Medi Assist Healthcare Services Limited (MEDIASSIST) Q1 2027 Earnings Call Transcript

Ladies and gentlemen, good day, and welcome to the MediAssist Healthcare Services Ltd. Q1-FI27 Earnings Conference Call. As a reminder, all participant lines will remain in the listen-only mode, and there will be an opportunity for you to ask questions after the management's opening remarks. Should you need assistance during the conference call, please signal the operator by pressing star, then zero on your touch-tone telephone. Please note that this conference is being recorded. I will now hand the conference over to Mr. Sulilpaul from Ernst & Young. Thank you, and over to you.

Thank you, Ryan. Good morning, and a very warm welcome to the Q1 FY27 Earnings Call of MediAssist Healthcare Services Limited. The Q1 results, the press release, and the investor presentation have been published on the exchanges and on the company's website. Before we start, a disclaimer. Some of the statements made in today's earnings call may be forward-looking in nature. Such forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties, which could cause actual results to differ from those anticipated. While these statements are based on management's current beliefs and assumptions, audiences are cautioned not to place undue reliance on them while making their investment decisions. On that note, I'd like to hand over the call to Satish Kirgu, CEO and Whole-Time Director of Mediasis Healthcare Limited.

Over to you, Satish.

Thank you, Cyril. Good morning, everyone. Thank you so much for joining our Q&A 527 earnings call this morning. As always, we will start with a few updates, run you through the key financial updates before we hand it over back to you for Q&A. We've talked about this over the last few quarters with largely three growth engines powering Medias' future. One is our core India TP franchising, which has been built largely organically and also aided through acquisitions as our core engine. That's giving us the right to win and giving us access. to the vast Indian market and where we have a pole position in the market today. And the second growth engine that we've been talking about is how some of the technology that we've built originally started from making our TPA business the most efficient. And then recognizing that the same capabilities are valuable to insurers outside the TPA model or in a hybrid model, as we called it much earlier. And now becoming an entity of its own, we're using technology, we're solving industry-wide problems that concern payers, providers, and patients. And lastly, as the tech stack is maturing and finding new spaces, not just in India, but across the globe, that we now take evolution, and we've made some more progress, you know, this quarter, and we'll share those with you shortly. And the last piece, the third one is Mayfair, which is our structured international platform. We made almost a seed investment a few years ago. And as we now understand and as we have a far greater sense of how some of our technology solutions and our network solutions can impact the global market, we've improved our ownership in Mayfair to excess of 90%. We're investing in building a strong leadership team and demonstrating that when you take all of what works well in India and adapt it to global environments, And we can find value and growth with our first-ever contract going live in Thailand just after the Q1 ended. So we have all of this in place now, and we are funding both these new growth tracks, which is the tech and the international tracks, from our own operating cash flows, and expecting them to become very meaningful contributors, not just for growth, but also they become arguments over a period of time. I'll spend a couple of minutes to give you the highlights of each one of these lines of business. The India TPA franchise is transforming its scale. Our group revenues grew up 25.5% year-on-year, with the premiums growing 29.5% year-on-year, and the group market share at 37.6%. The retention in Q1 of 90.2% reflects. A couple of aspects, the post-acquisition transition of such a large group, some amount of portfolio rationalization, and given the way we recognize revenues, given some of the older losses reflecting in the base of the acquired company. And, of course, at the same time, the portfolio continues to see significant new wins and allowing us to retain or improve our market share. Within the TPA model, the retail, like I said earlier, is significantly moving to a hybrid model. The TPA model retail revenue grew 13.1% year-on-year. The government revenues grew 35% year-on-year. We now service over 31 crore members across one state and four union territories. Please. We play a very meaningful role in delivering our students to me. And lastly, on Paramount integration, we are at what we would call a logical closure of the integration with all of the infrastructure, people, systems, you know, largely integrated. In fact, we speak now over 95% of the group claims and over 80% of the retail claims migrated to Matrix at the end of Q1. And we target a full of the balance claims and the operations to move to Medi-Assist PAC within Q2 F527. And we have demonstrated through multiple disclosures over the last quarters on how the EBITDA margins have improved quarter-on-quarter from our lowest in Q2 F526. And we expect this near-term PHS retention PAC will get fully normalized. So, those are some of the quick updates on our core business. And as we, the core business, we talked about transformation, and we talked about technology. Technology is not just a revenue generator for us as a new line of business, but a lot of the technology that we develop is getting deployed inside the TPA business and driving transformation at scale. And those will be obvious when you look at some of our operational numbers, be it from scale or speed, you've seen substantial amount of improvements in the way the TPA business actually delivers its outcomes. So in recognition of the transformation to set ourselves up for the kind of transformation that we need, we have wrapped up our leadership team in the TPA business. We have Gaurav Bhatnagar, who joined us as the Chief TPA Officer heading up the TPA business. Gaurav comes with an exceptional amount of background in running strategy, private equity, optimizations, and new operations, and substantial background in data analytics and AI deployments in businesses, both for growth and also for... Thank you so much for joining us. And it's also been designated as an SLP by the board in the last board meeting. So that's, and we are, we are ready, and we have the leadership team and the technology in place to leverage the tech that we develop and transform the retail business at scale. As we move to the technology platform, As mentioned earlier, all of our technology is built in-house. Our investments are from our operating cash flows. We did spend some dollars on building our AI stack. In fact, we spent about 24.5 crores over the last six quarters in a board-approved AI roadmap. So the stack itself has evolved in very interesting ways. So we now have solutions for all three stakeholders, which are the membership side for the patients, for the corporates, for the partners, and the payer side, which is our matrix stack, allowing payers to manage their claims end-to-end exceptionally well, and for the providers, which is the Magnum stack. And within this AI stack, we also developed a couple of very interesting end-to-end solutions, one largely doing what we call intelligent document processing, which fundamentally eliminates the need for disjointed interpretation. of various documents that are essential for a claim. These could be bills, this could be discharge summary, this could be labs, this could be medical documents, this could be, you know, past clinical history. IDP has evolved and is fast evolving to be able to summarize all of this and then make it ready for someone to understand and process a claim. And MavenGuard, our fraud race and abuse engine, continues to improve in its outcomes, delivered 480 crores of fraud savings in Q1. Now, all of these facts that we talk about are now available outside MediSS, and they can be deployed independent of each other. And we have today seven inch orders contracted across combinations of Maven, Metrix, and Magnum Stacks, including all of our A components. While we may not be able to share the specifics, we have first of all outcomes-based contract science, which is our compensation type to the outcomes that we deliver in for waste and abuse. And this It brings us to the original point that we made about the platform supporting the retail business. The TPA model retail premiums were at 521 crores, while the platform administers retail premiums by touching over 4,254 crores and representing almost a 29-plus percent market share. And without ability to tease the components out of matrix. And deploy them in standalone components, insurers are adopting them at a fast clip within their own in-house servicing architecture and riding on top of our ability to deploy a plug-and-play capability. And this truly reflects our evolution from TPA administrator to a platform partner. And the platform has also matured beyond the traditional use cases. The platform today acts as the health benefits administrator for NPS Swasta, which is a scheme that is created to allow NPS Swasta subscribers access to emergency funds for health catastrophes, and also very seamlessly integrate the top-up powers that multiple insurers provide. And Swasta needed a platform which combined, integrated with pension fund managers, the CRAs, And allow the withdrawals, allow access to network, catch lists, and then automatic integration with insurance companies, and then stitching it all together in real time for the subscribers, all the while ensuring that the fraud rates and abuse are minimized. So it's a true reflection of the generic capabilities of the platforms we've built and is an indication of the work that we can do in markets outside India. Lastly, from an operations perspective, Medi-Assist DPA, our whole-earned subsidiary, processed over 186,000 pre-operations within five minutes using this platform in Q1. Our Raksha plant service, the service is consistently rated 4.75, delivered zero-weight discharge for over 87,000 members across 6,000 hospitals in Q1. And our matrix implementation star across the 90% mark. And they're on its way to, you know, completing pretty soon. So this is a brief update of technology outcomes that we are able to develop. And it also reflects in the revenue growth of over 55% year-on-year, now reaching about 3.3% of the consolidated revenues. As we move on for a quick update on the international business, we've increased the ownership in Mayfair VK to 91.75% post-21. Converting the original seed investment into a majority-owned subsidiary and dedicated international vehicle for growth. Nikhi Chokar, our former chief business officer of the MediAssist group, has been appointed to lead and transform the international business, and he's going to be full-time on this business, and this is the material commitment to the international growth opportunity. Our first technology deployment contract went live in Thailand from 1st July, 2026. And the multiple corporates are on boarded to digital health events experience for the We have a significant pipeline of these capabilities outside India, and within India, we've also been able to sign up with multiple retail insurers to provide a seamless cover for the travel premiums that are placed in India. The Q1 performance is temporarily impacted due to the ongoing softness of moderation in student, leisure, and marine volumes all in the same quarter. But as some of these other projects kick in, they expect to see the growth coming back or improving. I will now hand over, and we have some more updates, but I will first hand over to call to Sandeep to run you through quick financial updates, and then we will open this up for Q&A.

Thank you.

Thank you, Sufis, and a warm welcome to all the participants. Following are the financial highlights for Q1, FY27. Starting with the revenue profile, the total income was 247 crore during the quarter, representing a growth of 24.9% year-on-year. Revenue from contracts with customers, excluding other income, we call it as operating revenue, was 236.5% representing a growth of 24.1% year-on-year. The segment-wise bifurcution of the revenue from contracts are as follows. The group segment contributed 70.2% to the overall revenue, translating to 166 crore, representing 25.5% growth year-on-year. 9.9% from the retained segment, translating to 23.4 crore, representing 30.1% growth year-on-year. The government business contributed 12% of the overall revenue. Translating to 28.5 crore, representing a 35.3% growth year-on-year. The international business contributed 4.3% equivalent to 10.1 crore, representing a decline of 5.2% year-on-year. The 3.3% revenue came from technology SaaS business. Translating to 7.8 crore, representing a 55.5% growth year-on-year. Moving on to the margin profile, EBITDA excluding other income, we call it as operating EBITDA, was 48 crore, which represents a growth of 14.3% year-on-year, equivalent to a margin of 20.3% on operating revenue for Q1. And it shows her... Circular improvement during the last four quarters. Quarterly EBITDA margin expanded consistently from 20.3% in Q1 to 99.9% in Q4 versus 18.6% in Q3 and 17.1% in Q2. Reported Pat during the quarter was 27.6% grow. Sorry, 27.6% grow. The reported pact included the benefit of a derivative gain on account of the acquisition of non-controlling interest in the international business that led to a one-time benefit of 3.1% grow. Adjusted for this, the normative pact was 24.5% grow. Moving on to QE business sheet and operating matrices as on Q1, key cash position was 245.5 crore, network was 884.1 crore, contract liability 337.4 crore, we continue to remain debt-free, revenue per average headcount for non-government contracts was 13.2 lakhs. I hand over the call back to Satish for further discussions.

Thank you, Sandeep. I have one final update to share. This is about the transition of Dr. Shatwal from the role of an executive chairman to a non-executive, non-independent director and chairman, which is our... I've read board leadership from executive management in line with best practice for the company at this stage of institutional ownership. Dr. Wittgen has been part of this industry and the company for over two decades. His educational background, knowledge of every facet of healthcare industry, vision, acumen, have no parallels. He always placed emphasis on governance, and we've been a board and company for a very long time now. Any company in terms of the institutional ownership and the kind of independence we have on the board, we believe it is now an appropriate time for us to separate the executive leadership and the management and the board leadership, and that this move reflects our commitment to governments, and that has always been the hallmark of how we have run this company. I now request Dr. Vikram to share his thoughts. And so we can all can fuck you in it.

Thank you, Satish, and good morning, everybody, and thank you once again for joining us. As you would know, earlier the board approved a proposal which will go to shareholders at our AGM on the 8th of September, under which I will cease to hold the executive office in this company and will continue as your non-executive chairman. Some of you, you would be aware that Satish has run this business as Chief Executive Officer since 2018. He joined us back in 2013, and the leadership around him has been in place for years. It is important that I stress that nothing about who runs MediAssist changes on the 8th of September. As a company, we operate at scale, increasingly across markets, where the questions that gets asked in the boardroom have to be genuinely hard ones. Our strategy is unchanged. Our domestic and international growth agenda is unchanged. But most importantly, Sponsoring that agenda at the board level continues to expressly be part of my responsibility as chairman. I did want to make sure that I share with you that I am not going anywhere. I am changing what I do. Thank you once again. Satish, over to you.

Thank you, Dr. Chesgall. Back to the chorus, call him. We may open up for Q&A now.

Thank you. Ladies and Chairman, we will now begin the question and answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star and 1 on their touchtone telephone. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, you may press star and 2. Participants are requested to use their handsets while asking a question. Ladies and Chairman, we will wait for a moment while the question queue assembles.

We take the first question from the line of

Sukrit D. Patil from iSyfe and Trade Private Limited. Please go ahead.

Good morning to the team. I have two questions. The first question to Mr. Satish is, just now to understand beyond the regular outlook, what are the top two to three execution priorities you are focusing on in the next few quarters? And alongside that, what do you see as the biggest risk in patient demand shifts, regulatory changes, or competitive pressures? And how are you preparing to manage them while strengthening media assist position in the healthcare administration and team's management space? That's my first question. I'll ask you a conclusion after this. Thank you.

No, I think that sounded like a lot of questions. Thank you. So I'll do my best to give a quick answer. Maybe it's best to start from the second one than the first one. We have a unique privilege as Medias is in this country to operate at the intersection of all the stakeholders' needs, like it is not how most companies are usually set up. Today, we operate at an unprecedented scale. At the intersection of solutions that are delivering to the needs of patients, the members, and then their employers and families, the providers, the caregivers, who are actually diluting the service and also originating the cost of health care, and the payers who are actually financing the health care costs according to the plans and the benefits that people have signed up for. Today, we have a very unique vantage point as Mediasis to understand all three aspects at scale. And what has been fascinating for me and given my part-tech background is how the AI-led technology built out is allowing us to solve these problems with a very fresh perspective And very seamlessly orchestrating... Agenda workflows across the three stakeholder types and solve problems that really matter to the world. This is one example of how we've deployed technology is today the hospitals need three to four hours to generate a bill once the patient is ready for discharge. Our prediction models predict on the day of admission what the out-of-pocket would be for that individual and allow the individual to pay estimated out-of-pocket and walk out of the hospital and leaving the entire cashless process to be a conversation between payer, DPA, and the provider and then not actually leave the consumer out of the equation. Thank you. This goes straight into how the regulatory intent is around policyholder protection and policyholder experience. For example, the idea says the patient should be able to get out of the hospital as quickly as possible from the time they're cleared medically, right? It's not about documentation. It's not about the process. It's not about claims and objectification and technology. It's about the patient and the experience. So, in a lot of ways, if you look at our approach to technology and our approach to how we build up the business, it is to deliver on the underlying regulatory intent, which is fundamentally centered around policy world protection, but at the same time, enabling all stakeholders to contribute to it, not just take on the burden only in the back-end process. That's saying that continues to be our process, and we see this. Working exceptionally well in markets, even outside India. So that sort of brings us to your first question on what our execution priorities are. I think we've been very clear and consistent. One is how do we transform our India TPA business to be even more efficient and deploy more technology and truly. We are a digital self-help company. We publish many of our metrics on our website, and I would request and encourage, if you have a moment, check out the insights section on our website, where we even present our turnaround times in real time today. The second priority is the technology business. We are in a very exciting phase with a very substantial pipeline of insurers, brokers, corporates in India and outside of India. Converting this into a core execution engine and also contributing to growth and margins of the company. The third is the international business. Again, we have a very interesting pipeline of capabilities beyond the traditional IPMI, which is international private medical insurance space that we played in, which is subject to the vagaries of people traveling, not traveling, employers sending employees abroad. We are building very long-term moats in our international business, again, predominantly based on our tech and network capabilities. We have just created the leadership team. We are doubling down on the work that we will do on the international business. So these three remain our execution priorities for the 4th April future.

Thank you. My second question to Mr. Daga is, from a financial point of view, just want to understand what key risks or challenges do you anticipate in the coming quarters and what specific measures have been taken to manage margins, cash flow, and balance sheet strength, especially in areas like cost pressures, receivables, and compliances. Thank you.

Thank you for your question.

Our first priority at this point of time is to completely integrate the dilution, which came around Q2 of last year when we acquired Paramount. Consistently, during the last four quarters, you have seen that we have gradually moved the Paramount part of the business into the full stack. Technology stack of Mediasis, which has given us 320 BIPs improvement during the last four quarters. A very insignificant part of that deployment is still pending, and we expect that to get completed in the next one quarter or so. From the value sheet perspective, Our key focus happens to be on reducing the receivables by increasing our connections faster than the previous historical trends. You will see from the debtor's perspective, we have consistently reduced our DSOs on a quarterly basis when you compare the same from the same trendline last year. Like for the quarter-ending issue, we have seen a 4.5% improvement in the DSOs versus a similar trend of last year, and that too on a higher base of achievements. So, at this point of time, The focus is only to sort of, you know, bring in efficiency and productivity by deploying the technology stack into our operational framework and squeezing every single opportunity which exists for us.

Thank you.

Thank you, and best wishes.

Thank you. We take the next question from the line of Rakash Kapadia from Kapadia Financial Services. Please go ahead.

Yeah, thanks for the opportunity. A couple of questions from my end. You know, government business is the fastest growing segment in our pie, and it's around 12% of revenue. So, how does working capital behave in this segment, and do we want to cap revenues from this segment as, you know, cash flows could get impacted? Because, you know, here I would assume the receivable cycle would be slightly longer. And second question is, you know, what will it... Take to, you know, get back to 23% with our margins. And given what we've seen in Q1 and, you know, given that we are a debt-free company and a net cash company, is it fair to say FY27 will be a record profit for the company?

Thank you, Prakash, Satish here. I'll attempt to answer some of your questions. I think government, we've been a significant player in the government business. We have a fair set of standards within each line of business on the quality of revenue as a bar. We have, I think, just to give you that sense, so we have a... Fairly stringent quality of revenue bar in every line of business, including our group business where we have substantial market share. So the government business coming together, especially with the acquisitions over a period of time, and giving us the opportunity to participate in 16 states. And we continuously evaluate the schemes for their contribution, the growth, and the margin characteristics. So, government is marginocrity, and government... is, you know, the collections are the safest because they come from the state governments and the national, you know, central government, and over the last few years, the schemes have significantly become performance-driven in the sense that there are measurable KPIs, there are measurable asks, there are measurable performance and predictable, you know, payments. So this is a space that we continue to watch, like any other line of business. So nothing unusual in the government business growth. It's really a matter of the mix of revenues in this quarter. There's nothing very specific that we're doing or not doing, you know, in the government business.

Okay, okay. So, it doesn't, you know, lead to a very elongated working capital cycle or cash flow strain is what I was trying to understand, Satish.

No, it does not, and our DSOs, that Sandeep just answered in the previous question, are for the consolidated business, which includes the government business.

Okay, okay. Okay.

And to come back to your question on the margin improvements, we were historically, we had to go about 23% in the margin business. And last year, Q1, before Paramount integration, we reported a 22% margin. So our immediate order of the day is to finish the remaining activities in the Paramount integrations and get back to back. I think that's our immediate audit thing, and we don't currently break out the margin profiles by, you know, line of business, but at the same time, we don't provide an adjusted bit of margins that account for our investments in some of our growth businesses, right? So some of these expenses are also funded, you know, by our own cash flows.

Satish, just a directional question, you know, with technology and investments, when, you know, do we see some of these translating to operating leverage or, you know, getting to a stage where, you know, costs grow lesser? Obviously, you know, we are doing, you know, a lot of investments, a lot of new things, and some of these are, you know, I understand outcome-based products. So, at what scale or percentage, you know, do we see some of? These levers coming in terms of higher margins or operating leverage, I'm not looking at a specific number, but I'm looking at the direction or, you know, what will it take to get some of these technology investments monetized. Obviously, it's too early days for us, but, you know, directionally, if you can throw some color, that will be very helpful.

No, absolutely. I think technology plays a very pivotal role in how we have built this business. Clearly, it is the reason why we are able to today process as many claims and with as much volumes and actually scale this business to this level. So fundamentally, the scale of the business itself is fully supported by the technology and the investments that we have made. And you've seen... The historical, you know, EBITDA margins of the companies that we've acquired, similar TPAs, we operated a far greater EBITDA margin. So that's the base case. So directionally, I see, you know, the technology playing a role in all three lines of business. One in the TPA business where we bring in more and more technology and self-help. Membership being able to access everything in real time and through digital channels will be a lever. Second is the technology itself is a revenue and a growth contributor and possibly on track to deliver margins that are probably, you know, double the usual margins, right, in pure technology contracts. And third is, I think for the first time, We have a contract outside India using technologies that are developed in India and tested in India at this scale, and it's been very fulfilling, the experience, and also the funnel is very promising, and it is allowing us to deploy all these stacks, which is the patient side, the payer side, and the provider side stacks, in markets outside India, and those yields and the margins and especially their ability to pay for outcomes. is far superior to how, compared to how this market operates, so I expect technology to play a central role in that as well. I think broadly, these are the directional cues, right, for where technology will generate value.

Understood. That's very clear. Thank you, and all the best. Thank you.

Thank you. Participants in the interest of time and fairness to others, we request you to restrict to two questions for participants. We take the next question from the line of Naveed Virani from Bastion Research. Please go ahead.

Hi, good morning, everyone, and thank you for the opportunity. My first question is on the retail business stuff.

So, I just want to understand how are we now, you know, looking at the retail business because what I am able to see is that the traditional TPA business is kind of plateaued or something, but at the same time, the technology piece is, you know, quite encouraging and growing very fast. So, how should one, you know, interpret the trajectory of the retail business going forward? That's my first question, sir. Thank you, Navid. It's not that the traditional model is necessarily going away. It's partly also to do with how we report. Today, the PPA model, you know, in very simple words means that the insurer has introduced their policy holder to Mediasis and said, henceforth, Mediasis will take care of all of your needs. From onboarding to customer support to cashless to reimbursement claims and so on. It's the introduction, right? That's the third party. Outside the introduction, all of the work that the insurer does, whether it's by using Mediasist or on their own, remains absolutely the same. It's identical. So today we choose to break out how we report our numbers. So today, in our retail TPA numbers, we only report those where, on the policy contract, our name is written and we've been formally introduced to the policyholder. It doesn't mean that we are not participating in retail. It is likely that, for example, as an insurer, they could have their own digital interface that they would like their customers to use, but we could still be running all of the back end. Publishing through technology integrations, updates in their digital interface, so the customer still deals with the insurer, but all the work is actually being done. Today, we don't necessarily present all of those numbers as the TPA model. So I think it is best going forward to look at the total retail market that we are able to access, be it in the traditional TPA model or as a platform model. And secondly, the technology revenues will be a sign of how much of the work are we able to influence using our technology, right? Are we able to, one, do the back-end, two, deliver network and other services, three, deliver. Fraud, Waste, and Abuse as a set of no-course services for delivers and digital technologies where the members can actually access and so on, right? So I think this, as you look at retail plus technology revenues, should be a reasonable understanding of how our own retail market share is improving.

Thank you. Thank you. That's helpful.

So, second one is on the overall business growth. So, now, we are already a very substantial part of the, you know, growth PPA business. Uh, the paramount businesses also been settled into the base completely now. Uh, retail is, uh, technology is something which is, you know, encouragingly, you know, building well, but it will take time to, you know, scale is what I understand. Uh, so how should one think about, you know, uh, overall business growth or how are you guys thinking about business growth as a management team? Uh, are you guys thinking about at least, uh, you know, making kind of a growth or something like that is, uh, the last question. Thank you, everyone, and welcome to the call. So on the call business, we've always said we'll grow at par or faster than the market in the group and retail segments, which I think we will continue to hold to that directionally. Government is an opportunistic play in the sense that there are schemes that we are able to execute. There are things that we may or may not want to. But the government will continue to be a meaningful contributor from a, say, high-scale and, you know, revenue perspective. But more importantly, you will see, I think, much faster growth rates both in the technology business that we've already demonstrated since last year because we first started publishing technology revenues as a part of our consolidated revenues in Q1 last year, even before Paramount came in, knowing fully well that the PPA business will substantially grow. Now, on the consolidated business, technology is at 3.3%, so that should give you a sense of how, you know, some of these investments and groups are, you know, panning out. The next is the international business. International business, you know, Q1 is not a reflection of what the international business is capable of. Today, we have technology contacts in place. In Thailand, for example, we have contacts with Indian traditional in-house retail insurers in place, giving us access to over 50% of the travel premiums, you know, that are placed in India. Today, as Mayfair, we can deliver cashless in 180 countries, right? So, we have, you know, some of those capabilities, you know, that are built out, and we are very excited about what the international business will bring to the growth, especially considering That the yields in the international business are often, you know, multiple times.

Okay. Thank you. Thank you for your question. Thank you.

Thank you. We take the next question from the line of Manjeet from Samia Advisors. Please go ahead.

Hi. Good morning. Am I audible? Yes, Manjit, you are.

Thank you. Good morning.

Thanks. Good morning, Satish. Satish, I was just curious still on the core, you know, our old group TPA business, if you could help me with, you know, the organic growth there in some sense. And I know, you know, we have now merged Paramount, so it's a bit tough, but I'll still try this. In Q1 FY26, you know, the group revenue which we reported was about 134 crores, right? Now, I understand there have been certain, you know, curling of customers on the Paramount side where it doesn't make sense. But on this 134 crores, if you could give some sense on how much you would have grown, because this was the business we had done last year, you know, organically in our base sort of. So that's question one. Question two is, you know, you mentioned that we have signed our first outcome-based contract, and congratulations on that, and, you know, I appreciate you can't give much details, but it would just give some sense directionally on how do these outcomes work. Is it in terms of, you know, savings you generate over and over what was already happening, or, you know, the entire savings you are generating, and, you know, what amount of, you know, claims or percentage claims sort of will run on your system for this. Thank you so much.

Thank you, Manjik. Like you said, it's a complex math for us to put out the media system separately considering zero four quarters. And of course, the base also had the trailing revenues, some of those accounts that were not already in the book when we acquired it. So I think maybe there actually, you know, we always presented three, four metrics in the past, right? Which is our retention rates are the same store growth, right? So retention rates are a little over 90% this year on the consolidated book, partly the portfolio rationalization, partly some of the challenges in onboarding such a large book where there is some accretion, and more also a slightly higher base effect of what was based in Q1. I think that's the retention number. Obviously, we've been historically in 93, 94% retention business, and one of the important things for us to track is, you know, how do we sort of, you know, get back there. And secondly, I think from a same store growth perspective, I think I've said this in fact. Last year ended, it was close to about 7-8% blended, the same-store growth of the retained customers. We are still seeing similar same-store growths in the group business. Slightly lower on the large IT companies, but slightly higher on all of the others outside IT. So averaging out about 7-8%, same-store growth. And we continue to add substantially. We have benefited previously because we added a lot of new business in Q1, and our business is best seen over, say, On an annual basis, because if we add a lot of new business in a particular year, say in October or in December, not all the revenues are occurring that year. So I think these are the three effects because of which you probably have those questions. But to summarize, our retention is at about 90-odd percent for the reasons I stated. Same store growth is still holding at around 80-odd percent, similar to what it was end of last year. IT companies are slightly slower. The rest is, you know, much faster. We are still adding a lot of new business, but the new business has its own seasonality, so some of these numbers are best seen over, you know, four-tailing quarters. I know that helps you.

That is just one follow-up here. You know, when assuming there were no new business additions, when you say same store growth of 8%, does this 8% translate also into revenue growth or is this same store growth of volume terms and then revenue growth may be higher or lower than that? Just a basic question.

No, same store growth has, it just, it improves the underlying base premium, right? If you have a corporate that was paying a crore or piece of premium, same store growth has 7% basically means they are paying 1.07 crores this year as a premium. Obviously, revenue is a function of the yield on the premium contract.

Got it. And the second question on the outcome is from...

I would encourage you to please join back the queue for follow-up questions. Thank you. We take the next question from the line of Dheeraj Asman from Intrate Equities. Please go ahead.

Hello, sir, and good morning on a great set of results. I just wanted to know about the industry that we are mostly catering to the group part of the, you know, insurance TPA, and also, like, mostly it is from the PSU side, and I've been seeing that a lot of the four PSUs are trying, like, to get to change to HITPA, which they have created a different entity for handling TPA in-house. So can you like share some light on it, like what is it and is it like an issue for us that it can be a shift that premiums from PSUs, which we are handling mostly, most of them, being the biggest TPA, is there a risk that premiums will migrate to that segment?

Thank you for your question, Jirash.

I think we've been operating in the same market landscape for more than a decade now. But I don't want to comment specifically on any one TPA. Every insurer today has some amount of work happening in-house and some amount of work happening with TPAs. The distribution changes by product or by line of business, whether it is group, retail, or government, right? So that's an industry dynamic of how we work. I think what we should probably look at is the good proxies are our group retention rates and, more importantly, the regulatory provision that allows a policyholder to request for a choice of their TPA. I'm an insurer, as long as the insurer has a working relationship, you know, with that TP. I think we're fundamentally living in a world and living in a business where if we deliver what we have to deliver well and deliver better than everybody else, and we absolutely have the right to win. And I don't think... It's about any one specific arrangement that anybody has. And today, we spent much part of this call explaining how even insurance companies that have only in-house operations in detail are benefiting from some of the components and technologies that we have built. So we will always find a way to meaningfully contribute to this industry and to every insurer, and of course, may generate a new sort of fit.

And I also understand that our P&M retention for the group segment is showing that 90% this quarter. Is that due to the paramount thing?

It's a, like we said, it's mostly in our mixed portfolio, because given that it's almost four quarters, you know, the way this business works, given most of the contracts are annual contracts. From the time we onboard a TPA, retention becomes our responsibility. So, in the combined business, between a couple of challenges in onboarding search last book, plus the higher base that he had last year, plus some amount of rationalization of the portfolio itself, is why we are at a 90%.

What would be this number if you can…

It's a little hard for us to break that out today.

Gotcha. Okay, sure, sir. Just one last thing. Can you break down what is the bifurcation of depreciation in our books? Because we haven't written the annual report of 26, so if you can give me...

Yeah, so could we take this question offline with our team? Would that be okay? Because there will be a few more people waiting with you. Thank you. Thanks.

Thank you so much.

Thank you. We take the next question from the line of Sandeep Khotari from East Lane Capital. Please go ahead.

Hi, Satish. Just a quick question on this NPS swastity, which you have reported in your numbers. What is this? What is the potential? And what is our relationship? What is the kind of work we will do there? If you could throw some light, that would be very helpful.

Well, that's a great question, Sandeep. Thank you. Good morning. And NPS FASTA, I mean, we are aware of NPS, the pension scheme. There are millions of subscribers of NPS. Historically, NPS has been an annuity only kind of model. So today, NPS FASTA allows the subscribers to allocate a portion of their corpus towards health expenses. And when they have a health expense need or when they need to be, when they have another pocket expense, they're able to draw down in real time from their pension accounts that are set aside for this purpose and pay a portion of their health care expenses and then automatically trigger other insurance policies that are a high deductible or a certain kind of deductible. And... Aggregate this whole funding across the NPS account, their cash, and the insurer payoffs into paying for hospitalization expenses, right? So the scheme was created to support subscribers from high out-of-pocket expenses, and secondly, using their accruals rather than just one-off expenses to pay for these out-of-pocket expenses. Our role in this team is NPS as a definition of health benefits administrator, as a technology platform that connects the members, the record-keeping agencies, the CRAs, and the pension funds, insurance companies, network, and payments, all into one single platform. You know, so... Eventually, for the entire membership to benefit from a scheme like this. So that's the role that we play as a technology platform and a network aggregator. Does that answer your question, Sam?

What's the potential for us? So we are the interface for the customer for this entire benefit delivery, if I could say that. So what's the potential long-term for something like this for us?

The potential long-term is obviously for the platform, certain revenues, and where we work with the insurance companies, the incremental revenues, right? And today, it's in the initial stages, but we hope that the scheme will extend to a substantial part of the NPS membership, and it's been formally notified as a product and offering.

Understood. If I may ask one more question, what is the pushback you get from the insurers when you are trying to sell your technology platform to them? What is the big pushback? Because logically, it makes sense. So what takes it to get the sale process done?

I will put this as a pushback, Sandeep. I think, you know, finally every insurance company is different. Every product is different. Everybody has different work, different ethos and, you know, claims management process. It's been very encouraging today. We probably have conversations, contracts, POCs running with half of the insurers today. So those have been very encouraging, and I think The cycle, the longer duration of cycle, if any, is fundamentally to understand how, into their existing process, our technology can seamlessly integrate, because not everybody is in a position to change their core systems overnight. But for those who are adopting our core system metrics, everything is completely seamless. For those who are unable to move out of their core systems, We have some little bit of additional effort in understanding on how we plug into their workflows, but we now have contacts with all of the mixes where we're deploying matrix. We're also deploying these capabilities with our underlying matrix platform into their existing core platform. So we have proofs of concepts and validations for both and including contracts.

Great. Thank you.

Thank you. We take the next question from the line of Vikas Sharda from NT Asset Management. Please go ahead.

Yeah, good morning. One question on the data point which you report for the group segment, that the PUM growth for PSUs is 28.9% for you, which is 30% higher than the industry. So does it imply that the PSU group health business specifically for the industry was down? Why, why?

Yeah, that is true. Our share of wallet has improved. In fact, in both, in both the sectors, both in PSU and private, our share of wallet has improved.

And what would be the overall group health insurance industry growth, let's say, for this quarter?

About 14%.

14% for the industry, but do you think within the PSUs, we're down YY?

Yeah, negative 1.5. And again, what industry reports of group premiums is not just employer-employee. It also includes other group products. We don't have a public breakdown of employer-employees versus the others. But considering it's predominantly employer-employee, I think it's fair to look at it as we improve our share of wallet.

Perfect. Thank you.

Thank you. Ladies and Chairman, with that, we conclude the question and answer session. I now have the conference over to Mr. Cyril Paul from E&Y for closing comments.

We are available offline to address any further queries you may have regarding the business and the financials. Please feel free to write to us at investor.relations at mediasis.in. That's investor.relations at mediasis.in to be added on our mailing list. We look forward to staying in touch with you and further interactions. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you, everyone. Thank you.

Thank you. On behalf of MediAssist Healthcare Services Limited, that concludes this conference call. Thank you for joining us, and you may now disconnect your lines.