market share, but they can dissipate a rather quickly. So, into the coming quarters and into the years, my hope and expectation is that our overall AUM market share, which is now close to about 33%, should inch towards that 39.4% to 40% of market share. It's only a matter of when and not if. And I hope the continued outperformance of the AMCs who KFintech services today, which, by the way, 6 out of the 10 fastest-growing AMCs are with KFintech.Â
So, it is not just about historic performance. It is about where the velocity is, where the speed is. And that's what's going to drive the future as age goes, past performance is not necessarily an indicator of the future. And I think it is the current velocity in terms of the AMCs who are largely embracing digital and embracing innovation and technology, embracing significant distributor-related, driven sales and marketing effects are the ones that I believe will have the fastest growth to accomplish. And I'm very, very happy to be able to -- and proud, in fact, to have a roster of clientele such as those, including the ones that we have won in the recent past.Â
Broadly, in terms of, if you take a look at even the other asset classes, I think there's been a breakthrough year, whether it is the number of AIFs registered, whether it is the number of demat accounts that have been added into the ecosystem. And the pension subscribers, of course, continues to grow at a smaller clip as compared to the asset managers. I think India as a pensionable society is still some time away. And there have been significant efforts made by the regulator and under the chairmanship of the last 2 and 3, in fact, Chairmans who have definitely made a significant impact. And it's a matter of time through innovative solutions such as what KFintech is able to offer. We had created back in the day, a solution called Future where we can give the pension. And we are seeing a breakout performance of that platform's adoption into corporates. And I'm hoping that in time to come, the overall pension subscribers expand significantly into the country.Â
Quickly moving on. I will cover a little bit in terms of the value-added solutions and services. It has been, again, our stated intent to deliver superior technological solutions, digital as frugally as we could. And a lot of the solutions KFintech creates, obviously, for us to render superior solutions to our own clients and their clients, who are the investors and distributors in some sense. But we have found that many of these actually have a relevance, whether it is as an offering that we can offer to the regulators. We have won the RegTech, the first RegTech award that we had given in the previous year for our platforms. So, most of the platforms that we build, we are extending them to the regulators, to the industry bodies, and to the clients as well. And that is where our value-added solutions, which is effectively to drive a higher revenue profile in terms of reducing the total cost of operation for our clients, but increasing our share of wallet given the relationships we have and given the technological solutions we could create.
Very happy to inform you that the previous year saw a 57% increase in value-added solutions revenue year-on-year. What are those? There are many of them. Some of them are platforms for monitoring inside of trading. Some of them are APIs, which extend to the fintech ecosystem to expand the overall book of business for them. It is creating some of the cutting-edge data engineering solutions, which help our clients improve their revenue in the scheme of things. We manage the data engineering lakes for several clients, and we also have created technological solutions of mobility stack, right, whether it is the websites and mobile apps for our clientele. We are handling the social, the analytics and the cloud components as well. Also happy to inform you that KFintech has become one of the affiliate partners for AWS. We have an entity called KFintech Cloud Services. We are now taking the capabilities we have built to help many clientele, and that could be in any non-asset management space as well to migrate into cloud as a strategy. So clearly carving out our fintech component of KFintech, which is basically revenues beyond the asset management solutions is a very, very important facet. And our wins into the previous quarter, coupled with all that we've done in the previous year, as I said, has given us a nearly 57% increase of revenue year-on-year.Â
The acquisition that we have done in the previous year, Webile Technologies, as we all know, is one that specializes in the mobility stack of it all. And that entity has given 150% growth in its top line in the single year, and we'd like to believe that it has a significant amount of growth lying ahead of it.
I quickly covered the international footprint. As I've already spoken in terms of the wins we've had, I called out the 2 important wins. One is the very large trustee in Malaysia. And as I said, it's a full Hexagram deal, so to speak. So, this is not a transfer agency, but it's a full-scale fund admin deal and the DTA and the distributor transfer agency component of it, right? And we have also won one more in Malaysia, which has been verbally confirmed and in time to come, hopefully, we'll have a clearance on that. And another large Tier deal in Philippines, we have onboarded 3 new funds in GIFT City, taking our total funds to close to 30, making our market share close to about 50% in the GIFT City funds. And with Essent Fund Services, should we include that, obviously, our market share will be far superior to that.Â
We intend to get to 3/4 of the total market share into the GIFT City with a combined strategy of 1 plus 1 equaling 10 in some sense. And we have initiated some of those conversations in terms of operationally, how do we align both the entities to drive faster growth as against individually competing. Obviously, we are collaborating, and then we would be driving the growth from here onwards. And happy to also tell you that we have now reached 100 contracts in our international business. And if you recollect, one of the points that I had made in the initial days was the contracts that we had been signing initially were obviously the smaller and the medium-tiered AMCs, and it's a matter of time, the larger contracts tend to come in.
The last quarter, we had announced a large contract win, this quarter, too. The deal that I'm talking about, the trustee win is also a materially large contract in the context of our international business. Also very happy to inform you that after a protracted period of mark-to-market, either degrowth or flat growth in Asian markets, which did not honestly give us the gains of transfer agency revenue growing, which if you compare with India, Indian markets went up. And hence, our MFTA revenue also grew. Our revenue in international grew nearly entirely only because we kept winning new mandates, but the AUM per se did not grow because Asian markets did not see both the mark-to-market movements as well as net flows. But this year, FY '25, saw the first year in the last 4 years, both mark-to-market gain as well as net inflows, which means that the revenue, hopefully, from now on would be on account of both new wins and more importantly, on the back of the expansion of the AUM of the current clients. So, the AUM grew nearly about 33% year-on-year into the previous year. And I'd like to believe that this would be a sustainable trend from here on.
With that, I would pass on the baton to Vivek to cover the financial performance, and then we'll leave the floor open for questions after that.
Thank you, Sreekanth. On the overall revenue performance, Sreekanth talked about that we have grown 30% year-on-year. And Q4 last year versus this year, we have grown about 24%. Sequentially, there is a degrowth of 2.5%, largely driven by the mark-to-market correction that happened and some bit of corporate actions in Issuer Solutions, which had given a reduction of 3% in the Issuer Solutions revenue sequentially. But overall, a robust performance. We have crossed INR 1,000 crores in terms of revenue. The breakup of revenue is more like mutual fund fee-based revenue continues to be in the range of about 64%. The Issuer Solutions revenue is 15% of total revenue.
The international and other investor solutions revenue is about 14% of total revenue. Within that, now the international business continues to be about in the range of about 5% to 6%. And we believe that the trajectory in terms of international business contribution will change with the acquisition of Ascent, which currently is about 5%, 6% will move towards 15% in future - 13% to 15% in the future with the acquisition of Ascent. And overall, the EBITDA has gone up by 30.7% year-on-year. And same quarter last year versus this year is about 17% increase. There is some impact of mark to the M&A due diligence cost of about INR 12 crores that we incurred during the year, which has reduced the EBITDA, otherwise, it would have been about INR 31.5 in terms of the margins. So, in terms of the growth and the EBITDA margins, which are 43.9% for the year would have been about 45% for the year, but for this INR 12 crores that we had to incur to do a due diligence. And for the quarter, which is 43.2% would have been about 46%. So, you are seeing -- you're looking at the operating leverage playing out and as the market supported us, the margins have been pretty healthy.
The PAT margin has gone up by 35.2% year-on-year, and the PAT margin was 30.5% for the year. And sequentially, also in terms of, against last quarter, there is a jump of 253 bps year-on-year on the PAT margins. Sorry, a dip of 253 bps on the PAT margin because of the expenses that we incurred on due diligence. We remain healthy in terms of cash and cash equivalents at INR 660 crores of cash, which will be utilized towards payout of dividend that the Board has recommended, subject to shareholders' approval of INR 7.50 per share. And the acquisition of the initial 51%, about INR 305 crores will also be funded out of it. We continue to convert EBITDA to free cash flow at about 60%, while we continue to invest for future and capital expenditure to develop new products. We have seen a healthy increase in EPS, about 34% increase versus last year. And we believe that in times to come, with the acquisition of Ascent, at least for FY '26, it will be neutral. And from FY '27, we believe it will be value accretive.
We are happy to take questions now.
[Operator Instructions] The first question is from the line of Karthik Chellappa from Indus Capital Advisors.
Congrats on the quarter. Am I audible?
Yes, Karthik.
Great. Just 2 questions from my side. First is on the other expenses. Apart from the due diligence, was there any other chunky expenses in this quarter, because the Y-on-Y growth seems to be pretty high. And if we could further break down, what portion of the other expenses would you attribute to investing in growth versus maintenance? That's my first question.
Yes, I'll take this question. There are expenses related to cloud expenses and licenses that we have incurred in terms of expansion and a balancing strategy between on-prem to cloud, which is a similar increase, about INR 12 crores, INR 13 crores extra that we have incurred to ramp up in terms of IT strategy. We are looking at optimizing the cloud strategy with on-prem. And this is something which we are developing the entire chassis, the core chassis based on the latest technology. And overall, we believe that 19% of the total revenue that we have spent on IT in the current year vis-a-vis 21% last year will continue to come down in the coming years.
My second question, sir, is if I were to look at our issuer solutions, that has actually seen increasing momentum at least in the last 2 to 3 quarters, purely from a corporate client addition point of view. In your opinion, what is driving the strength? And is this something that we can expect to sustain in FY '26?
Thanks, Karthik. Yes, I do believe that -- so the Issuer Solutions as a business A couple of things that are happening. Obviously, tailwinds in the form of the new IPOs, the number of companies that are going public is always helpful. And I just want to caution that a company going to public does not give any sporadic jump of revenue for KFintech given the IPO revenue itself is very little. It is the annuity revenue that still matters. So, winning the IPO mandates will actually improve our run rate year after year. So definitely, the number of IPOs is definitely a factor that bears well on it.
Second, our commercial model, of course, is number of folios into unit price and portfolio and expansion of demat accounts and the retail participation always helps and which is what we saw in the previous year, and I'm hoping it will continue for the foreseeable future. By any stretch of the imagination, the retail participation in India is like most things are still underpenetrated. I think they will continue to grow.
Three, corporate actions. I think a plethora of corporate actions by many of corporate always helps in terms of the activity that we do. There have been large-scale corporate actions such as the demergers that we have handled, say, for example, for Vedanta and so on and so forth. And these are all important activities or including ITC hotels demerger that KFintech had orchestrated. So that always helps us. And lastly, I think we have also been focusing on transitions. Transition mutual funds is seldom there, but transitions in corporate registry as a business, Issuer Solutions as a business is possible. And given we have always been the largest in this space. And with our technological capabilities, they have significant value to be added to many an incumbent.Â
So, we have also been successful in transitioning many corporates from other RTAs into Capex. So broadly, these are the reasons, and these are all sustainable reasons. I do not see these to be a onetime clip. In fact, Issuer Solutions, if you see even in the previous year and the year before to that, have seen up north of 20% growth. We would continue to drive attention to this and then see if we can even expand it much faster given there are potential opportunities in terms of value-added solutions in this line of business. One of the things that I can call out is, say, for example, Investor Relations, the entire IR as a portfolio of every corporate is still done in a very non-industrialized manner. And we are working on cutting-edge solutions, which will alter the ways of working for the IR as a function. Now with an 8,000 client roster, even if you convert 10%, 15%, 20% of them into each of these solutions, they will tend to add that delta of 400, 500 basis points of growth, that is possible.
The next question is from the line of Supratim Datta from AMBIT.
My first question is on the KRA business, what is the update there? When are you planning to launch that? And a connected question to that is KFin has moved into different lines or different categories, different products, wealth being one. You're talking about how you're expanding value-added services on the Issuer Solutions side, that being other. Globally, we have seen that RTAs or platforms like KFin are able to get into nonfinancial categories as well like health care or others. Is that an ambition for KFin as well? And what are the other blank spaces that you could look at filling with the current platforms and systems that you have? If you could help us understand that, that would be very helpful. Two, I wanted to understand, is the cost associated with the M&A that's around INR 12 crores, is that done? Or is some part of that cost going to come in FY '26 as well? And lastly, on the ESOP side, there has been a new ESOP tranche due to which the cost on the ESOP side has gone up this year. How should we think about ESOP costs going into FY '26, if you could help on that? Those are my 3 questions.
Sure. The first question in terms of KRA business. So, we have in the previous quarter, updated that we received in-principle approval from SEBI for the KRA business. We have completed our platform build at this point in time. We are awaiting SEBI's final approval. Our readiness at this very moment is we are literally a minute away from launching our KRA solutions the moment we get approval from the regulator. So, our preparedness is absolutely done, and we believe it's a matter of time. And hopefully, into this quarter, we should have started our KRA business.
Related to that is in terms of your question about how the value-added solutions can actually permeate beyond the financial services industry. We are not purposefully working in that model. Should, however, the solutions that we are creating find resonance in other industries, we are happy to consider them in terms of extending those opportunities. Let me give you a few potential possibilities. I think first and foremost, we, at the very minimum, need to exhaust the financial services, the BFSI sector itself before even going that far. As you all know, we are nearly entirely only on the financial services and that too within only asset management, we do not have a play in insurance or banking and NBFC, so on and so forth.Â
There are solutions that we have created, however, which have -- which are fungible and which have relevance in a non-asset management industry. For example, we have created what I'd like to believe is one of the best anti-money laundering monitoring platform in the country. It's called InPro. And whether you're an insurance company, whether you're a bank, whether you're an NBFC, anyone who onboards any customer needs to do these kind of screenings. And our platform is definitely as applicable to any of these companies as much as it is to asset management industry. And it is applicable to any country in the world as much as it's applicable to India because these are all global lists, so to speak, right? Similarly, there are -- the API as an economy extends well beyond asset management industry to various other industries. So, to that extent, we're already looking into non-BFSI -- sorry, non-AMC, but within BFSI. Beyond that, I do not believe we have any special interest at this point in time. And as I said, if there is a resonance of any of our solutions for other industry, we will definitely consider those.Â
In terms of the M&A costs for the -- all the costs have been booked into the quarter that had gone by. So that is fine. I think the other one is in terms of ESOPs. ESOP was -- ESOPs were given in the previous year. I'd expect some ESOPs to be given this year as well. To a certain extent, it is probably wise to factor in certain amount of ESOPs to be given. We are in a knowledge industry. As you all know, it's an asset-light model. We don't have plants and machinery. Our assets are our people. Attracting, retaining talent is probably one of the most critical job as the new leader of the organization or my leadership team have. So, to that extent, it is also not just as a retention tool, but also it is our responsibility in terms of wealth creation for the people who are directly responsible for the wealth creation of the broader shareholder community.
The next question is from the line of Abhijeet from Kotak Securities.
I have a couple of number questions. First is, if you could break down the international alternatives pension bit into the subsegments? Second one is that in the balance sheet, I see a noncurrent asset held for sale item, which is about -- it's not a big number, but just curious what that relates to. And third one is a broader question, which is on the international side and the alternative side, if it's possible to quantify the sales pipeline? And then secondly, again, I think it's been discussed earlier as well, but if you could talk about the competitive environment in those markets in terms of who are the other players you're competing with? And how important is pricing in those deal wins? That will be all.
Sure. Sreekanth, I'll pick up the first one on the breakup of the international other investor solutions.
Also, the balance sheet item. I'll take the last one.
Yes. So, the international business, the breakup for the international piece within the overall pie is about, FY '24 was INR 119 crores, and this year is about INR 156 crores. And that is -- international is about INR 48 crores and AIF is about INR 58 crores. Webile is about INR 12 crores, NPS is about INR 11 crores and GBS is INR 27 crores. Same thing last year was, international was INR 36 crores, AIF was INR 34 crores, Webile was INR 5 crores, NPS was INR 8 crores and GBS was INR 34 crores.
On the question on the balance sheet item held for sale, it is basically the asset which has been generated, which will be transferred to the MF Central JV that we have formed. So as and when the investment is -- they get the license, EOP license, the asset needs to be transferred to them. That is why it is shown in the balance sheet as asset held for sale. Over to you, Sreekanth.
Thank you. The international business in terms of the landscape of the competition, it's going to be horses for courses in terms of whether if you are competing in mutual fund space, and it varies by the country, of course. Is broadly -- if you talk about Malaysia, we truly do not have a like-to-like competitor who delivers end-to-end solutions like how we do it in India, for example. We end up competing with in-house and the captive, so to speak.
There are a few exceptions where bank-based administrators, say, NHSBC or a Stanchart, by virtue of them being the custodian and fund accountant, as I keep saying, gradually deliver transfer agency services as well. But broadly, it is -- probably competition is largely with the captives. And same is the case in the Philippines market as well. But when you look at the private mandates, of course, the competition is a little bit more, again, depending upon the nation. But if you see countries like Singapore and Hong Kong, and even much of the West for that matter, whether it is the offshore locations of Cayman and what have you, large international global fund administrators will be there. We compete with them. FX Group would be one such one, SS&C Global, IQ, EQ, right? And these are the firms. And some of those firms actually are there in GIFT City also, if you see it today.
So, on the private mandate space, we compete with them. So, whether it is AFS competing with them or KFintech competing with them in GIFT City. How much is pricing an important factor? It is important, no doubt about it. But I won't necessarily say that is the most important. I think in a private mandate space, unlike in the case of a public mandate space, transitions are possible because the lineage of the funds won't be very large. The number of investors won't be very large. The history isn't as significant as in the case of mutual funds. Given the transitions are possible, a good number of the cases it happens is largely because of the service standards. Go-to-market, many of these fund houses tend to launch schemes rather quickly. There are fund houses who can launch schemes literally every month, every 2 months, every 3 months. And it is how nimble is your admin to be able to make sure they go live as well in terms of whether setting it up the back-end systems or if you're managing the LP and the GP portals, how quickly are you able to bring them up? What is your capability in terms of advising them on the IMs itself and securing the right kind of licenses. A lot of advisory -- further advisory functions are also delivered in that space.
Yes, pricing is important, but several other factors are even more important in the private space. So, both AFS and KFin compete with a different set of competitors depending upon which market we deal with.
[Operator Instructions] The next question is from the line of Sarthak from ERAYA Capital.
Sir, so basically, you and CAMS are continuously investing a lot in the technology space, right? So how do your technologies can be different from CAMS?
So, there are areas where we compete. There are areas we collaborate. For example, we collaborate on MF Central. We compete with each other on mutual funds and alternatives. But as you know, KFintech also is in other businesses. And likewise, CAMS is also in businesses where KFintech is in. Technologically, one, we both use different tech stack altogether. We are on Microsoft. And if my knowledge serves me right, I believe CAMS is on Oracle. In terms of operating model, it could be slightly different. It's not right for me to comment how they operate. I mean, I only have as much insights into it. What I can tell you about surely is that KFintech prides itself as a tech-first company, first and foremost.
Second, we constantly have run and changing the bus, which means that we have large businesses where we constantly have to run as the scale increases, complexity increases, regulation increases. But we also need to have a mechanism to forward invest and completely replatform. And that is exactly where our investments, I'd like to believe are far higher. If you see our spend of tech as a percentage of revenue, which is a parameter we track to, 5 years back, it used to be about 7% to 8%. The year that had gone by, it has risen to almost 23% to 24%. So that means on a revenue that has expanded from nearly INR 350 crores to over nearly INR 1,200 crores in a matter of 4 to 5 years, our share of spend on tech also has moved from 8% of the INR 300 crores to now 24% of the INR 1,200-odd crores revenue that we're talking about. And a lot of this is to modernize, keep ourselves future-ready.
We believe that the volume expansion will probably even outpace the expansion of the AUM in times to come. And the cybersecurity-related aspects are extremely important for the kind of and the nature of the work we perform. As you could imagine, nearly 8 out of 10 financial investors, any financial investor in the country, 8 out of 10 is sold by KFintech in one capacity or the other. If you -- because you're a shareholder in a company, you probably are receiving your dividends computed by us. You're a mutual fund investor, you're an alternative fund investor, you're a natural pension system investor, so on and so forth. So with that level of complexity, it also adds a responsibility in terms of our spend in the direction. We have always been pretty nimble in terms of the value-added solutions. I've called that out already the growth because we do not want to look at any function within the company as a pure cost center.
We have been successful in converting most of our internal functions into revenue centers and technology is no different. So not only does do we spend enough on tech, we are also converting -- repurposing the solutions we are creating for in-house as a solution that is also relevant to other companies, and hence, we are able to generate certain revenue outside of it. The other important factor I'll call out is our data and cloud journey. I think we have definitely been the first and the foremost probably across the Capital Markets in India to have adopted a complete cloud and data migration strategy as early as 2019, 2020. We have successfully completed our migration into AWS. And it is not just about for the sake of migrating data, but it's about your ability to create business solutions and value based on that ability to crunch petabytes of data in a few seconds and help our clients grow. And that is where many of our platforms like DIGIX or PARAS, which are adopted by SEBI to many of our data engineering solutions adopted by many of our clients and the distributors. So these are the differentiators as an RTA, we are able to provide to our clients so that they can grow at a much faster rate compared to the rest of the industry. So that's largely about us, and we continue to invest on new age tech.
I spoke about AI. We are drafting a corporate level policy on adoption of AI. It's a buzzword. Everybody uses it, but you will see the real-world use cases. I'll give you one example. On the data that we crunch from the cloud, the status reports that we are creating that goes out to the industry is entirely written by AI. So we do not use any human being to actually generate those reports at all. So that means comprehending natural language processing, taking the data, providing the insights systematically by the platform itself is one such aspect of it. And I'd like to believe there's much more to come in the coming weeks and months.
I understand. Sir, I have a follow-up question. Like we have been investing a lot in the technology stack. So just wanted to know one thing, why we have not win any contract from the last mutual fund that have launched. Last 8 mutual funds, we have just won one. So what could be the possible reason for that?
There will be multiple reasons for wins and losses. We have won 10 out of 10 mutual fund houses before the few losses that we have had in the previous few years. And we had signed up with one of the marquee mutual fund houses just in the last quarter. We have already made that announcement. And see, beyond the point, we have to win deals which make commercial sense. Winning for the sake of winning makes no value at all for us. And when we won all the wins that we've had, obviously, there is a response from the market and that response eventually meant that because of the severe undercutting on the prices, we did not find some of those deals accretive in terms of business. End of the day, I have a responsibility to my shareholder to drive a profitable and a meaningful business. So it is sometimes important to lose the trees for the goods.
Also, sir, I've seen that one of our mutual fund has shifted from KFin into CAMS. So what is the reason? And is there any issues in the loyalty barrier in the favor of CAMS?
So there were 10 mutual funds that have shifted from CAMS to KFin over the last 15 years. I hope you're tracking to that. The fund house that has shifted from KFin to CAMS is a fund house, which has an AUM less than a few hundreds of crores. And I think the affiliation was largely in the context of some of the key management personnel who joined that entity belong to CAMS back in the day. So they just wanted to work back with the organization they were left in -- they were left earlier.
Sir, just wanted to know the last -- as you have told --
I'm sorry to interrupt. Mr. Sarthak, could you please come back in the queue for further questions? The next question is from the line of Pranuj from JPMorgan.
Just 3 questions. One is, any mutual fund contracts that are up for renegotiation in FY '26 that we should watch out for? Second, I think there was a previous question on the international deal pipeline. I'm not sure if you disclosed that. So the deal pipeline for yourselves and for Ascent, if you can disclose that? And lastly, the INR 12 crores M&A expense, was that all in 4Q? Or was it distributed between 3Q and 4Q?
I'll answer the last question, then Sreekanth, you can answer the first 2. The M&A expense is broken up into 2 quarters, Q3 and Q4.
Sorry, what is the quantum?
The deal pipeline, let me answer that. Sorry, I missed two, I'll answer that one. Our KFintech deal pipeline in Southeast Asia is close to about $25 million at this point in time. And the conversion rate, if you saw in the last 6 months had been pretty solid with nearly 7 large deals to have been signed. And that number of $25 million is consistently increasing. I have not included the Thailand market in that number just yet, given we have gone live, and we are in the process of now looking at nearly the entire market and to add that to the pipeline. So the pipeline of $25 million is broadly amongst the countries of Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore and Hong Kong, excluding Thailand, and I'll be able to add that number shortly. I'm sorry, what was the other question?
Also on Ascent deal pipeline, if you can disclose at this point in time? And also any mutual fund contracts that are up for renegotiation in FY '26, we should be aware of?
So it's Ascent Fund Services, first of all. They are not taxing, so Ascent. So Ascent, the overall pipeline, their pipeline is larger in the context of multiple geographies that they are present. They are present in 18 different countries. And of course, we are still in the early stages of integration in terms of understanding the financials, et cetera, very well. We just signed the definitive agreement. It is not right for me to comment just yet into the coming quarter as we spend more time with the organization, we'll be able to give you the pipeline. But broadly, it is larger than our international pipeline at this point in time and continues to expand faster. In terms of the contracts up for renegotiation, yes, there are about 2 AMC contracts up for renegotiation this year.
Understood. Would it be possible to give the size of those AMCs?
One is a large AMC, one is a mid-tier AMC.
The next question is from the line of Dipanjan Ghosh from Citi.
So just a few questions. First, on the employee expense growth number for FY 2025, would it be possible for you to kind of break this number between fixed cost inflation, new employee additions and maybe others in terms of more deployment on the sales side or business development side or product side? Second would be, when we look at the Issuer Solutions business, this year, obviously, the folio growth has been quite strong. So again, I mean, if you can break it up between primary activities driving this portfolio addition versus more companies that you're getting from competition and maybe others? The third is on the domestic alternates, and this is more qualitative. Is the entire portion of the revenue annuity in nature? Or is there some portion which is more transactional-based? And lastly, in response to the previous participant's question, when you mentioned the deal pipeline or your proprietary deal pipeline on the international side, was it in terms of AUM or revenue out there?
I'll cover -- and I sincerely request everyone to limit to a few questions. And Vivek, you can cover the item on the cost. On the Issuer Solutions, the total folio addition in the previous year was 9 million folios, which is pretty robust. And I think with the exception of one specific transition, nearly all of it is organic, which means that it is all the folios that have been added for the companies we have been servicing for the past bunch of years. The IPOs that have happened, obviously, they happen through the year. So, the full annuity value of it only will come into 2026, this year that is, right? So, to that extent, a broad component of the revenue is from Folio. Last year, I think the total revenue coming from the folio maintenance was close to about 45%, and the corporate actions was close to about 35%. The rest of it is corporate events like conducting AGM and e-voting, so on and so forth.
On the deal pipeline, it is revenue, not AUM because the AUM usually runs into billions of dollars and for the basis points we charge. So, the $25 million that I was talking about is purely the revenue potential, not the AUM. There was a question on alternate investment funds. In AIF, usually, there is no episodical onetime revenue at all. So, this is purely annuity. In fact, you will always see a lag of revenue because it usually takes a month, 2 to 3 months for a fund house when it launches and onwards an RTA for us to set ourselves, keep ourselves operationally ready for them to go live and then they get the funds. It's only after that the AUM actually has been factored; do we get revenue. So, there is no onetime revenue. If anything, you will actually have a little bit of cost that we would have incurred before the revenue hits at this point in time. Vivek, would you want to?
Yes, I'll cover that. On the employee cost, largely the increase in headcount is more to take care of the volume of transactions that have increased in domestic mutual fund, number of funds that have increased in alternate business and the number of new clients in the Issuer Solutions business and the growth that we are witnessing in Webile and Hexagram to a lesser extent. We also have ESOP cost of about INR 11.3 crores, which was incurred as an addition to what was incurred last year. And next year, again, you will see an increase in the ESOP cost because more employees will get covered in a new scheme which was launched, new brands will come in. And we do expect anywhere around INR 18 crores to INR 20 crores of ESOP expenses to come in the next year. So, it's more volume-driven. While the volumes have gone up by 33% year-on-year, the increase in the number of employees has been marginal of about 5% to 7%.
The next question is from the line of Sanketh Godha from Avendus Spark.
Sir, a couple of questions. Basically, as the Ascent gets integrated with us, say, in last part of the current year and maybe fully for the next year, so is it fair to say that given the EBITDA margins of that company are lower to start with, so our EBITDA margins, which are closer to 44% will fall below 40% for a while before it inches back to 44% kind of a number? Is it a fair assessment to do so?
Yes. Mathematically, absolutely, yes, it will. I mean, but again, keep in the context, the total revenue profile is about roughly $18 million. And Cap Index total revenue into the coming year, obviously, is going to be much, much higher. So, the impact will be marginal at a percentage level, but at an absolute number level, it won't be dilutive.
Got it. And you said a couple of mutual funds will come for repricing. Just wanted to understand, if I calculate the yield came for the full year around 3.63%. So, you see a contraction to be much meaningfully higher or it will be naturally a telescopic pricing impact to play out in enough revenue?
Sanketh, early to predict. That is obviously a negotiation and a discussion. And as we engage with our clients into this year, we will be able to have a better understanding. But nevertheless, you're talking about 1, 2 AMCs on a base of 27 AMCs and their AUM versus the total AUM and any amounts of discounts that can go into. There can be some compression, but I wouldn't anticipate it to be materially high.
And last one, see, in company RTO business, if I look at last 2 years history, '23 and '24, your revenue portfolio was around INR 10.2, INR 10.3. It has meaningfully fallen to INR 9.4. It's almost like 8%, 9% depletion in the realization portfolio. So just wanted to understand this INR 9.4 is the new normal or because your IPO activities were a little more and therefore, the revenue per portfolio looks optically lower and then it might improve in '26 with the IPO activities coming down?
I think it's a combination of all. Definitely, your observation about a lot of IPOs happening in the year, which means the portfolio is counted, but the revenue is not counted for the full year. Obviously, mathematically, it will look and it will appear to dilute the revenue portfolio. That is definitely the first of it. Second, see, the growth of which company and which portfolio is clearly not in our hands. And we have clearly negotiated contracts where the unit pricing varies by the client that we deal with. So today, if a company has a much larger retail participation because the company has done well, share price is doing well, a lot of investors are buying that share versus some other company's share. And depending upon the unit price of both of them, obviously, there will always be a certain amount of fluctuation that will happen.Â
So broadly, it will be a combination of market forces. It will be definitely the number of -- there are a lot of IPOs. Optically, it will appear as if there's been a little bit of reduction. But this is not a business where discounts, et cetera, are discussed. And if anything, there is actually contract price revision, upward revision that happens for a select set of companies. So broadly, I do not anticipate this to be any structural reduction in the portfolio pricing.
And last one, Hexagram revenue, can you call out and how much it contributes to global and AIF?
See, we don't. It's very tough to look at it that way because Hexagram's value transcends beyond the revenues that are booked in the Hexagram books itself. As I said, we created an entire mPower Wealth as a business line within a matter of a few months, it's already about INR 20 crore business for us, right? And the alternate investment funds, for example, the revenue that you see there, unlike in the case of mutual funds, we do both transfer agency and fund accounting for AIFs. The fund accounting as a solution is rendered on top of mPower, which is a Hexagram's platform, but the revenue continues to be booked in the business line of AIF, so to speak, right? So those are the tactical reasons, but broadly, it had been an extremely strategic acquisition for us and absolutely the one that's helping us fuel our global aspirations.
And maybe last one, the mortgage business means the global business services, this INR 27 crore revenue for the full year means any investments, any revival in that business? Or you see the demand coming off and then this revenue see a declining trend as we have seen in the last 2, 3 years?
So we have formally -- and it's a position both from the management and our Board to not to invest time, effort, monies in that business. As we all knew from the beginning, it's an outlier. It is not an asset management business. It was a business that we have created at the behest of our erstwhile joint venture partner, Computershare. We created a center of excellence for them, and we're delivering some revenues in the form of -- in the style of BPO, if I may. Now in the context of our strategy of being a global fund administrator, it does not feature in the list of things that we want to do. So consequently -- and also, I guess, this also coincided with, in general, mortgage as a line of business in the U.S. coming down quite dramatically over the years. So, we are not interested to scale up this business. We will continue to run whatever is left of it, but we will not -- you will not see us spending any time effort either organically or inorganically into this business.
Any plans to sell it off?
Well, as I said, there isn't too much of proprietary in it. It's just a BPO style work, right? So, we use clients' platforms and we use our people. So, if we do get an opportunity, we'll think about it. But broadly, we'll see this business naturally scaling down over a period of time.
The next question is from the line of Kshijit Saraf from Tusk Investments.
I have just one question on the BlackRock Aladdin platform. You mentioned in the presentation that you have presence in Canada. U.S. is not mentioned yet. So, I just want to understand from a licensing perspective and a go-to-market perspective, where are you as a company? And would you require those licenses? And would you go ahead and acquire for those licenses?
Sure. So, KFintech has clientele in Canada, right? And hence, Canada is mentioned. U.S. is not mentioned because we do not have any clients in the U.S. BlackRock, of course, is not our client. We are their preferred partner by virtue of formally getting onboarded by BlackRock in the month of late January this year. We by virtue of being a partner, preferred partner for BlackRock to implement Aladdin and Aladdin as things stand today has roughly about $20 trillion of global funds, which means that we, as one of the preferred partner, has access to compete and win any of the fund managers who are currently on-board Aladdin platform. Over the past 2.5, 3 months, we have been working with BlackRock to fully comprehend the capabilities of the platform, Aladdin, because it's something that we need to know, of course, we will be adding business and solutions layer on top of BlackRock. We will have to integrate the BlackRock platform with mPower platform because mPower is the back-office platform, whereas Aladdin is the front office platform. So that integration work has been initiated. There's a track on the go-to-market from the sales angle in terms of how to approach the sales, so on and so forth.
So, this is a little complex process. As we engage, as we fully comprehend, as we complete our integration onto the platform, we will be creating our right to win solutions, and then we'll be approaching the market. It is probably a quarter to 2 away in terms of clocking revenues. But obviously, it's important to go that far to be able to understand because there, even the tiniest of conversion in terms of our clients can be a materially large contract for KFintech. So, it's better invested to sharpen the eggs at this point in time and make sure that when we hit the market, there is every reason for a fund manager to consider KFintech as against anybody else in terms of the solutions.
And one out of less than 10 empanelments on this platform. Any sense on the win rate that you can get in terms of the other platforms vis-a-vis you? And how is the process there?
I'm sorry, I'm not sure I understood the question. The line was also wasn't very clear.
So, you are one among the less than 10 empanelments on the Aladdin platform. So, I just wanted to understand. So as one out of less than 10 of the empanelments on Aladdin, just wanted to get a sense of what win rates you think you can get eventually or sort of any sort of aspiration you have there because the others would be also sort of looking for a share of that pie. What are you looking to differentiate with respect to mPower Wealth or any of the offerings that you're looking to build into this?
Yes. So, the 8 other administrators, I think the list is in the public domain. They include large entities like BNP Paribas, Fund Admins and MUFG and others. And they are 8 of them, and all 8 of them currently service this $20 trillion. So, there is nobody else who does that, right? And we could be the ninth one in that context. What is our right to win? As I said, we are in the process of integrating the systems and capturing the solutions. We believe that unlike many other fund administrators in that list, we have our own homegrown platform, which is mPower, which does an excellent job in terms of fund accounting capabilities. We manage 3/4 of the insurance and 3/4 of the pension industry in India, 8 mutual fund clients, 5 of those are the clients of our competitors from TA, but we manage their fund accounting. And once we integrate these 2 solutions and in the context of the large big data solutions that we have, we believe that pricing can be a big first step in terms of making your presence felt in conjunction with go-to-market and the analytics around it. I know that analytics are very, very cliche. But I can assure you in terms of how difficult it is for legacy companies to be able to deliver those as frugally as we can.
So, it is largely superiority in terms of technology, fully-integrated mPower solution into Aladdin, right, and a price point which should be compelling enough for a bunch of fund managers to cut over. And it is not necessarily that anybody needs to transition. As I said, almost all of these funds continue to launch new schemes and new fund managers are also onboarded. So, this is an ongoing dialogue with the BlackRock as a larger entity that we are having in terms of what is the right go-to-market strategy. And they have been extremely accommodative and graceful in guiding us into this process of go-to-market. So, we are working with the global -- the sales organization of BlackRock to be able to get there.
The next question is from the line of Prayesh Jain from Motilal Oswal.
Just a couple of questions. Just extending the question on BlackRock of the previous participant. What is the kind of concentration today amongst the 8 other players that you have mentioned, and it is in the public domain. Is there a concentration wherein a couple of them have, say, 80%, 90% share today. And so, it's kind of difficult to entrench into that kind of a domain. That would be my first question. Second is on VAS. The share has gone down sequentially in this quarter. Anything to read into it? Or is there a seasonality there? Or what kind of will transpire there? And last question, now that we have kind of filled in a lot of pockets with so many acquisitions and everything. Do you think the next leg of growth could come from using your existing technology and skills to move different adjacencies in the BFSI space like banking or some other aspects of the business, which can help you grow organically more? Those would be my questions.
Sure. On the BlackRock, I do not believe there is any concentration risk. Many of them have large portfolios that they are managing. The concentration risk does not impact our ability to win. I think we need to keep in mind that these funds are not domiciled in any one country. And as a fund manager and as a fund administrator, let's take any fund X, right? And if that fund is currently based in Cayman Islands tomorrow, they can start something in Ireland, they can start in Dubai, they can start in Abu Dhabi, they can start in India, in GIFT City, so on and so forth. And as you move and set up funds in various different geographies, the fund administrator need to have the capabilities to be able to deliver to all types of funds in all the countries, which is where there is no one who is master of all, right, who understands every type of funds, every type of business process in every geography. And hence, even if there is a client who is probably a very large client of one of those fund administrators, the fund administrators, it is not necessary that the next fund launched by the same fund manager goes to the incumbent. It is strongly possible that, say, for example, if it's in GIFT City, we probably are best positioned as compared to the 8 other fund administrators.Â
So, I do not -- so one, there is no huge concentration risk. Yes, there are probably the top 3 who will have a bigger share, but there is meaningful share for all of them. And I do not necessarily believe that having a large market share with anyone precludes others from participation into that large pool of funds that is there. In terms of VAS revenue sequential item, I think it's -- that's absolutely -- there is no specific trend in it because these are not like annuity contracts, right? So, we win new contracts. So, for example, we would have won a good number of data engineering contracts of our clients and of our competitors' clients in the previous quarter and that revenue would have been booked there. And sometimes some of these contracts tend to have a slight spillover effect into the coming quarters. So, I wouldn't read too much into the sequential component of it, given it is not annualized or an annuity revenue as against contracts that we win and deliver. And then obviously, we get on to the maintenance mode for us to have annuity revenue, but that would be at a smaller clip of about 20% or 25% of the total value, so to speak.
And my last question on the adjacencies.
I'm sorry, but would you be able to repeat that again?
Yes. So, what I was saying was whether the next leg of growth for KFin would come from extending your existing skill sets and technology to other adjacencies in the BFSI space?
I mean, can it come from there? The answer is yes, but do we want it to be like that? The answer is no. I mean, I think we are just literally scratching the surface of our global ambitions. Acquisition of Ascent and mPpower, integrating it for global fund admin solutions and services is our North Star, right, whilst continuing to grow in the overall India's ecosystem. As you've seen, our market share, whether it is alternatives, whether it's pensions, whether it is mutual funds, has been rising quarter after quarter, year after year on the AUM and the number of funds. And there are a lot of solutions that our country itself needs and warrants. Now in addition to that, probably the only other item that we really want to be focused as management would be our international expansion to be anchored on the Ascent acquisition.
We believe that our 100% of our time, effort and focus is needed -- will be needed for us to achieve these goals and ambitions. And we don't believe digressing into, say, banking industry, for example, payment aggregation. Some of our competitors get into that space or account aggregation and a bunch of others. We do not or insurance for that matter. They will -- they are subscale. They will never be able to offer the opportunity as the current strategy that we have chosen in terms of opportunities of growth for us. So, we will be focused in the narrow confines of asset management, wealth industry, but drive a lot of depth into business processes, a lot of breadth and diversification into geographies.
Ladies and gentlemen, due to time constraints, this was the last question for today's conference call. I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. Devesh for closing comments.
Thank you, Steve. On behalf of IIFL Capital, I thank the KFin management for giving us an opportunity to host the call today. Before we conclude the call, Vivek, would you like to add any closing remarks?
Thanks, Devesh. I think this was -- past year was a year which was filled with growth and getting into new businesses like KRA and getting into new geographies with Ascent coming in. We continue to maintain a guidance of 18% to 20% top line growth and 40% to 45% EBITDA margin. While we will see the integration of Ascent in the coming 3, 4 months, we believe that it will be neutral in terms of EBITDA margin impact, and it will become accretive in FY '27. And we will put all of our efforts in terms of making sure that the diversification is balanced from the management side in terms of the time and attention as we grow the international business with enhanced capabilities. Thank you so much for joining the call today.
Thank you, everyone, for joining in today. Steve, you may now conclude the call.
Thank you. On behalf of KFin Technology Limited, that concludes this conference. Thank you for joining us, and you may now disconnect your lines. Thank you.