Another year has gone by, and with it, another set of solid numbers. I
am pleased that the team at Aurionpro is making a habit of this, and based on where we are
and the opportunities ahead, I'm confident this will not change anytime soon. Any
growing business is a combination of a good macro environment, the right market segment, a
strong management team, and a bit of luck. Over the last few years, we have had it all,
helping your company grow by over 30% compounded. However, along the way, we have created
a phenomenal management team and a set of integrated, unified offerings at Aurionpro that,
I dare say, will sustain our growth even in the absence of other favorable factors.
The financial performance was strong across all key metrics. Revenue
grew by over 30%, with solid EBITDA and PAT margins, and a healthy ROCE of approximately
20%. The Company has witnessed consistent growth across all key segments. With strong
growth expected this year, we will add revenue equivalent to what we were generating four
years ago—and that's no mean feat.
As I have mentioned in my past letters, I firmly believe that the
quality of your offerings, a customer-centric approach, and a dedicated team with a strong
ethos—who breathe customer opportunities and problems—are the cornerstones of
sustained financial success. Along with all these, you need a strong management team to
keep moving constantly and stay ahead of the curve.
Fortunately, over the last two years, under the strong leadership of
Ashish Rai, Aurionpro has built a phenomenal team. A combination of excellent new leaders,
the addition of highly motivated entrepreneur-managers through acquisitions, and the top
team at Aurionpro when Ashish joined have collectively become a force to be reckoned with,
and the industry is taking note.
I would like to welcome Sanjay Varma as President, along with Shekhar
Mulatti and Sanjay Bali, to work with Ashish in building your company further. With this
team—and more to come—we are now looking at the world as our playground,
expanding beyond India and Asia, as we have done in the past. This move will require us to
dramatically alter how we have grown thus far. I am glad we have all the necessary arsenal
in terms of the quality of our products and team.
As we set the tone for the future, I look back at the past year with
great satisfaction. It has been a transformative year in every aspect. A string of
game-changing deals, such as with the State Bank of India and the Haryana Antyodaya
Parivar Parivahan Yojana (HAPPY) Scheme, has further deepened our partnerships with global
partners, especially Mastercard. We built a strong sales team across the region, started
acquiring customers across all of Asia, and created strong brand recognition and respect
for Aurionpro and its offerings. I am also very excited that we recently received final
authorization from the Reserve Bank of India to operate as an online Payment Aggregator. I
am confident AuroPay will carve out a strong niche for itself in the payment world in the
time to come.
As we set about expanding the business, Ashish and the team have worked
diligently hard to ensure that our internal systems and processes align with our
ambitions. During the year, we have implemented new ERP and CRM solutions, which will
streamline operations, enhance decision-making, and foster stronger customer
relationships, leading to improved efficiency and business growth. Additionally, the
rollout of a new HR system has seamlessly managed the addition of over 700 people across
all geographies, improved and streamlined HR policies, and helped create a strong
marketing team to keep pace with our evolving needs. I applaud all business leaders for
their hard work throughout the year.
As we were growing the business, we realized there were areas where
acquisitions made sense and would allow us to deepen and broaden our offerings quickly.
With the team's capability and hunger to grow and the opportunities staring us in the
face to supplement our offerings, we raised over 600 crore rupees to strengthen our
ability to move quickly and seize the right opportunities. The acquisitions of Omnifin and
Arya.ai last year have been successfully completed, and the teams at both companies are
happy companions. With Arya.ai, we have started integrating AI offerings across our
products. We continue to be on the lookout for the right inorganic products and companies
that can assimilate into the Aurionpro family.
Along with business growth, we are also committed to working with all
stakeholders to do our bit in making society better. Aurocares is one such initiative in
that direction, and along with business, we will work on expanding the footprint of
Aurocares' offerings in the time to come as well.
I hope to spend more time making Aurionpro a good corporate citizen and
share its success with all who can benefit from it the most.
I close this letter with immense confidence in Team Aurionpro to be on
a path of strong and sustained multi-year growth. I would especially like to thank all our
shareholders for their support during this transformative year for Aurionpro. I would also
like to express my sincere gratitude to our customers, vendors, government partners, and
all other stakeholders whose unwavering support is essential to our success. A special
thanks to our dedicated team members, whose relentless efforts are driving us toward our
goals.
With your continued support, Aurionpro is poised to achieve even
greater heights.
Thank you!
CEO'S MESSAGE
Dear Shareholders,
On behalf of the entire Aurionpro team, I want to extend our heartfelt
gratitude for your unwavering support in our mission to build a world-class products and
platform leader, rooted in India. Reflecting on another year of solid progress, it is
truly a privilege to witness the significant additions across our stakeholder ecosystem
– clients, investors, strategic partners, and employees. The trust and support that
you have shown us is both humbling and exhilarating. It is also a great responsibility,
one that we aim to live up to every day and exceed in every way.
We added more new clients in FY24 than any other year in our history,
bringing our client base to over 300 institutions that trust Aurionpro with their
mission-critical technology needs. We also had the privilege of welcoming prominent
institutional investors who strongly align with our long-term vision and ambitions.
Perhaps the most rewarding addition has been the 700+ Aurionites who chose to join us,
making Aurionpro one of the deepest pools of fintech, deep-tech and AI talent in the
industry. We were thrilled to welcome the amazing teams from Omnifin, Interactive
Communication, and Arya.ai into Team Aurionpro, each bringing industry-leading products
and deep expertise in their respective domains. This level of support from clients,
investors, employees, partners, and the wider industry is a testament to how strongly our
mission, strategy, and business execution resonate with them. I have never been more
confident in our chosen path, and we are committed to doubling down on our efforts with
even greater vigour and discipline as we continue to build the business in the coming
years.
Technology is not an industry where one can compete with a static
playbook for long. While we stay true to our core principles and capital allocation
framework, we have to remain agile and align our execution with the most significant
value-capture opportunities. Our approach depends on the segments we operate in, the
offerings we bring to market, and the operating model we use for execution. The segments
we have chosen have large, visible demand runways for the medium term, so there's no
need for major shifts. However, if a compelling capital allocation opportunity arises and
we have the capability to execute against it, we are open to adding new segments. Our
technology offerings within each segment will continue to evolve and we will keep
investing in R&D and adding offerings at an even faster pace than before.
With significant advancements in AI and the value realization from
high- impact use cases, we are convinced that we are experiencing one of the most
fundamental shifts in tech spending and priorities that we have seen in history of
enterprise tech.
Take banking, for example, our largest segment. We have seen several
technology waves before: core banking transformations, evolution of risk technology with
regulatory overhauls, the onset of digital, cloud computing, and more. As impactful as
those waves have been, never before have banks been compelled to re-evaluate their entire
business process landscape for value creation opportunities like they do today with AI use
cases. Moreover, banks are now viewing the data stored in their enterprise systems as a
new opportunity to create and capture value through AI-driven solutions. This presents a
significant opportunity for an agile, R&D-focused, enterprise applications player like
Aurionpro to lead with mature Enterprise- grade AI offerings that allow banks to extract
the promise of AI at scale, directly where they are already using Aurionpro's
mission- critical applications to run their business processes. Put simply, we believe
this is a once- in- a- generation opportunity for Aurionpro to climb the pecking order of
enterprise tech players even more rapidly than in recent years. Together with Arya.ai,
which we recently acquired, we plan to make AI/ML integral to every Aurionpro application.
We are investing significantly in rolling out a comprehensive suite of Enterprise AI
offerings starting with the Banking, Insurance, and Payments segments, eventually
extending into many other segments as we evolve.
Both our business segments continued to show strong momentum throughout
the year. Banking & Fintech experienced robust growth, transitioning from a phase of
large-scale product buildouts over the past few years to aggressively targeting the market
to capitalise on the strong demand for our offerings. The notable growth in this segment,
especially in the second half of the year, is a direct result of strategic investments we
have made over the past few years in building new products, significantly expanding sales
channels, and forging key partnerships within the wider ecosystem. Key wins in this
segment include the highly sought-after 100 Cr+ win from State Bank of India as well as
several other prominent wins for our Transaction banking platform. We also recently signed
a multiyear partnership with a major US fintech giant, securing initial wins of over USD
10 million, paving the way for significant growth in both the US and global markets.
Additionally, we achieved the first successful deployment of our product at a large bank
through our strategic partnership with Finastra.
We continue to enhance our digital front-end solutions for the banking
and insurance segments, a portfolio that has been significantly strengthened by the
acquisition of Interactive Communication. These significant proof points highlight the
effectiveness of our strategy. We strongly believe that we will see the accelerating
impact of our investments in products and partnerships in the new financial year and
beyond.
The growth in the TIG segment also remains strong, driven by robust
demand in smart mobility, hybrid cloud, and data center segments. Our global sales
channels and strategic partnerships with Mastercard and Vix are performing very well,
resulting in a solid order book and pipeline. This success further validates the
uniqueness and effectiveness of our sales and partnership strategy. Key wins in this
segment include significant strategic orders in the data center and hybrid cloud spaces.
Additionally, we secured a particularly rewarding win from the Government of Haryana to
roll out the socially significant and ambitious Haryana Antyodaya Parivar Parivahan Yojana
Scheme, which covers the issuance of 5 million open-loop cards and has the potential to
establish Aurionpro as one of the leading players in the open-loop NCMC card market.
As we continue to scale up Aurionpro, we need to remain mindful of the
challenges inherent in rapidly expanding an enterprise. Scaling up talent is front and
center and we have been very fortunate in attracting some of the top industry talent to
Aurionpro. We need to stay sharply focused on scaling our product and delivery
organizations as we grow. We continue to make significant investments in strengthening the
technology backbone across the enterprise, including continuing roll outs of ERP, CRM, HR
systems along with various tools to assist our product teams to enhance productivity. This
year, we have also added Pune and Noida to our list of development centers, further
enhancing the specialized pools of expertise available to us. We also continue to invest
in expanding sales and demand generation organizations in markets across Asia, the US,
SEA, MENA, London, and EMEA.
As I close out this letter, I am filled with gratitude for you, our
shareholders, as well as our team members and customers for their unwavering support and
trust in our vision. Your commitment has been instrumental in driving our growth, enabling
us to become one of the largest enterprise fintech players in Asia and positioning us to
become a significant global player in the years to come. We have a clear strategic
blueprint for our chosen segments, and as we press the pedal on growth, we will continue
to use long- term shareholder value as the primary lens through which we evaluate our
decisions.
Thank you for being part of this journey with us.