Firstsource Solutions Ltd (NSE: FSL) Q3 2025 Earnings Call dated Feb. 07, 2025
Corporate Participants:
Ritesh Idnani — Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer
Dinesh Jain — Chief Financial Officer
Analysts:
Manik Taneja — Analyst
Dipesh — Analyst
Vibhor Singhal — Analyst
Rahul Jain — Analyst
Girish Pai — Analyst
Abhishek Kumar — Analyst
Presentation:
Operator
Hello ladies and gentlemen, good day, and welcome to First Solutions Limited Q3 FY ’25 Earnings Conference Call. As a reminder, all participant lines will be in the listen-only mode and there will be an opportunity for you to ask questions after the presentation concludes. Should you need assistance during this conference, please signal an operator by pressing star and then zero on your touchstone phone. Please note that this conference is being recorded.
On this call, we have Mr Ritesh Idnani, MD and CEO; Mr Dinesh Jain, CFO; Mr Pankaj Kapoor, Head of Strategy, Investor Relations and ESG to provide an overview on the company’s performance followed by Q&A.
Please note that some of the matters that will be discussed on this call, including the company’s business outlook are forward-looking and as such are subject to known and unknown risks. These uncertainties and risks are included, but not limited to what the company has mentioned in its prospectives filed with SEBI and the subsequent annual report that are available on its website.
I now hand the conference over to Mr Ritesh Idnani. Thank you, and over to you, sir.
Ritesh Idnani — Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer
Thank you. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, depending on which time zone you’re in today. Hello, everybody. Thank you for joining us to discuss our financial results for the 3rd-quarter of FY ’25.
Before I start with the discussion on our quarter performance, I would like to thank each one of our 34,144 first sources around the world whose passion and commitment to consistently deliver value to clients helped us report yet another strong quarter. Coming to our Q3 results, our revenue grew by 32% year-on-year and came in at INR21 billion.
In US dollar terms, the growth was 30% year-on-year and 8.4% quarter-on-quarter at US dollars INR249 billion.
In constant-currency, revenue grew 7.6% quarter-on-quarter. This is the fifth straight quarter where we have delivered over 3% quarter-on-quarter constant-currency revenue growth. EBIT margin for the quarter was 11.1%. This is broadly was INR2.27 for the quarter. With that, let me shed some color on the deal wins.
In Q3, we sanked three large deals. As you are aware, we consider a deal with an ACV of over $5 million as a large deal. This is the third straight quarter of at least three large deal wins. And despite that, our Q3 exit deal pipeline was among the highest-ever. This gives us confidence in sustaining the accelerated momentum in deal wins in the coming quarters.
I believe that the strength of our deal wins and pipelines reflects our success in leveraging our deep industry and functional expertise, our partnerships In the technology ecosystem and our ability to proactively bring automation and AI into the mix that is resonating well with our clients. I would also like to highlight that several of these deals, including those in the pipeline are transformative in nature with a staggered ramp-up curve that is different from standard deals and hence will translate into reported revenue over an extended period in time. Let me highlight a few notable wins in Q3. We were selected by one of the top-10 healthcare payers in North-America, an existing customer of ours to process their entire claims operations. One of the top three consumer tech companies in North-America also selected us for providing Gen AI services. As part of the deal, we will be helping in developing and evaluating content across multiple different domains and validating and optimizing their Gen AI models. We also expanded our business as one of the largest utility companies in the UK, another existing client with additional business across their customer support and collections operations. During the quarter, we also added 13 new logos, including five strategic logos.As we defined earlier, a strategic logo for one, a strategic logo is one where we see the potential of at least $5 million of annual revenue. With that, let me provide you a little bit of flavor on our performance across industry verticals. Starting with Banking and financial services. In Q3 of FY ’25, our BFS vertical was up 1.6% quarter-on-quarter and 8.1% year-on-year in constant-currency terms. We added seven new logos in this vertical in Q3. As I’ve highlighted earlier, we have invested over the last few quarters in strengthening our sales and solutions team in this vertical, particularly in North-America to broad-base our presence in existing clients and expand our footprint into adjacent segments. We are now taking a much wider and integrated capability portfolio to clients and prospects, which is visible both in our sequentially improving revenue trajectory over the last 3/4 and last year. While our revenues were flat quarter-on-quarter, they were up 31% year-on-year in constant-currency terms. We added five new logos in the verticals. You may recall, we highlighted a temporary softness in the payer segment due to the typical slowdown in deal decision-making ahead of the open enrollment period and the impending US presidential elections in our last earnings call. Deal conversations have resumed actively over the last few weeks and we expect closures on several of these deals in Q4. Turning to our CMT vertical, we saw a 3.4% quarter-on-quarter and a 14.2% year-on-year growth in this vertical in constant-currency terms. We added one new logo in Q3. This has been one of our fastest-growing verticals driven by expansion amongst marquee consumer tech logos with both traditional and non-traditional service propositions. During Q3, we added one of the largest consumer tech companies as a client for our AI — for our AI services through a large deal. We now work with four of the top-five consumer tech companies in the US. Overall, we see a healthy deal pipeline in this vertical that is well-diversified across traditional media and communication players as well as new-age tech companies. Lastly, coming to our diverse portfolio, that grew 80% quarter-on-quarter and 193% year-on-year in constant-currency terms due to the full-quarter impact of the Ascends acquisition. We see a healthy deal pipeline in this portfolio in both the retail and utilities verticals, which should translate into a broad-based growth in the coming quarters. Let me now provide you some color from a geography perspective. In Q3, growth was well distributed with North-America growing at 1.3% quarter-on-quarter and 28% year-on-year in constant-currency terms and Europe at about 22% quarter-on-quarter and 28% year-on-year. We expect growth to remain broad-based across our three core verticals in North-America. In the UK, companies are facing significant cost pressure that has led to clients increasingly exploring offshore or nearshore delivery options. We are seeing strong interest from clients to leverage our expanded nearshore capabilities in South Africa and Romania with two of our existing large clients signing-up in Q3. We are also seeing increased conversations around sales leading to a significant build-up in our deal pipeline in Europe. During Q3, we also started execution on our deals with a large telco major in Australia. We continue to see a strong deal pipeline in Australia and are optimistic on the growth in this region. On the people front, we added 1,246 net hires in Q3, ending with a total headcount of 34,144 first sources. We have now added a total of 6,204 hires in the first-nine months of FY ’25 compared to 2,929 during the same-period last year. This robust hiring underscores our ability to meet business demand while maintaining a strong talent pipeline. Our trailing 12-month attrition rate inched up marginally to 31.4% from 30.9% reported in the last quarter. During Q3 of FY ’25, we launched an enterprise-wide initiative to enhance skills on the Gen AI and digital transformation side, but to date employees have completed close to 150,000 learning hours.I also take pride in sharing that FirstSource continues to strive as a diverse and inclusive workplace with women comprising 46% of our workforce. I now want to turn your attention to some of the awards and recognitions that we got during the quarter. I’m happy to share that First Source continues to be positively recognized by leading analysts for bringing significant value to clients and offering innovative technology solutions in our focus markets. During Q3, created First Source as one of the top-five leaders amongst 15 top-tier providers offering mortgage business process transformation services. ISG recognized us amongst the booming 15 based on the annual value of commercial contracts awarded in the past 12 months. I’m also proud to report that achieved an ESG score of 81 by SNP Global that puts us in the top 99th percentile of the Dow Jones Sustainability Index of 2024 and amongst the top-five in our peer group that includes both Indian and global IT and ITES services companies. Today, we have also announced a small tuck-in acquisition of a firm called Acumi. Dinesh will provide you the financial details of the sales. Is a Jaipur-based startup that is doing excellent work-in the areas of AI development services. Their AI data engine has technology companies build and evaluate their AI models. We have been partnering with them for the past few months and decided to bring the platform in-house. We believe this improves our competitive positioning in the fast-growing market. I will now turn-over the call to Dinesh to give a detailed color on the quarterly financials and related matters. I will come back to talk about our progress on the strategic priorities and the outlook for FY ’25. Dinesh?
Dinesh Jain — Chief Financial Officer
Thank you, Ritesh, and hi, everyone. Let me start by taking you through our quarterly financials. Revenue for Q3 FY ’25 came in at INR21,024 million or $249 million. This implies a year-on-year growth of 32% in rupee term and 30% in dollar terms.
In constant-currency, this translates to a year-on-year growth of 28%. This is the highest-growth year-on-year in terms of constant-currency in last 14 quarters. Our constant-currency revenue growth over the nine-month period for FY ’25 is 22%.
Our operating profit was INR2,33 million, up 37% over Q3 of last year and translate to EBIT margin of 11.1%, same at normalized margin in the Q2. We continue to keep our reported margin in a Narrow-Band despite continued investment in our businesses.
Our normalized margin in nine months for FY ’25 is also 11.1%, which is our guided bank for FY ’25. Profit-after-tax came in at INR1,603 million or 7.6% of the revenue for the quarter, implying a 16% quarter-on-quarter and 25% year-on-year growth.
Our Q3 reported profit includes a net one-time gain of INR88 million. This include a write-back of INR651 million for adjustment on contingent Consideration payable for earlier acquisitions. While our combination is working well and the businesses is meeting the financial target, the earn-out was also linked to certain non-revenue or profit target, which are unlikely to be met, hence this write-back. We also taken a charge of INR284 million for change in estimate useful life of some of the intangible assets from earlier acquisitions and a one-time cost for a potential credit-loss of INR130 million with respect to certain customer contracts which we have. And an especial bonus provision of INR150 million has been also done. Coming to the other financial highlights for the quarter, the tax-rate was 20% for the quarter. For nine months also, we are about 20%, which is in-line with our earlier guidance. Reported ESO was slightly higher at 67 days in Q3, which is normally the soft recollection quarter, especially in the US versus 65 days in the Q2. We see that I think it will get normalized by Q4. We had a strong cash conversion in this quarter. Our FCF to PAT was 159% in Q3 and 78% for Nine-Month FY ’25. Our cash balance, including investment stood at INR2.5 billion. Our net-debt was INR10.2 billion at the end-of-the quarter three. We continue to invest in expanding our execution infrastructure. In Q3, we have added new seat capacities in Bangalore, Hyderabad, Mumbai and the UK. Our hedge book as of 31st December was as follows. We have coverage of GBP74.9 million for the next 12 months with a rate ranging from INR106 to INR114 to the pound and coverage of US dollar 168 million, which is within the range of 85.5 to 88.5 to the dollar. As mentioned earlier, we announced a small tuck-in capability acquisition today. We have acquired a 100% stake in AQ&I, a provider of AI development services-based out of Jay Jaypur India. It is a startup which is also a vendor to first source for AI development services and crowdsourcing. We like their capabilities and decided to bring them in-house for a total purchase consideration of INR100 million and this was a 100% acquisition. I’m also pleased to share that the Board had declared an interim dividend of INR4 per share, which is 40% or 40%. This is all from my side. I’ll hand it back to to talk about our strategic priority and outlook.?
Ritesh Idnani — Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer
Thank you. Thanks,. As you know, the One First Source framework has been our North Star for the strategy refresh in the organization over the last five quarters. I’m pleased with the progress we are making on each of the seven themes we have defined as part of this playbook and our success so-far in translating this progress into business outcomes.
Let me highlight a few client metrics. Over the last 12 months, our count of clients with over $1 million, $5 million and $10 million revenue has gone up to 3, 2 and 1 respectively. The share of revenues from our top-five clients has come down to 29.2% versus 35.8% and our top-10 clients to 43.5% from 52% in Q3 of last year.
These are visible signs of the success of our initiatives to broad-base our revenues and build multiple growth engines. Our deal engine continues to do well. Q3 marked the third consecutive quarter where we clocked three large deal wins.
Our improved growth momentum is helping us gain market-share against the basket of our closest globally publicly-traded peers based on trailing four quarters reported revenues.
I have previously talked about our initiatives to reinvigorate our sales engine, our efforts to cross-sell and up-sell our entire service portfolio and how we are taking technology-led solutions to our clients. This quarter, I would like to share the progress we are making in expanding our capabilities and improving the visibility of First Source with analysts and prospects, both of which are critical to build a resilient and durable business with industry-leading growth.
Over the past five quarters, we have made a meaningful realignment of our capability portfolio. This includes both identifying adjacent spaces to expand organically and inorganically as well as reimagining the market-facing value proposition of our existing capabilities with an anchor of being technology first. Let me give you examples of each.
We established our operations in Australia last year to expand our geographical footprint beyond the traditional markets of the US and UK. We’ve seen early success. You will recall our multi-tower large deal win from one of the largest telco companies in Australia. We followed it off with a win from one of the largest healthcare insurers in Q3 and have a healthy deal pipeline in the region.
We expanded our nearshore delivery capabilities through the acquisition of Asensor announced in September last year. It positions us very well with our clients and prospects, both in the UK and US who are actively exploring economical outsourcing capacities in the same time zone and adds the capability to offer multilingual support to several of our large global clients, especially those in the consumer tech space.
Also enables us to jumpstart our presence in retail, a strategically important and fast-growing verticals. At a relatively smaller, but strategically equally important scale, our latest acquisition of our expands our capabilities for AI services and especially to our consumer tech clients.
We’ve also done a refresh of our CX portfolio with components of AI tech-enabled CX to drive a 10x improvement in both the customer experience and outcome delivery. In healthcare, we expanded our capabilities by building a BPAS service line that combines our operational capabilities with technology and systems integration capabilities of our partner ecosystem to provide a comprehensive and a solid value proposition to our payer clients.
We have been able to build a strong deal pipeline in this area and are hopeful of meaningful conversion in the coming quarter. While we make improvements to our front-end and execution capabilities, it’s equally important to consistently highlight these to industry analysts and our clients and prospects. We have been making significant investments in amplifying the brand as we have talked earlier.
To give you a perspective, we received 10 recognitions from five leading industry advisory firms for our market leadership in our chosen domain in calendar year ’24. This is twice of the five recognitions from three advisors we received in calendar year ’23. What is more, we are going beyond the traditional set and amplifying our value proposition through innovative channels.
For example, we set-up an advisory board comprising of industry veterans across business units to leverage their collective knowledge base and take their help to amplify the First Source brand across their access network.
We also hosted our first-ever client event in the UK that saw close to 100 CXOs participating over two days. We are now gearing up for a similar event this month for our US-based clients.
Overall, I’m pleased with the progress we have made over the last four quarters in each of the areas we have identified for a strategy refresh. What I find more encouraging is the growing client recognition of our efforts that I see in our deal wins and pipeline.
Turning to the business outlook. For fiscal year ’25, we now expect our revenue to grow in the range of 21.8% to 22.3% in constant-currency terms. For operating margins, we expect our normalized FY ’25 EBIT margin, excluding one-time charges related to the acquisitions to be in the 11% to 11.5% band.
This concludes our opening remarks, and we can now open the floor for questions. Operator, over to you.
Questions and Answers:
Operator
Thank you very much. We will now begin the question-and-answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star and one on the touchtone telephone. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, you may press star and two. Participants are requested to please use handsets while asking a question. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now wait for a moment while the question queue assembles.
We have the first question from the line of Manik Taneja from Axis Capital. Please go-ahead.
Manik Taneja
Hi, thank you for the opportunity. I hope I’m audible.
Ritesh Idnani
Yes.
Manik Taneja
Thank you for the opportunity. Actually wanted to get your sense with regards to you made a remark that while you continue to win some of the larger deals Deals, the ramp-up may not be in-line with the — with the way these deals have progressed in the past. Would be great to essentially understand in detail about that front, about that point. And the second question was for Dinesh. Some of these reversals as well as one-time costs that we’ve incurred in the current quarter, if you could dwell deeper into what — which particular acquisition does this impairment charge relate to? And similarly also talk about the special bonus that has been accounted for in the current quarter? Thank you.
Ritesh Idnani
Thank you, Manik. Let me just give you a flavor of some of the deal wins. So if you go back-in time, right, I think over the last five quarters, we’ve consistently had a series of large deal wins and our pipeline has consistently trended upwards itself. The deal wins that we got in the first, you know in Q3 of FY ’24, Q4 of FY ’24, some of them started to yield results and you started to see that in the revenue numbers come with maybe a one, two-quarter lag depending upon the specific nature of those deals itself, right? There is — each of these deals is different. Sometimes it requires an upfront assessment and an implementation, sometimes it’s a gradual ramp.
Several of these deals have commercial models, which are linked to outcomes itself. So they don’t necessarily follow always a linear path. What we feel encouraged about is the momentum that we have with the large deal wins and we think that it will follow a similar pattern to what played out for the deal wins that we saw in FY ’24 in the later second-half translating into the kind of momentum and growth that we saw in FY ’25 and some of the deal wins that we are seeing now moving pretty much the same way going into FY ’26 as well.
Thank you. Dinesh, do you want to take the second question?
Dinesh Jain
Yeah. So Manik, this reversal which we are talking about is pertains to the QBSS acquisition, which we had done in the last quarter of the FY ’24. And I think bonuses looking — looks like that Board have happy with the performance and they are considering to give a special bonus this time to the employees. It’s not to a specific one or two employees for organization.
Manik Taneja
Okay. And the impairment charges also led to QBS.
Dinesh Jain
Impairment charges pertains to a different previous acquisition which you have done. So it’s not an impairment technically. It is more of being you reassess the intangible to the customer contract and reassess every point of time. It’s like reassessing a goodwill, you need to also reassess them.
And I think the reassessment is already three years before acquisitions those were. We felt that some of the customers have not been got wait has to be delivered. But I think overall, all the acquisitions are delivering better than what we have thought of originally we do. Except I think the mortgage acquisition, which you all aware that due to the industry level changes has undergone a slight change. Otherwise, I think all has been doing much better, including where we are taking a reversal, I think businesses or what we estimated the revenue, they are delivering more than that.
Manik Taneja
And the last one from my side before I get back into the queue, we had — in the past, we’ve been speaking about possibly targeting between 50 bps to 75 bps of annual margin expansion beyond the phase of investments that we’ve done over the last 12, 18 months. Does that outlook still hold to for FY ’26? Is that how we should be thinking about? And also the expectation was that second-half FY ’25, we should start to see some of these margin gains play-out.
So would be — would be great if you could talk about that as well. Thank you.
Ritesh Idnani
Yeah. No, thank you, Manik, for that. So let me first state at the outset that we do expect the 50 to 75 basis-points playing out in FY ’26. So in-line with what we have consistently stated. What you’re also seeing is the fact that with the kind of momentum that we are experiencing in the marketplace and the growth that’s there, some of the investments that we made, we had to continue to move forward some of the investments that we are seeing with the growth that is there, some of it is the cost of growth, et-cetera as well.
But if you also see pretty much over the last two quarters, you’re seeing about a five, 10 bps improvement quarter-on-quarter from a margin standpoint, while we continue to make those investments itself. So I think what you will see from us is, and I want to almost like take a sneak peak into how we are thinking about potentially next year, we want to have industry-leading growth, but while we continue to expand margins as well, and I think that would be the storyline how we — how we are thinking about the business going-forward.
Manik Taneja
Yeah. And also probably second-half should that pace of expansion should continue even in second-half.
Ritesh Idnani
That’s it.
Manik Taneja
Thank you and all the best.
Operator
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, to ask a question, you may please press star and 1. We have the next question from the line of Dipesh Mehta from Emkay Global. Please go-ahead.
Dipesh
Yeah. Thanks for the opportunity. A couple of questions. First about the growth side. Whether, let’s say in essence, so any seasonality because of the exposure to some of the vertical where December is usually strong quarter because it is first time it integrated for the quarter, if you can give any seasonality playing out in this business?
Second question is about the vertical-wise. If you can help us understand healthcare, we earlier indicated about some softness in delay in decision-making. Are we witnessing now healthcare is doing better and between payer provider, how the things are playing out for us?
And same, if you can provide some sense about BFS, particularly sub-segment level, if you can give some further detail about the demand outlook across various segments where we operate and how things are playing out? And last question is about margin. Partly you answered.
But if one want to understand usual collection business seasonality playing out, typically between Q3, Q4 kind of thing, do you think it can be a margin lever entering into Q4? Thank you.
Ritesh Idnani
Thank you, that those were a lot of different questions, but let me try and get to the verticals first and then I’ll come to the margin side. Yeah. So with — first and foremost, we’re not splitting the revenues separately, but one of the things that you can say is — you can see is that a sensor the from a revenue standpoint was there for the full-quarter.
What I can tell you is the revenue run-rate in Q3 was similar to the previous quarter itself from a sense of standpoint, right? What you will also see is as we are trying to build a business, given that we have a wide portfolio of businesses with presence across multiple verticals and multiple geographies, each of which has a different rhythm itself.
So there could be variations in quarterly performance depending on the trajectory in an individual vertical or geography itself. For example, we highlighted last quarter some of the pause and decision-making in the payer business ahead of the US presidential elections. Some of those factors make it create temporary volatility itself. In Europe, given the current macroeconomic factors, we are seeing a significant interest in shifting work offshore.
So there are multiple factors that are influencing the kind of growth and what we are seeing in each industry vertical itself. So at the outset, what I just want to give everybody comfort out here is we are trying to build a business that’s resident, which is on a consistent upward trajectory and you’ll see our growth will continue to be at a band, which is at the top-end of the industry growth rate and I think we’ve demonstrated that again in the quarter itself.
Now specific to the healthcare business itself, I want to just give you a few data points in terms of how we are thinking about the businesses there, right? And I think it’s just important to understand you know the healthcare business because it’s the way we are approaching that vertical is interesting in a way.
First and foremost, one of the things to bear in mind is that for us, one of the key guiding principles has been to have a balanced footprint between the payer and the provider side. And we think in terms of how we have built that business itself, that’s one of the things that we have perhaps one of the best-in the marketplace that it’s balanced between the payers and providers.
Number two, within each segment, it is broad-based across customers so that there is no dependency on a few clients. We are not a two-trick pony or a three-trick pony or stuff like that, but it is broad-based across multiple clients itself.
And number three, we are bringing tech and AI induced capabilities to solve customer problems. That is what has actually fueled the growth that we have experienced in the healthcare vertical by over 31% year-on-year this year so-far. And we’ve had multiple large deal wins in this space. We actually continue to see a very strong and healthy deal pipeline that’s well distributed across clients. We talked about the introduction of modernizing the offering that we had around the BPaaS side and that’s another area that we think is going to see some conversion in the quarters to come.And those are some of the areas that we feel pretty good about from a healthcare standpoint.
Going to the financial services business itself, one of the things if you recall again, we wanted to try and see how we can minimize The dependence on the macro itself. So while we can’t eliminate the impact of the macro, but as you can see, interest rates have continued to hold a pretty high. The 30-year mortgage since end of September has continued to rise up again. It’s now holding close to 7%. If you look at the Mae data, about 80% of the outstanding fixed-rate mortgage loans are still at 5% or less from an interest-rate standpoint. So it’s very clear that refi volumes are unlikely to come back very quickly and anybody else is telling you otherwise is probably smoking something else. But if you look at the new housing market, affordability continues to remain stretched. So overall, the macro-environment continues to remain uncertain, right? So — but what have we tried to do, we have tried to broad-base our portfolio both in terms of the profile of our clients and the nature of the work that we do for them. We are consciously working to increase, for instance, the share of servicing in our portfolio, which was — which had a higher indexation to the origination side. We have tried to cross-sell from our collection service line into other areas of the business, both on the asset and liability side of the P&L and that’s yielding results. We are adding more new logos and we have built-out, for instance, the financial services team in North-America and that’s yielding results and you’ll see some of that. Again, it’s probably also the reason why we’ve added several new logos in the financial services vertical as well. So overall, I think from a vertical standpoint, we feel-good about what we see right now across the growth and that’s why you’re seeing more broad-based growth across the industry verticals itself. So just remind me the question on the margin side?
Dipesh
So typically on margin collection business seasonality we used to see in the past, which helps your BFS business into this quarter. So whether those kind of seasonality benefit also likely to play-out.
Ritesh Idnani
So you know it’s a — this is one which continues — we continue to have a very strong and robust capability on the collection side of the house and it’s one of the reasons why I think our integrated capability across first-party collections, third-party collections, legal collections, all underpinned through a digital collections platform, which is AI and ML yielding result and is allowing to win many logos in the marketplace as well as expand our footprint in existing accounts.
What I will say though is that, I mean, if you take the US market, the US consumer continues to be very resilient. So you expect that with delinquencies having gone up and all those macro indicators that I’m sure you’re tracking far better than we are, there should be a bearing on the business itself, but it’s interesting how some of these things don’t necessarily play again.
What we are trying to do, therefore is to say can we continue to expand our footprint in the collections business? Can we continue to add new logos and some of that is what is playing out and also contributing frankly to the growth that we’re seeing also in the financial services vertical as well.
Dipesh
Thank you. Thank you. I can join follow-up. Thanks.
Ritesh Idnani
Thank you.
Operator
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, if you wish to ask questions, you may please press star and one on your touchtone telephones. The next question is from the line of Dipesh Mehta from Emkay Global. Please go-ahead.
Dipesh
Dinesh, just one question on cash generation. If I look nine months, our EBITDA growth and OCF growth, OCF growth is far more muted compared to EBITDA growth. If you can help us understand puts and takes there? Thanks.
Dinesh Jain
I think it was the impact of a first-quarter where DSO was very-high. I think that was one of the reasons.
Dipesh
So whether that impact will persist even for the full-year or because that time you said it will reverse or but nine months is still weaker. So you expect it to reverse in Q4 or that impact will be there in the full-year?
Dinesh Jain
No, I think Q4, I think it will get normalized. It will get recovered into the Q4 for sure.
Dipesh
So for the full-year, OCF to EBITDA will be normalized kind of thing.
Dinesh Jain
Yeah, that’s right.
Dipesh
Okay.
Operator
Thank you. Participants, you may press star and one to ask a question. We have the next question from the line of Vibhor Singhal from Nuvama Equities. Please go-ahead.
Vibhor Singhal
Yeah, hi. Thanks for taking my question and congrats on another solid quarter of performance, Ritesh to you and your team. Ritesh, my question was, I think you’ve partly tried to answer that and I’m sure we’re hitting this a lot on the overall impact that we are expecting of, let’s say, the Gen AI and of course the new versions that are being that are coming up in the market every — I mean, in a very frequent manner.
I think the initial — I mean understanding was that, yes, a lot of the BPO transactions or work might be impacted because of the Gen AI adoption, but our growth has definitely kind of outshone that. And definitely, I think it’s proven that even in that in this business, there are multiple things that we can do. How are you seeing the trajectory going-forward? I mean, in terms of client conversations? Are we able to basically get incremental more work like, let’s say, data and all which is helping us grow in that business?
And do you believe that in some part of that cycle, maybe not in the next few quarters, maybe sometime, let’s say, maybe over the next one, two, three years, there would be some cannibalization of revenue. Net-net, we might again go back and grow again in revenues, but do you see some cannibalization of revenue happening to our business or the industry business at some point of time.
Any color on that would be really helpful.
Ritesh Idnani
So thanks, for the question. You’re right, the buzz over seek over the last two weeks, I think crystallized for many people are few important trends that I think have been happening in-plain sight, right? Number-one, China is catching-up to the US in the generative AI side with implications for the AI supply-chain.
Number two, open-based models are commoditizing the foundation model layer, which creates opportunities for application builders, right? And that’s what creates in some sense, I think the competitive moat and a source of differentiation.
And third, I think scaling isn’t the only path to AI progress, right? So despite the massive focus and hype around processing power, I think what we are also seeing is that algorithmic innovations are rapidly pushing down-trading costs, right?
So my sense is that if you think about this from a broader AI perspective and then I’ll talk a little bit about itself specifically. AI is going to continue to blur the line between BPS and technology services itself. And as in the case of any industrial revolution, we are in the early stages of adoption. What we are seeing today is that a human who leverages AI for their day-to-day work will replace a human who doesn’t use AI. So that’s why for us from our vantage point, making sure that our entire workforce is AI ready becomes extremely critical.
We also think that some of the routine simple task, the lower-end of EPS services will potentially get cannibalized, but new business opportunities as-is the case with any technology resolution will be far bigger. We are already seeing that with data, AI/ML operations, analytics will be our new frontiers to expand our business using AI.
And today, for instance, in fact, one of the reasons why we brought in the capability that brought in-house is precisely because of this data is the lifeblood of artificial intelligence, but a lot of the data is unstructured. AI systems find it difficult to use that data strain off the bat.
So there is a big demand for services to provide enterprises with data that has been correctly annovated, primed for training models itself, right? And I think we’re seeing significant growth with three of the top-five consumer tech companies in the world for AI services. In Q3, we added a fourth logo to that list.
What we are doing Vibor is we are bringing consciously AI and automation in every solution. At our size and scale, what it allows us to do is to be the challenger to incumbents and the combination of deep domain and technology contextualized to the domain, I think is allowing us to take share of and win against the larger players.
At the same time, if you take, you know, certain markets, I mean, just take the CX market as an example, a large part of that addressable market is still in-sourced. So our view is that the percentage of outsourcing will go up there, but it will happen in a non-linear fashion. And I think that creates an opportunity for deep domain tech-led players like us to lead and potentially grow at a faster pace.
The last point I would also call is that we have been modernizing our existing platform, infusing them with AI. So in the last earnings call, you might recall, I talked about how we have our digital collections platform where we’ve infused AI to try hyper personalization with an empathy first mindset.
The last quarter, we also talked about an investment in-building our mortgage domain-centric language model specific to the mortgage profit. And this is the kind of stuff that is, I think, creating competitive differentiation and also allowing us to win in the marketplace. . So for instance, the language model that we’ve got specific to mortgage is actually reducing the cycle time related to pre-qualification, formal loan applications. So it’s allowing us to use that combination of domain and tech to win against undifferentiated players at the smaller end-of-the spectrum and larger players who may be reluctant to move as quickly from an agility standpoint. Specific to the developments of the last two weeks, you take as an example, we are a services provider, right? So we work with multiple technology platforms and partners itself, right? So we work with some of the closed models, we work with some of the open-source models as well. And I think there we are seeing a significant amount of traction. We are also doing a lot of interesting work now around the AgentTech AI side as well, right? So we’ve got an inventory of use cases where we think the AI capabilities can be brought to the forefront. I was just earlier this week with a customer where we showcase which parts of those processes can be done using AI agents. Now that’s the kind of thought leadership that I think is creating a difference also in the marketplace. Overall, we continue to be net positive with everything that’s happening because we think we can move rapidly and nimbry and respond to the developments in the marketplace and have specific solutions which build-up our domain.
Vibhor Singhal
Got it, got it. So would it be also correct to say that the — if I look at the vertical wise, the verticals which are more B2C focused, as Mike mentioned, consumer tech or or even retail. These are the verticals which are probably ahead in the race of using the — I mean trying to implement these solutions than the typical manufacturing and the other energy B2B segments from the, of course, the industry knowledge that you would have not just stick to fossils.
Ritesh Idnani
Actually, let me just give you a flavor. Certainly, a lot of the consumer-facing industries, there are opportunities that are there and it comes down to every individual customer and their level of maturity in that AI adoption curve itself. But if you think about two broad flavors of how we are playing that market, right?
Number-one, we — through the capabilities that we have from a crowdsourcing and the data engine ingestion that we are able to do, we’re able to support a lot of the consumer tech companies who have their own AI models and able to provide the necessary data that feeds into those models itself, right? So that’s one-way to play it what I will call as loosely the AI infrastructure side.
The other is the AI for business, which is the application layer itself, right? And that’s where you have different combinations of things that we are seeing. You might do you know examples of something maybe in healthcare on maybe the claims side of the house and you say, hey, maybe some of this can be touch less no human in the roof for certain parts of the value chain, you might be able to do something on the provider side around appointment scheduling.
So I think there is an inventory of use cases that we’re working with and we are taking those propositions to the marketplace. Several of them either in the B2C or the B2B2C side, which are I think resonating deeply with our customers and prospects.
Vibhor Singhal
Got it, got it. And just lastly, it would be fair to say that, right, that we are well past the POC stage and many of the projects in this AI as well as the HMTKI space are already revenue-generating.
Ritesh Idnani
So what I will say is almost everything that we are responding to today in the marketplace has AI embedded in it as a capability. Some of the deals that we are winning and the consistency with which we are winning these large deals is because we have AI embedded in the way we are going to reimagine the process and transform the operation for our customers
Vibhor Singhal
Got it. Got it. Great. Thanks, Vive. Thanks for taking my questions and wish you all the best.
Ritesh Idnani
Thank you very much.
Operator
Thank you. The next question is from the line of Rahul from Dolat. Please go-ahead.
Rahul Jain
Yeah, hi. Thanks for the opportunity. I think a similar question has been asked, but it would be good if you could help me out in terms of understanding a slight bit of seasonality for the sensors business because it seems you are saying the run-rate has remained similar, but if we look at some of the metric, it suggests there is a far bit more traction.
So is there something more that we should calibrate from a seasonality point-of-view or it is more a uniform business on a sequential basis?
Ritesh Idnani
No, I think look, there has been some seasonal uplift in volume, but then there is also some of the business that was there in the UK itself, which is more nearshore, et-cetera, which kind of neutralized it. So I wouldn’t read anything further into that, which is why from our, what we are saying from a run-rate standpoint, it’s pretty much in-line with what you saw the previous quarter
Rahul Jain
Okay. Okay. And the growth profile of the business was not very exciting when we acquired this business. So is there anything meaningful that we would have done to stimulate that.
Ritesh Idnani
So let me take a step-back and talk about the rationale of the acquisition from the Assent standpoint, right, and what it brought to them and where we are starting to see value levers for growth, right? So number-one if you look at the Assence of service delivery footprint, it was UK, South Africa, Romania, Trinidad and Turkey. They did not have a footprint in India, Philippines, Mexico.
I think that is an opportunity that has gotten created where the ability to take some of those newer locations where we have critical mass and scale has been an opportunity for the clients of our. So I think that’s an opportunity. The second one has been centered around some of the front-end consulting capabilities that we’ve been able to bring to the customers. I’ll give you an example, right?
We’re doing a lot of work around journey mapping and reimagining the process for several of those clients itself. And that I think is yielding results just in terms of positioning even more as a valued partner to those customers. I mean, they were doing phenomenal work with these clients. They were great at the Brilliant basics and now I think we are able to showcase that additional value-add for them to change or rethink the way these properties are run and here I’m talking about the end clients.
The third is I think on the technology front, right? And I think just the inventory of things that we have, our Gen AI studio, the ability to talk about agent AI for different parts of the retail value chain, where’s my order, what are you doing on the refunds and cancellation side. Some of that thought leadership is also percolating across to the client base as well.
So a combination of all of these elements, I think is creating momentum to the client portfolio as well, interesting. Give you a flavor.
Rahul Jain
Yes, yes. And given that we would be doing a very strong organic growth as well in this year other than of course, the inorganic contribution. Going into ’26, you think there is a need for the constant inputs coming from the inorganic side of the strategy? Or you think for now it would be more about consolidating what we have and grow on its own?
Ritesh Idnani
What I will say is that it can never be one or the other. It’s always an and kind of a strategy. So obviously, we want to continue to grow the business organically, but you can’t build a business based on acquisitions only, right? So it’s not that we are going out there and saying we’re going to hit growth numbers based on acquisitions. I think start with organic growth, but at the same time keep looking for opportunities that come either proactively or reactively on your plate and then saying, hey, is there a fit, is there something that’s relevant, so on and so forth. I think that’s the way we are trying to architect and build a business.
What I will say is that we’re not looking to do acquisitions for revenue sake. If you look at all the three acquisitions that we’ve done in the last one year, each one of them has addressed a specific capability, which we — which has been accretive or value-accretive to us and that will continue to remain the philosophy going-forward as well.
Rahul Jain
Yeah, right, right. I mean, the question was more in the context that it’s like almost three-in-one year. So one thing is that it is an important — do we see it as an important thing? I’m sure nobody do acquisition for sake of it. My question is, is it like a — it’s an important tool that company — that your strategy has to boost the growth and wherein the organic opportunity and inorganic opportunity both need to be seen to understand What should be the growth compounding from a three, four-year perspective or it would say acquisition would be more the chance event and organic growth is a more defined strategy.
Ritesh Idnani
So again, as I said, when we are architecting a business plan and we are planning for not just next year, but two years out, three years out, et-cetera, our growth strategy is completely centered around what we can drive-in the business organically, right? That being said, acquisitions are binary in nature, right? Either they happen or they don’t happen.
You can’t plan for a business and a — and a target and a goal based on acquisitions itself happening. So I think the safe way to think about it is that we will continue to build the business with organic growth. At the same time, acquisitions will be relevant if they plug a capability gap, et-cetera.
But you — as I’m sure you understand, a lot of stuff has to come together for an acquisition to happen, right? It’s not just about a capability gap. There has to be a value and a culture alignment and so on and so forth. So these things are binary in nature, right.
So from my vantage point, I am thinking about this and our entire leadership team is thinking about this more in the context of saying, can we build an industry-leading business and do it on the back of organic strategy and at the same time, keep looking opportunistic if there’s something that allows us to continue to build-out our capability gaps, if any, so that we continue to be relevant in the domains in which we operate
Rahul Jain
Right, right. And last one from my side. From a profitability improvement perspective, we are saying that there is going to be a certain increase in profitability that we see. But just to see from a more comforting area of leverage that you see, can you highlight one or two easy picking for you where you say, okay, these are area where you can straightaway see a margin improvement will happen going into next fiscal year.
Ritesh Idnani
So I want to give you one example of straight away of how we are thinking about margins, right right? And if you — and it’s probably important to take a step-back and say over the last four or five quarters, what have we been doing, right? We’ve invested in broadly three areas.
The first was in expanding our sales and account team and our sales team has grown by over 50% over the last 12 months. We’re largely done in this area. So we will continue to add or make changes as we see the needs, right? The second is on the capability side where we are doing both leadership hires as well as beefing up our solutions team. This is an area where the way, we continue to make investments.
In fact, we have accelerated some of these investments, especially around modernizing our services portfolio by infusing AI and automation. We talked about some of this in the last quarter when we detailed specifics around RELY and our language model around mortgage services.
The third area that we’re doing is spending time on and investing heavily is in amplifying the brand in expanding our relationships and visibility in the industry analysts and advisor community itself, right? This does not change the trajectory of 50 to 75 basis-point improvement that we expect every year over the medium-term from next year.
But if you think about one lever, right, just I want to take you back to Q2 of last year, where our onshore revenue was roughly about 74% and our offshore revenue is about 26%. If you look at where we are today for Q3 of FY ’25, that’s changed to 60% coming from onshore and 40% going from on from the offshore and nearshore sites. And that is a meaningful shift, right? And we think that there is still opportunity out there.
As that plays out, I think you are going to get margin expansion. We’re also looking at our employee pyramid and how we staff our project delivery team. Technology, AI and automation is changing the way support functions get done. And I say support functions in the context of the work we render to our customers. This is not about the corporate support functions.
There are opportunities there to centralize, automate offshore roles where relevant as well. We are using automation and AI in our onboarding and training processes to improve speed to competency. All of these, when they all come together, I think among other areas, and I’m not even detailing all the value levers, but we’ve got about 24 value levers that we are tracking closely, which I think gives me a high degree of comfort of the 50 basis-points 75 basis-points.
Rahul Jain
Right, right. Just double clicking on the point you mentioned. So one thing is, of course the mix of the new business that we have acquired as a very big offshore or nearshore kind of a thing. But you think on a like-to-like basis also our business that used to have before this we’ll also see a meaningful shift on the offshore delivery side.
Ritesh Idnani
I think if you look at with a lot of our existing customers, a substantial part of that incremental growth is coming offshore and nearshore, right? So service delivery capabilities that we have, the geographical footprint that we now have is of tremendous health there. At the same time, I think one of the things that holds us in good set is the end-to-end capability that we can offer, particularly in the regulated markets in which we operate.
So I don’t want to take-away from the in-country US, UK, Australia footprint that we have because I think there is a strategic value to that. But at the same time, I think the ability to increase the offshore and nearshore business at a much faster clip, I think gives operating leverage.
Rahul Jain
Yeah, sure, sure. Thank you. Thank you for the elaborate answer. That’s it from my side.
Ritesh Idnani
Thank you.
Operator
Thank you. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we request you to please restrict your questions to one question per participant. We have the next question from the line of Girish Pai from BOB Capital Markets. Please go-ahead.
Girish Pai
Hitesh, if I heard you right, you mentioned that
Operator
Request you to please ask your question again. We lost your start of your audio, please.
Girish Pai
Thanks for the opportunity. Can you hear me?
Operator
Yes, you are go-ahead.
Ritesh Idnani
Yeah.
Girish Pai
Ritesh, you mentioned that if I heard you right, you said that FY 2026 you’re going to have industry-leading growth and I think that you’re talking about organic growth here. The industry growth itself, now that the budgeting cycle is probably done for 2025 amongst your clients, do you think it will be 1.1, 1.3x or 1.5 times? What is the kind of industry growth pickup that you see in 2025 or FY ’26? That’s question number-one.
Second, you mentioned that you are going as a challenger in the Jennai projects and taking away projects from incumbents. Are the incumbents not self-cannibalizing or not pushing back or providing their own set of solutions through platforms and stuff like that? Just these two questions.
Ritesh Idnani
Let me quickly respond to the first one, which is I think we’ve not made any specific comments about FY ’26, but I think we’ll provide more color once we come up with the Q4 numbers and close-out FY ’25. At that point in time, I think we’ll provide more perspective, but I gave you directionally how we’re thinking about FY ’26.
Related to the second question, Girish, you’re seeing some interesting dynamics playing out. In some instances, the larger incumbents may not be agile and nimble and as responsive to client needs at the point when they arrive. Sometimes it’s because they want to be mindful about protecting their existing business so they’re playing on defense and they are reluctant to cannibalize their own revenues and that could be one of the factors.
Some of the players that we have — some of the larger players that we’re dealing with are going through their own internal trials and tribulations with large acquisitions that they’ve done and they haven’t necessarily sorted through all the post post-merger integration challenges that come with it. And that forces a lot of these organizations to be insular as opposed to-market outside and rather than being inside-out, right? They’re all inside-out rather than being outside-in, I’m sorry.
I think these are just two anecdotal things that we are seeing out there in the marketplace that is allowing us to compete, hold our own and punch above our weight against some of the larger players.
Girish Pai
Okay. Thank you very much.
Operator
Thank you. The next question is from the line of Abhishek Kumar from JM Financial. Please go-ahead.
Abhishek Kumar
Yeah, hi, good evening. Ritesh, just one question from my side. You mentioned that in the payer segment within your healthcare vertical, there was some slowdown because of the open enrollment period. I mean that is a bit contrary to what some of your other pure-play healthcare peers have said. I mean, they’re generally a volume pickup because of the open enrollment period.
So I’m just trying to understand the contrast here. Are we into different service lines, which doesn’t get any benefit from the pickup in volume in Q3? Any color would be helpful there. Thank you.
Ritesh Idnani
No, thank you, Abhishek, for the question. Not going to comment on other companies, but I do want you to understand that different companies have different business priorities and different operating spaces in which they run their business. And I talked a little bit about this in terms of giving some perspective. Our intent for our healthcare business is, A, to build a portfolio that is balanced between the payers and the providers. Number two, within each segment, it is broad-based across clients so that there is no dependency on a few clients.And number three, that we are able to bring tech and AI induced capabilities to solve client problems. This is what has helped us grow our business by over 31% year-on-year this year so-far. And we’ve had multiple large deal wins in the space. We continue to see a strong deal pipeline that’s well distributed across clients, so on and so forth. There are segments within this vertical like open enrollment and you’re right, where you know that naturally gives an uptick in volumes, but we have taken a conscious call to keep our exposure calibrated because volumes in this space could be unpredictable, right, and create a seasonality element to it. What I also want to add is that we can afford to do so because we don’t have a concentrated client portfolio. Our business is far more diverse in terms of the playing field itself. So we have a choice and that choice allows us to play the market more selectively than maybe some of our peers are able to do. And I think that’s what I think is probably the operator word in terms of how we see the segment play-out, but which is why we feel very good about the vertical. We see a very strong pipeline. We think there are going to be some very interesting conversions in this space. So we feel pretty good from an outlook perspective.
Abhishek Kumar
Yeah, thank you and all the best.
Ritesh Idnani
Thank you. Thank you.
Operator
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we will take that as a last question for today. I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr Ritesh for closing comments. Over to you, sir.
Ritesh Idnani
Thank you. Thank you for joining the call and for all your questions. I just want to close with a few points. We are on-track with our revamped go-to-market strategy. You’re seeing that in the numbers. We continue to remain laser-focused on building a resilient durable business with industry-leading growth and our growth, as you can see, will be industry-leading in FY ’25.
Our sales engine is working well. We had three large deal wins in each of the last 3/4. And in-spite of that, our Q3 closing deal pipeline was amongst the highest-ever. We are adding larger relationships and mining our existing relationships better. There is an increase in the count of our 1 million, 5 million, 10 million-plus revenue clients from a year back.
Our revenue concentration with our top-five and our top-10 clients is also down by 7% and 9% respectively and broad-basing that revenue and adding strategic logos, we think creates more opportunities and more headroom for growth. Our improved and expanded capabilities portfolio is resonating well with our clients and prospects.
And finally, our revised FY ’25 revenue growth guidance of 21.8% to 22.3% keeps us in the top-decile for the industry. That’s all from my side. I look-forward along with my colleagues to interacting with you again in the next quarter call. Thank you again for joining the conversation.
Operator
Thank you, thank you. On behalf of First Sou Solutions Limited, that concludes this conference. Thank you all for joining us. You may now disconnect your lines.