CEO’s Message

FY21 was, by all account, an extraordinarily difficult year, with the unprecedented COVID pandemic-led crisis seriously impacting economies and industries worldwide.

For the first time in the history of the Company, we started work-from-home operations in March 2020. We moved with rapid agility to roll out our Business Continuity Plan (BCP), in order to meet SLAs and client commitments. This was done after working through numerous design-aspects of the new paradigm such as information security, availability of desktops and last-mile connectivity in the houses of employees, including those who were at Tier 2 locations. Closing and subsequent reopening of 270 front offices while adhering to local laws was managed in a disciplined fashion while serving investors and distributors through alternate modes. As a result of our agile response to the transforming situation, I am happy to share that despite the extraordinary difficulties triggered by the pandemic, we stayed on course to ensure that our MF customers and investors were not impacted and continued to get high fidelity service without any expansion in risk.

It is pertinent to share with you that the Company delivered uncompromised service levels despite the transaction volumes scaling to historic high of 86 million in Q4-FY21.

I would like to thank my leadership team and the entire workforce whose commendable spirit of commitment and energy helped face the unprecedented situation head-on and helped us deliver to the clients and regulatory commitments. I am proud and thankful for their complete support and earnest cooperation.

I am grateful for all the contribution and guidance provided by the Board to help us stride through this challenging year and keep our commitment to the various stakeholders we serve.

I am thankful to the regulators for their guidance and responsive support.

Our strong focus on operational excellence and financial prudence enabled us to report positive performance, marked by a historic high in Assets under Management. Average Assets under Management (AAuM) of CAMS serviced funds grew to 22.0 trillion in Q4 of FY21, enabling the Company to register a 19.4% increase in consolidated net profit to Rs. 205.29 crore in FY21, as against FY20. Revenue from operations rose 0.8% year-on-year to Rs. 705.50 crore in FY21 over FY20.

Focus on client delivery through service and process innovations continued through the year. Several automation initiatives, in the areas of transaction posting, systematic transaction processing, reconciliation, eKYC, brokerage computation and several others were carried out. These are designed to deliver improved quality & productivity and offer significant accretion to risk mitigation.

During the year, we supported the Mutual Fund industry with implementation of several high impact regulatory and tax-related changes. The Company is participating in regulatory initiatives on enhancing investor convenience and technological innovations like creation of the industry sandbox.

Company’s core value is reflected in its mission statement – “Our Mission… Your Growth” – i.e., investors, distributors, clients, employees and every other stakeholder. One measure that the Company truly cherishes is how our service recipients value our services. The annual customer satisfaction survey, in which 22,000 respondents participated, shows 95.3% of participants rating their experience after consuming our services as satisfied or very satisfied.

Our market share, as measured by AAuM serviced by us as a percentage of industry AAuM was 69% as at March 2021. All the top five AMCs and seven of the top 10 AMCs in the country are being serviced by CAMS.

Driving our positive performance was our fervent focus on technology upgradation and digitalisation, as tools to empower investors and intermediaries. As electronic & digital modes of transaction via wealth management platforms, stock exchanges, AMC websites, fintech platforms and our own portals increased with the onset of COVID (and the closure of customer service centres), we heightened the monitoring of electronic linkages, APIs and the overall network in order to ensure uninterrupted powering of the electronic touchpoints. We also extensively educated and promoted usage of digital conveniences via our website and social media. The launch of OTP-based Aadhaar eKYC, edge360 mobile app and investor services using AI and ML technologies proved to be game-changing conveniences for investors and intermediaries. Our digital platforms continued to make significant contribution to the digital adoption momentum in the industry, with myCAMS touching the 4 million user base and GoCORP portal for Institutional investors contributing to over 20% of transaction value in liquid schemes for Mutual Funds serviced by us. Key automation-led process enhancements in core processes were successfully completed, leading to visible benefits such as no-human-touch processes, vastly reduced risks and near zero defects.

As technology became the driver from being an enabler in the new business environment, we made significant investments during the year to upgrade our technology infrastructure and information security standards. Having always considered business continuity of core processes for the MF industry as critical to our business strategy, we relocated the third data centre to Mumbai in the midst of COVID-related challenges in order to bring a significant lift to our BCP strategy. Our cyber security posture has been reviewed by an internationally renowned agency BitSight, which has rated the Company at an advanced score of 800 in FY21. This is a market-leading score and vindicates the robust security posture.

In FY21, we embarked to significantly enhance our value proposition for AIF / PMS segment across all areas of client services and operations and engage with clients as an end-to-end, full stack service partner. In that direction, we launched two industry impacting technology solutions viz. Digital On-boarding platform for PMS Advisors (and RMs) and Web portal for AIF/PMS Investors. Both of these are seeing positive market response. We currently serve over 98 fund houses across their 280+ schemes.

CAMS Insurance Repository opens e-Insurance Accounts for the insured, primarily in life insurance segment and is expanding its reach to the non-life & General Insurance segment as well. In the technology-enabled processing service, it expanded service scope in the persistency business while the Insurance Repository maintained its growth trajectory and now has more than 3.3 million digital policies, aided by our social media presence and new digital communication strategy.

CAMSPay ACH business saw some depression in the revenue partly due to pandemic-led volume drop and partly due to price compression. However, there has been positive traction in sign-ups and adoption to digital payment offering from tech-led financial entities. During the year, RBI came out with regulations on Payment Aggregators like CAMSPay and application for registration has been made through wholly-owned subsidiary, CAMS Payment Services Private Limited.

We expanded our product portfolio during the year, to cater to the evolving needs of our existing clients and to expand our client base. Our new service offerings Recon Dynamix and Digital Lien against Mutual Funds have received good response. Account Aggregator platform, NPS Central Record Keeping Agency and Payment Aggregator services are the new areas we are pursuing to expand our business in the emerging financial infrastructure and platform-based services arena. While continuing to broaden and deepen our offerings, we exited businesses characterised by slow growth and low profitability (outsourcing services to banking & NBFC clients and German operations of our software subsidiary).

With the pandemic necessitating a bigger outreach to the vulnerable communities, we expanded the frontiers of our CSR programmes during the year with a series of programmes for migrant labour, economically weak citizens in slums and frontline health workers in Chennai and Mumbai.

As mentioned earlier, your Company remains steadfastly focussed on creating and delivering long-term value to all its stakeholders through a holistic approach, centred on sustainable operations. To this end, we are continuously enhancing our ESG (Environment, Safety and Governance) focus, which we sharpened further during FY21 to enable a safe and secure business environment for all our stakeholders. While effective risk management has always been central to our strategic thrust, the complexities of the new business norms triggered by the pandemic led us to raise the bar even higher. We remain committed to continued efforts for mitigating/ minimising the risks of our business for our investors and clients and shall continue to strengthen our risk management framework in the coming quarters.

Though FY22 started on a disruptive note as a result of the deadly second wave of Coronavirus, the overall prospects of the Indian MF industry look promising, with the vaccination roll-out raising hopes of an early end to the pandemic. The short-term disruptions notwithstanding, the industry is expected to grow in the long term at the back of various drivers, including anticipated economic growth, a growing investor base, higher disposable incomes and an expanding investable surplus. Increasing aggregate household and financial savings, increase in geographical penetration as well as better awareness, ease of investing, digitalisation and perception of Mutual Funds as long-term wealth creators are likely to further contribute to the growth of the industry. As a result of our domain expertise, established processes, technology-driven infrastructure and marquee clients, we are well positioned to capitalise on such growth. We believe our market leading position and our strengths adequately position us to increase the number of our Mutual Fund clients and enhance our value proposition for all our stakeholders.

On this positive note, I once again thank all of you on behalf of all employees of CAMS for your continued support and trust in the Company and assure you that we shall remain focussed on being the preferred solutions partner for all our clients, with our differentiated services and products, backed by powerful technological and digital support systems and a committed workforce. And we are confident that, with your cooperation, we shall succeed.