Firstsource Solutions Ltd

NSE:FSL

Earnings Call Analysis

Challenges and Growth Across Key Sectors

In Q3, Banking and Financial Services (BFS) experienced a downturn, 3% quarter-on-quarter and 5% year-on-year, while Healthcare grew 3% year-on-year and 5% quarter-on-quarter. The payer segment led this with strong deal ramp-ups expected to boost Q4 revenues further. Communications, Media, and Technology (CMT) saw a 10% quarterly increase and a 2.6% annual rise. The diversified vertical, focused on energy, leaped 1.5x year-on-year and 14% quarter-on-quarter. Geographically, the U.S. grew 3.3% quarterly, while Europe increased by 3.6%. New hiring surged, with 1,994 added in Q3, expanding the workforce by 16% over two quarters, amidst high attrition rates of 33.8% offshore and 43.3% onsite.

Strategic Progress and Organizational Alignment

Firstsource Solutions has illustrated significant progress in refining its organizational structure and aligning leadership to improve decision-making and accountability. The company now operates with four business units that are sector-specific in North America and geographically focused in Europe. These strategic moves, including the integration of services into market units and the addition of experienced leaders, indicate an enhanced aim for innovation in existing services and a sharper focus on emerging domains such as data analytics and trust and safety.

Technological Integration and Market Engagement

The company is spearheading efforts to embed technology in every client proposal. This initiative is expected to expand client engagements and foster a shift towards transaction and outcome-based models. Notable is the hiring of a leader to advance technology partnerships which underscores Firstsources's commitment to innovation and growth.

Commitment to Workforce Development and Retention

Firstsource has demonstrated a strong dedication to creating an enriching work environment and being an employer of choice, which is evident from its efforts to enhance employee experience. They've amplified personalized interactions, resulting in a significant reduction in attrition and a substantial increase in hiring. Moreover, investments in learning and development, with a marked increase in training hours, ensure that the talent pool remains competitive and skilled.

Cost Optimization and Efficiency

The company remains focused on optimizing costs and driving efficiencies, outlining specific initiatives such as right staffing, right shoring, overhead optimization, and leveraging automation and artificial intelligence tools. These measures aim to support the company's investment plans, primarily funded through internal cost optimization and efficiency gains, to achieve consistent revenue growth and margin improvements over the medium term.

Revenue Growth and Financial Outcomes

For the third quarter, Firstsource Solutions achieved a 6.1% year-on-year revenue growth, amounting to INR 16 billion. In USD terms, this constituted a 4.8% growth year-on-year and a 3% rise quarter-on-quarter, reaching 192 million USD. Notably, after a flat performance in the first half of FY '24, there was a 3.4% revenue growth in constant currency in Q3, with an EBIT margin of 10.7%, a slight decrease from the previous quarter but a noticeable improvement from the same quarter in the previous year.

Deal Wins and Client Portfolio Expansion

Firstsource reported its highest deal wins in the past three years in Q3, signaling a successful implementation of its strategic direction focusing on cross-selling, upselling, and process transformation. Significant achievements include transformational deals with top banks in the U.K., expanded relationships with large health care insurance providers in the U.S., and growth in the media and entertainment sectors. These victories contribute to a 30% year-on-year increase in deal wins over the past two quarters and the largest pipeline in company history.

Future Outlook and Confidence in Continued Growth

Firstsource positions itself to capitalize on market shifts and technological disruptions, continuing to work towards top quartile revenue growth with improved margins over a medium-term horizon. The company exhibits confidence in its trajectory, buoyed by its quality client portfolio, strong vertical market leadership, and burgeoning deal pipeline, which collectively augur well for sustained growth.

Earnings Call Transcript 2024-Q3

[Operator]

Ladies and gentlemen, good day and welcome to the Firstsource Solutions Limited Q3 FY '24 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Please note that this conference is being recorded. On this call, we have Mr. Ritesh Idnani, MD and CEO; Mr. Dinesh Jain, CFO; and Mr. Pankaj Kapoor, Head of Strategy and Investor Relations, to provide an overview on the company's performance, followed by Q&A.

Please note that some of the matters that we'll discuss 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 company has mentioned in its prospectus filed with SEBI and 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, executive]

Thank you and hello, everybody. Thank you for taking the time to join us today to discuss our financial results for the third quarter of FY '24. My name is Ritesh Idnani and I'm the CEO at Firstsource.

I will start today with an update on the progress we have made during the quarter on various initiatives under the One Firstsource framework that I had detailed out in the last earnings call. I will then move to discuss our quarterly performance and outlook for FY '24. The One Firstsource framework defines our blueprint for the strategy refresh across the organization and is aimed at driving top quartile revenue growth with improvements in margin over the medium term. During the third quarter, we have made meaningful progress across several of these initiatives.

Let me start at the outset by detailing our efforts on simplifying the organization design and realigning the leadership team. As I have mentioned in the previous call, we've streamlined the organization structure along 4 go-to-market business units to remove overlaps, establish clear accountability and ensure faster decision-making.

So North America now has 3 broad industry verticals. Venkatgiri continues to head our Healthcare and Life Sciences business. We hired Vivek Sharma during the third quarter to head our Communications, Media and Technology verticals with additional responsibility for the North America Banking and Financial Services verticals as well. Vivek has had an impactful career, running sales globally at Infosys BPO and I'm excited to have him with us. He will also oversee our build-out in the emerging geographies such as Australia and New Zealand. Europe remains a geographical business unit for better synergies across verticals and continues to be headed by Rajiv Malhotra.

Our service portfolio is now aligned into 6 capability units to identify white spaces in our portfolio, build adjacencies and improve client experience. Ashish Chawla, who built a strong edtech practice for us from scratch has taken over as the leader of our CXM consulting capability units. Arjun Malhotra (sic) [ Arjun Mitra ] continues to lead our world-class collections practice.

Back office, which is typically domain-specific is integrated into the respective market units. Besides these mature service lines, we are also seeing significant demand come from emerging services that is trust and safety and data and analytics. With the org designs largely over, the businesses are now moving rapidly in putting in place specific plans around the priority areas they've identified to drive growth in their respective businesses and building the next level of leadership to support their sales efforts.

Next, let me talk about our progress in bringing technology in everything we do. We are institutionalizing the process of evaluating how we can leverage technology in every proposal that we are participating to have a wider engagement with our client base and increase the share of wallet as well as the share of transaction and outcome-based commercial models.

You will recall our deal win from ETS announced last quarter, where we are engaged for both ops and technology services. We are currently engaged in several such discussions with similar tech and operations deals in both Europe and North America. We're also expanding actively our partner ecosystem and have recently hired a leader to drive technology partnerships across the organization. He will also work on improving our existing services and developing new ones to support businesses in achieving higher growth. We believe that the quality of our client portfolio and our market leadership in chosen verticals are truly differentiated and we continue to double down on our efforts to amplify the Firstsource brand amongst different constituencies, including industry analysts and advisers.

We recently hired Aniket Maindarkar as our Chief Marketing Officer to lead our efforts in this area. The passion and commitment of our workforce is our superpower and we want to make Firstsource a great place to work for our employees and be an employer of choice. In Q3, our ongoing commitment to enhancing the employee experience within the One Firstsource framework remained a top priority. We successfully maintained high employee engagement by conducting personalized interactions, doubling the one-on-one sessions, including 70-plus town halls and several [indiscernible] meetings. This concerted effort resulted in a trailing 12-month double-digit reduction in our attrition in Q3 even as we doubled our hiring to over 1,800 plus candidates per month.

We're also focusing on automation and deploying technology internally to improve our hiring process and make it more efficient and effective for new joiners. We also continue to work on a skilled refresh across levels and functions and expand our leadership training and development programs. There was a close to 25% increase in the average learning hours across our employee base during the quarter.

Finally, we remain laser-focused on optimizing our cost and driving efficiencies. We've identified specific tracks to work on such as right staffing the execution model, right shoring of both production and support headcount, optimization of overheads, adoption of automation and AI tools to reduce time to deployment and improve speed to competency and also benchmark our current contract commercials.

We are seeing a strong interest amongst our clients for our revamp to go-to-market strategy and our increased engagement with them, especially to structure large transformational programs. We're also doubling down on reinvigorating our sales engine to build a foundation required for achieving consistent revenue growth over the long term. Our combined deal wins in the last 2 quarters is 30% higher year-on-year and we exited Q3 with the highest ever pipeline in the history of the company. This has encouraged us to left shift our investment plans. We intend to fund these investments mainly through internal cost optimization and efficiency gains.

As such, while the interplay of various puts and takes can have impact on our margins in a specific quarter, we expect that to be in a narrow band and we remain confident of a structural improvement in margins over the medium term.

In summary, we continue to believe that the discontinuities caused by the macro and technology shifts are opening up opportunities, which Firstsource is very well positioned to take advantage of, given the quality of our client portfolio and our market leadership in our chosen verticals. I'm pleased with the progress we have made in Q3 in these areas we have identified for a strategy refresh. I'm also encouraged by the early signs of this in our deal pipeline as well as the enthusiasm amongst our employee base that gives me confidence in achieving our target of top quartile revenue growth with improvement in margins over the medium term.

Let me now shift to the key highlights of our Q3 performance. During Q3, our revenue grew 6.1% year-on-year and came in at INR 16 billion. In U.S. dollar terms, the growth was 4.8% year-on-year and 3% quarter-on-quarter at USD 192 million. In constant currency, our revenue grew 3.4% quarter-on-quarter after staying flattish over the first half of FY '24. This is in line with our previous commentary in Q2 of a growth acceleration over the second half of FY '24. EBIT margin was 10.7%. This is down about 60 basis points quarter-on-quarter from Q2 FY '24 normalized EBIT margin but higher by about 134 basis points versus Q3 of last year. Our net profit was INR 1.3 billion and our diluted EPS was INR 1.84 for the quarter.

Let me now talk a little bit about our deal wins. We continue to participate actively in both the cost optimization as well as the process transformation agendas of our clients. We're also actively hunting for sole source opportunities both in our existing portfolio of clients as well as a new set of logos. The success of our strategy is evident in our deal wins in Q3, which was the highest in the last 3 years.

Let me highlight a few notable deal wins. I'm pleased to inform you that we've been selected by 1 of the top 5 banks in the U.K., one of our long-standing clients for a large transformational deal. This would be one of the largest deal wins for Firstsource in the last 5 years and underscores the importance of the relationships we've built and the value Firstsource delivers to its clients. It's also a testament to what we are trying to do on the cross-sell and upsell side. We also won additional business from a leading utility company in the U.K., another existing client to provide core customer support. We continue to expand our footprint in one of the leading media and entertainment companies by adding new complex service queues.

Firstsource won additional business from one of the large North American telecom and media companies globally, another existing client, to provide account management services. We expanded footprint and wallet share in 1 of the top 5 health care insurance providers in the U.S. for providing claims processing services. We also further strengthened our relationship with a large managed health care company in the U.S. with additional business for customer support and claims processing. We further strengthened the multi-decade relationship with one of the largest managed health care and insurance companies in the U.S. with additional business for providing clearinghouse support services. And finally, we were selected by a leading online real estate player to provide support for its property management services business.

While the overall demand environment remains conservative, we stay focused on creating value for our clients and remaining disciplined on execution. Concurrently, we are continuing to work on scaling new subsegments in our chosen set of focus verticals and selectively expanding our offerings to adjacent verticals.

Let me now provide you a deep dive into our Q3 performance and outlook for each one of our industry verticals. Let me start with Banking and Financial Services. In the third quarter, our BFS vertical was down 3% quarter-on-quarter and 5% year-on-year in constant currency terms, primarily due to softness in business volumes. As you know, this vertical comprises 3 broad subsegments for us: Mortgage, Collections and Customer Experience.

Our mortgage business was down sequentially and year-over-year due to the market cycle. While the broader demand remains sensitive to changes in mortgage rates both in refinance and purchase business, we continued with our efforts to weatherproof our portfolio by expanding our footprint into servicing, reverse mortgage and adjacent sectors of real estate. We had notable success, as I mentioned earlier, with a leading online real estate player which selected Firstsource as a strategic partner. We've also secured a significant sized new campaign from a reverse mortgage lender, another existing client.

And finally, our efforts to bring in technology interventions into our sales propositions in the form of advanced automation and GenAI is also attracting encouraging interest from customers.

Let me turn attention to the collection side of the business. While our collections business was marginally down, that was primarily because of the growing shift in execution to offshore. Our focus here has been to increase our footprint, both geographically as well as expand into other industry verticals beyond financial services to telco, utilities, health care and retail. We are also working to shift our execution to offshore or nearshore and we made steady progress on all of these initiatives in Q3.

For instance, in one of our large clients in the segment, our service footprint has expanded into credit card and back office apart from the core loan collection business. During the quarter, we also went live at one of the largest European banks where we are working with their collections business in the U.K. We added multiple new clients in this segment during the quarter as well as expanded our execution capacity in Mexico where we are servicing 5 collections clients from them. We expect growth to recover in Q4 even though the seasonal lift that we typically see is likely to be muted this year due to reduced share of third-party collections.

And finally, on the customer experience side, as you know, we are one of the largest CX providers in the banking and financial services verticals, leveraging our healthy mix of locations for voice and messaging services to drive efficiencies and deliver meaningful outcomes for our customers.

We're seeing excellent demand from banks that are diversifying both their overall retail banking and commercial banking portfolio with market improvements. And last but not the least, we are making steady progress in our efforts to broad base our portfolio on the banking and financial services side in areas such as risk and compliance, financial crimes, fraud and auto finance. Overall, we continue to expect modest growth in this vertical in Q4.

Let me turn to Healthcare. In the third quarter, our Healthcare vertical was up 3% year-on-year and 5% quarter-on-quarter in constant currency terms. This was driven by the payer segment, where revenue grew mid to single digit on a year-on-year basis and double digits sequentially, led by ramp-ups across clients. While the macroeconomic environment has been relatively stable for health plans, they continue to explore more opportunities for cost optimization and acquisition to drive member expansion.

We're seeing opportunities to partner with them to provide disruptive propositions to help them be more competitive and relevant to their member base across the entire value chain, whether it be enrollment, claims, billing, appeals and grievances, et cetera. We're also in advanced talks for a few large, structured deals in this segment, including a couple of sole-source transactions.

Our strategy to focus on strategic accounts is playing well. We had 2 large deals in this space in Q3 from our existing clients that I've already mentioned. We also added a couple of new logos in this segment in Q3. We expect ramp ups in these deals which should reflect in healthy revenue growth in the fourth quarter as well. We continue to also focus on building out our BPaaS offering. And during the third quarter, we hired a dedicated person to drive our build-out strategy in this area. We're also seeing encouraging traction on GenAI, where discussions are moving from POCs to live projects.

Let me now turn your attention to the Provider segment. Revenues in this segment was stable sequentially and marginally higher on a year-on-year basis. Our focus here is to improve profitability by driving offshoring as well as widening the service offerings. We've seen an uptick in the number of discussions with clients for offshore revenue cycle management.

Our first such win was in Q1 of this year, that's scaling up well. We've had multiple additional wins and are currently in conversation with several clients in this space. The current wave of technology-enabled disruption is providing an opportunity for us to take share from traditional revenue cycle management players who have largely built a people-based business. Overall, we expect good growth momentum in the Healthcare vertical in the fourth quarter as well, largely driven by the payer segment.

Let me now turn your attention to our Communications, Media and Technology segment. Our CMT vertical grew 10% quarter-on-quarter and 2.6% year-on-year in constant currency terms, driven by ramp-ups across multiple clients, offsetting the drag from the onshore to offshore transition underway in our top client. As you are aware, our client portfolio in this vertical comprises some of the leading names and global brands in telecom, digital media, edtech, consumer tech and the e-commerce space. We have a sharp focus on our 3 core segments, growing our B2C support, building our B2B presence and systematically investing in building our capabilities and expanding our client base in the [indiscernible] to new age segments. We are encouraged by the progress thus far and the traction we have seen with our pipeline conversions.

Our engagement with ETS is also scaling well. In October, we went live with our first global capability center for the [indiscernible] vertical in Hyderabad, with multidisciplinary skills in the areas of assessment, operations, data analytics and emerging tech.

We continue to expand our footprint in the university and edtech provider space globally with solutions that help transform all facets of the learner experience from admissions to graduation. We also expanded our partnership with a marquee consumer tech company in training their AI tools, leveraging our AIOps framework. In Q3, we also added another consumer tech company as a client supporting their AI research team in localization of their chatbots.

We've seen a healthy momentum in our telco business where we had multiple wins, not just in our top clients but we also added additional lines of business with our top clients in North America and adding 3 new logos in the telco space in the quarter. Overall, we expect a healthy momentum in this vertical in the fourth quarter with ramps up in recent deal wins.

And finally, I will round off with a quick word on our diversified vertical, which mainly comprises the energy and utility space. It grew 1.5x year-on-year and 14% quarter-on-quarter in constant currency terms. We continue to see a strong demand in the energy market even as we make fresh inroads in our client base in this vertical.

Let me now provide you a geographical commentary. In terms of geographies, the U.S. was up 6% year-on-year in constant per currency terms, while Europe was flat, mainly due to the optical impact of on-site to offshore shift in our top client. Sequentially, we had a well-rounded growth with the U.S. growing 3.3% quarter-on-quarter, while Europe grew 3.6% quarter-on-quarter. We expect the growth momentum in the U.S. to be -- continue to be led by the Healthcare and CMT verticals. Growth should be higher in Europe, where we are working with a dedicated focus on client acquisition across all verticals as well as investing in beefing up our sales team.

Coming to our operations. On the people side, we added a total of 1,994 new colleagues in Q3, bringing our total employee base to 25,947 employees at the end of December 2023. This is the highest net addition in the last 12 quarters and is across geographies.

As you may note, we have added 16% to our base over the last 2 quarters and this, in some sense, is a reflection of our strength of our executable order book. The trailing 12-month attrition for the quarter was 33.8% at offshore and 43.3% at on-site compared to 36.1% and 44.8% in Q2. We expect these metrics to trend down further in the coming quarter, though at a more moderated pace, helped by improved outcomes of our employee value-related interventions.

And finally, to give you a progress update on the GenAI side, we continue to make solid progress on our GenAI initiatives. Our library of use case has expanded to over 130 cases across industries that can be used to jump start conversations. We've completed over 35 proof of concepts during the quarter. We are focusing our efforts on prebuilt copilots that can be quickly integrated to live engagements. We are working extensively also to elevate our existing platforms and IP, leveraging AI.

And finally, on the awards and recognition side, I'm proud to report that we achieved a score of 62 in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index in the very first year of our participation. This places us in top 96th percentile and amongst the top 5 within our peer group, that includes both India-listed scale IT services companies as well as global BPO providers.

Turning to the guidance and outlook. In summary, I'm pleased with our performance in Q3 of '24. Our healthy order book -- healthy order bookings during the quarter, as well as the good deal pipeline sets us well for Q4. With 9 months of the fiscal now over, we narrow our expectation for constant currency growth in FY '24 to be between 0.5% to 1.5% and a normalized EBIT margin to be at the lower end of 11% to 11.5% range.

With that, let me turn the call over to Dinesh to give you a detailed color on the quarterly financials and related matters. Dinesh?

[Dinesh Jain, executive]

Thank you, Ritesh, and hello, everyone. Let me now walk you through some of the financial details. Revenue for Q3 FY '24 came in at INR 15,966 million or USD 192 million. This implies a year-on-year growth of 6.1% in the rupee terms and 2.8% in constant currency terms.

I'm happy to report that we have returned to the year-on-year growth in constant currency terms after contraction in the previous 4 quarters due to the portfolio changes in our Mortgages and Healthcare businesses. For the ninth month (sic) [ 9 months ] of FY '24 cumulative revenue was INR 46,658 million or USD 564 million. This implies a year-on-year growth of 4.5% in rupee terms and flat in the constant currency terms. We reported operating profit of INR 1,709 million in Q3 FY '24, up 21.2% over Q3 FY '23 and translates to EBIT margin of 10.7%, up 130 bps on year-on-year basis. This is down around 60 bps sequentially from 11.2% we reported in Q2 FY '24, adjusted for a few onetime charges.

As you know, we rolled out our annual compensation hikes and promotion in Q3. We also saw higher costs related to ramp ups in the some of the recent deals wins. We were able to offset this partly through cost optimization and efficiency gains resulting in the net impact of only 60 bps in Q3.

For the 9 months, our operating profit was INR 5,132 million or up 34% over 9 months. FY '23 and -- it translate EBIT margin of 11%. Adjusted for onetime charge in Q2 FY '24, our EBIT margin in 9 months was 11.2%. Tax rate was 20% for the quarter and 19% for the 9 months, which is within the range which we guided between 18% to 20%. Profit after tax came in at INR 1,287 million or 8.1% of the revenue for the quarter.

As you will recall, we have other income of INR 598 million in Q3 FY '23 on account of change in the fair value of the liability for purchase of noncontrolling interest and also the contingent consideration on the acquisition. Adjusted for that, our net profit in Q3 FY '24 was up 18.5% year-on-year basis. For the 9 months profit after tax was INR 3,812 million, this is higher by 42% on a year-on-year basis after adjusting for the other income on the base.

Coming to some of the other financial highlights. DSO came in at 62 days versus 66 days in the Q2. You may recall we had called out that spike last quarter was mainly due to delay in collection, most of which have been now subsequently collected. As a result of this and, of course, higher revenue, our cash flow from operation improved significantly in Q3.

We kept our CapEx in the quarter to INR 275 million as we prepared the key infrastructure to fulfill the recent order wins. We have added new seating capacities in Bangalore, Mumbai and Philippines during quarter 3. We continue to invest in creating additional capacity given the extent of our deal wins. W also used some of the cash generation to retire both working capital debt as well as the long-term debt during Q3. Our net debt stands at INR 4,398 million as of December 31, versus INR 6,053 million as of September 30, 2023, which implies reduction of INR 2,255 million during the quarter.

ROCE for 9 months is 15.3% versus 13.4% for the FY '23. Our cash balance, including investments stood at INR 2,556 million at the end of the quarter. Our hedge book as of December 31 is as follows. We have coverage of GBP 59.5 million for the next 12 months with average rate of INR 105 to GBP 1 and coverage of USD 82 million with an average rate of INR 84.4.

I'm pleased to share that the Board of Directors declared an interim dividend of INR 3.5 per share on the face value of INR 10 per share, same as last year.

This is all from my side. We can now open up floor for the questions. Operator, over to you.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] The first question is from the line of Manik Taneja from Axis Capital.

[Manik Taneja, analyst]

Once again, good execution during the quarter. I just wanted to pick your brains on -- pick your thoughts on a couple of things. Some of your peers as well as you have spoken about softer volumes compared to the initial client volume estimates that customers typically tend to provide through the course of calendar year '23. Are you still seeing that play out? Or there is some amount of stability on that front? That's question #1.

The second question that I have is that some of your peers have spoken about in-sourcing that they have seen at a -- in a couple of instances. Are you seeing any signs or discussions around this front at any of your clients? And the third question was a clarification question. We've seen us do several leadership reinforcements over the recent months. Where are we in that journey now? Would be great to get your thoughts on that.

[Ritesh Idnani, executive]

Let me try and address the questions one after the other. The first question that you had was in terms of what are we seeing in the macroeconomic environment itself, client spend, volume, so on and so forth. Let me just start by saying, we still see the macro duality in some sense still playing out. What I mean by that is, on one hand, while clients remain cautious in the uncertain macro environment, we also find that they are actively moving on programs where they see opportunities for meaningful cost optimization, not just by leveraging outsourcing and offshoring but by reimaging the process itself and bringing in elements of technology, including AI and automation.

We have sized that opportunity and continue to engage with both our existing clients as well as exploring new logos with solutions that create value for them. So that duality, in my mind, is likely to continue either which way. The second question that you had was related to the insourcing side. Actually, let me just take a step back and share with you how I see this trend in a larger context. The narrative for in-sourcing or global capability construct in the last 12 months has moved from pure cost arbitrage to co-location and co-innovation.

And here there's a little bit of a paradox on one hand. Between 200 to 250 new centers are being established every year across various GCP hubs, out of these, about 55% to 65% are de novo, that is, the enterprise is setting up their own centers. So the rest are provider assisted. And the newer provider-supported global capability centers even in the in-source environment are focused around collaboration around cutting-edge tech and [indiscernible]. But what we're also seeing is the growing number of clients who are exploring divestitures of their offshore captives. In fact, the number of such cases today is almost 5x of normal years and even more than what we saw post the global financial crisis. Part of this has to do with the impact of higher interest rates on working capital and thereby expensive debt servicing, which is pushing companies with global captive footprints to consolidate and divest to free capital itself.

The other part has to do with the advent of AI and the uncertainty around its impact, making companies rethink their entire strategy to deploying large pools of resources on their own. At Firstsource, what we're trying to do is to position ourselves to take advantage of both these trends.

We created a comprehensive playbook, when clients want to insource that has components of design, build and operate in partnerships with real estate firms, global talent agencies and legal and regulatory advisers. This makes it easier for us and clients to get off the ground quickly and reap the benefits of co-location and co-innovation. We've also set up a team to focus on divestitures, especially in sectors we operate in and the geographies we operate in are on our radar itself. So we think a combination of both of those allows us to take advantage of either the in-sourcing/setting up of global capability centers or on the other hand, it allows us to take advantage of what might play out in terms of capital divestitures itself.

The third question that you have was related to the leadership and the org design and so on and so forth. We've rolled out the new org structure effective from 1st of Jan. Portfolio alignments, as I discussed in my initial commentary, as the market and capability unit levels have happened, we're now firmly in execution mode. Having said that, look, there are still areas where we continue to explore the right talent. We'll keep making interventions as and when we see a requirement itself.

[Manik Taneja, analyst]

If I can pick your thoughts on one more question. You spoke about both an interest and push from our end to, as you say, drive more offshore delivery across some parts of our vertical service offerings. What is driving that? Because historically, the kind of work that we used to do in certain segments, say, for example, in the [indiscernible] side, those used to be typically onshore delivery because of compliance or because of regulatory reasons. So is there something else that we're essentially trying to sell now on both health care as well as possibly on the collection side?

[Ritesh Idnani, executive]

Yes. So let me respond to this, Manik. Let's talk a little bit about the Healthcare segment itself, right? So on the provider side, I do expect that the buildup of enrollment will be gradual over the next 9 to 12 months. But on the provider side, what we are focused on is on broad basing our portfolio. We are quite excited right now by the offshore revenue cycle management market, where we believe that the current wave of tech-led disruption is providing an opportunity for us to take share away from traditional revenue cycle management players who have largely built a people-based business. Similarly, on the payer side, our strategy to focus on strategic accounts is playing well. We had good wins in the States in the first quarter and we see a very healthy pipeline as well. Therefore, we expect good growth momentum in the Healthcare vertical in the coming quarter.

[Operator]

The next question is from the line of [indiscernible] from Svan Investments.

[Unknown Analyst]

Yes. I wanted to pick you brains around -- the conversations around the highest deal wins. Could you talk a little about quantification of the numbers or the order book, how it does look like?

[Ritesh Idnani, executive]

Yes, we do not get into specifics around the numbers yet, in terms of the deals wins or the size of the pipeline itself. But what I want to talk a little bit about is the pickup in our deal wins that you see, whether it's in terms of the fact that our deal wins in the third quarter was the highest in the last 3 years or the fact that we exited third quarter with the highest ever pipeline in the history of the company. It's simply the result of the rigor that we've brought in all -- in our engagement with all our clients. What we're doing differently now is to participate more proactively in both the cost optimization and the process transformation agendas of our clients. We're actively hunting for code source opportunities, both in our existing portfolio of clients as well as in new set of logos.

And we are finding clients responding favorably to our efforts which is, therefore, then translating into the strength of our deal wins and pipeline. What you also will see is in terms of profile, these deals are across the board. An example, in Q2, we had a large deal in the health care sector, which is essentially a new logo. In Q3, we got a deal from a large financial services client, which was one of our existing customers in this space. This kind of stuff in some sense is reflective of how we are going to market and the fruits of the rigor that we are deploying in the process, how that's yielding results for us.

[Unknown Analyst]

Got it. Got it. Understood. And one last question maybe. So you touched up on the top quartile growth. So what sort of peers are we comparing the growth rates to?

[Ritesh Idnani, executive]

Good question. I think what I would do is, when we come back in -- at the end of Q4, I will be providing more detailed commentary in terms of what the top quartile revenue growth will be, as well as talk a little bit about what those numbers would look like in terms of either the revenue side or in terms of margin itself because a lot of this is not just about the current quarter or the near term but it's also about how we are building a business for the medium- to long-term itself so that we can continuously outperform itself.

[Unknown Analyst]

Got it. And one last question, if I may. So when do you expect the BFS vertical to pick up per se, seeing the -- based on discussions where the -- declines we are having right now. And any sort of improvement in terms of operating leverage improvements and since we are spending a lot in the terms of technology and seen growth in top line? So when do we expect it, even in Q4 it would reflect or it is going to take longer than that? So these 2 questions.

[Ritesh Idnani, executive]

Yes. So let me talk a little bit about the financial services vertical and then talk a little bit about the margin side of the house. If you look at the growth that we are seeing today, our financial services portfolio, we won this large deal, for instance, with this existing client in the U.K., which is in the financial services space. And that can some sense reflects resilience in what we're seeing in the portfolio itself. What we are also seeing as a secular theme, which we think bodes well for us is where clients are increasingly looking for service providers who offer an integrated capability across front office and back office so that they are truly end-to-end from a domain standpoint.

This actually plays well for us because we are one of, maybe a handful of providers who have that end-to-end capability from front to back, mostly players end up over-indexing on one area or the other. If you look at the mortgage space, in particular, the trajectory suggests based on all the commentary that, I'm sure you read as much as I do, that there's likely to be an easing of mortgage rates, which should increase the refinance demand.

What we are, however, doing though and this is more important than anything else, right? We are deeply engaged with our clients to help them build a certain readiness playbook with the right mix of people and digital/AI interventions. And as we've been broad basing our service portfolio, we're not just talking to the mono liners in the mortgage space but we're talking to mid-tier regional banks as well as broad basing our portfolio beyond origination to servicing and [ e-lock ] and other segments of the real estate sector.

We're also seeing growth in our fintech space and our collections business is a great hook there to land in the fintech space as well as especially to take a lot of the BNPL players in the segment. A lot of them are dealing with a large collections portfolio and our world-class leading capability in collections certainly is helping in that regard. So there are a number of things that we feel good about in the context of our current capabilities and how they are geared up for the financial services space itself.

Now the question that you had related to margins and what we end up seeing. One of the things that I talked about right up front in the context of our commentary is, we are investing in building a deal funnel as well as refreshing our sales engine. Our intent is to fund these investments mainly through internal cost optimization and efficiency gains. And while we may see minor impact on our reported margins in a specific quarter itself, we remain confident of a structural improvement in our margins over the medium term. The fact of the matter is, I mean, if you just take 2 data points into account, we had the largest set of deal wins last quarter and we also exited the quarter with the highest pipeline ever in the history of the company.

Just put those 2 things in perspective. It seems that when these deals land and we hire people, there is a cost of growth that's going to come about. And that's going to be playing out in a quarter itself. Now, while we try to optimize for that through internal cost optimization and other efficiency initiatives that we are constantly working on, that could result in a split narrowly and in a narrow band quarter-to-quarter. Our intent is to make sure that they're building a resilient and durable business with margin improvement over the medium term itself, so that's probably the way to think about it.

[Operator]

The next question is from the line of Shradha from AMSEC.

[Shradha Agrawal, analyst]

Congratulations on a good quarter. Two questions here, Ritesh. First is, you've indicated kind of increased offshoring trend in certain segments of business like health care and collections. So do you see this as a risk to revenue just like we saw a 300 to 400 bps headwind to revenue in FY '24 because of higher offshoring from our top client in CMT vertical?

[Ritesh Idnani, executive]

No, I do not see this is a risk. What we are seeing is 2 sets of things. On one hand, we are seeing propensity to move offshore and nearshore and some of our clients potentially being an opportunity where we can take additional volumes from them. We are also seeing the amenability on their part to look at that part of the business from an offshore standpoint benefits us. As we broad base our portfolio on the provider side, as an example and we started playing in the mid- to back end of the revenue cycle side, a lot of that work gets done offshore. So naturally, there is a tendency to move the work offshore as opposed to otherwise.

Do you feel good about it? If anything else between the locations that we have today in the mix, our ability to service, whether it's our health care clients or our collections clients, our location mix across onshore, nearshore and offshore positions us really well. And actually, in a way, having locations in country in the U.S. and U.K. in our mind, it's going to be a net positive over the long run, medium to long term.

[Shradha Agrawal, analyst]

Right. But from a more near-term perspective getting into next year, do you see more -- do you see this more as a headwind? I'm talking more from a near-term perspective. I understand from the...

[Ritesh Idnani, executive]

We don't see that. We don't see it as a headwind. No.

[Shradha Agrawal, analyst]

Right, right. That's great to hear. And secondly, while you've narrowed your guidance band for '24, the [indiscernible] still is very wide from 2% to 6% to get to the top end and the low end of the guidance range. So at this point in time, just wanted to check your comfort on whether you are more comfortable being at the lower end or at the mid-end, given the fact that you don't expect the usual seasonality in the collections business that plays out every year to happen this year.

[Ritesh Idnani, executive]

Look, I will only say this. While we do not specifically provide guidance on any specific quarter -- so I'm not going to comment on the math that you just provided, right? So having said that, let me just reiterate the following. We had a good set of deal wins in the last 2 quarters that are in various stages of ramp up as we speak. You can also see this in the net headcount addition numbers as well as the facilities build-out that we are doing. We feel good about where we will end up in the -- at the end of the quarter and for the full fiscal itself on the back of that. So our purpose of narrowing the band was to give you more color as we approach the end of the quarter itself as we start looking at where we might end up for the full fiscal itself.

[Shradha Agrawal, analyst]

Right. And just one more question, if I can squeeze in. This time around, I think you indicated that we did see some decline in our mortgage business. And this has come after 2, 3 quarters of stability that we had seen in the previous 2, 3 quarters. So could you just highlight what exactly happened? Because if I recall well, you had indicated that you've kind of reached the bottom in mortgage revenue. I mean most of your clients have reached the bare minimum of the mortgage revenue that they can be at. So from that perspective, would we not be expecting a gradual ramp up each quarter.

[Ritesh Idnani, executive]

Look, I'm not too perturbed about what you might see as a marginal drop quarter-on-quarter in the business itself, in the mortgage business. As you are aware, that business is down to -- in the high single digits for us as a percentage of revenue, #1. #2, we feel very comfortable with the deal wins that we had in this space and the ramps that are happening as we speak. We also continue to have a active pipeline in the mortgage side and our leadership position in this space augurs well for what's coming down the pipe. So if nothing else, actually we are playing on offense out there. We have created a [indiscernible] playbook, which we think bodes well for as and when the Fed chooses to relax interest rates as well. So overall, I wouldn't read anything into what you might have seen as a minor aberration one quarter to the next.

[Shradha Agrawal, analyst]

Sure. Any quantification around how much does mortgage contribute to overall revenue now?

[Ritesh Idnani, executive]

It's -- we are not getting into specifics of numbers but what we can see is that it's not material enough that it should matter to the portfolio. And that's -- the bigger point that I want to highlight out here is, I think, again, in our endeavor to build a business which is resilient and durable, we want to make sure that we take some of the macro, discontinue it away from the way we are growing the business itself. That's the reason why we are continuing to broad base our portfolio. That's the reason why we feel that how we are putting the foundational blocks in place, sets us up really well for top quartile industry growth.

[Operator]

The next question is from the line of Nikhil Choudhary from Nuvama.

[Nikhil Choudhary, analyst]

Congratulations on very strong quarter. My first question is on deal win. So just want to understand which segment and which geography is driving this growth. And second thing is regarding growth in deal win being 30% for first half and headcount growth being 16%, is it fair to assume that our between ACV and PCV, ACV growth is more or less similar to headcount and while PCV is growing much more faster.

[Ritesh Idnani, executive]

So let me respond to the first part of the question, which is where have we seen the deal wins itself. The deal wins are broad-based across industry sectors. So we've seen it across industry verticals and across geographies. So if you look at growth that we are experiencing, both in the U.S. and Europe and in European markets, we see the deal wins playing out. Similarly, we also see the deal wins playing out across financial services, health care as well as our communications, media tech, as well as our diversified portfolio itself.

I don't want to specifically comment on the PCV, ACV math because deals have different time lines. They're not necessarily drawn out in a manner that you might have been drawing a conclusion out there. What I think you should take away is the fact that we've had 2 consecutive quarters of meaningful headcount addition. And that in some sense is a reflection of the strength of that executable order book itself. So the very fact we're adding headcount, supported by the fact that the deal wins continue to go up and last quarter was the highest deal wins that we've had, as well as the pipeline that is there, I think these are all, I would think, as great indicators in terms of how it's likely to play out from a revenue standpoint itself.

[Nikhil Choudhary, analyst]

Sure. Ritesh, on similar line, basically our deal wins will be very strong. But in a scenario where mortgage volumes comes back, that will be more discretionary and still not structured in this deal win, right?

[Ritesh Idnani, executive]

So it's a good question. I'm going to give you 2 different perspectives, right? A lot of the independent mortgage companies that might be there, the mono liners who only specialize in mortgage, a lot of them may still be looking for capacity in terms of how they ramp itself. As and when the origination volumes do come back, I would expect that it won't be discretionary but they are looking to potentially build-out the business for what's lately to play out.

I mean, sometimes these things are a cycle, right? The next cycle that ends up playing out where interest rates are coming down, creates a market move towards maintaining a certain threshold of people to support that volume itself. What I do expect is, the way we are preparing ourselves and what is resonating with our customer base is the fact that we can provide a combination of a people plus technology solution, i.e., a nonlinear capability to help them ramp up to what might come down the pipe. Let me give you an example of that. Take underwriting, which is one of the key areas in the mortgage value chain itself. The ability to have a digital underwriter, as an example, leveraging AI along with a human in the loop is going to be a differentiated capability for organizations to ramp up as volumes come back. And I think these are the kinds of opportunities that we feel very, very good about.

[Operator]

Next question is from the line of Dipesh from Emkay Global.

[Dipesh Mehta, analyst]

A couple of questions. First about, I think in the collection business, you indicated we are not expecting usual seasonality in Q4. So can you help us understand what is changing in the business or why it is not happening, usual seasonality? But you indicated obviously growth to happen but not [indiscernible] seasonally which we usually see.

Second question is about top client. Top client did well this quarter despite offshoring. Just want to understand what led to it and whether it is -- because Q3 is generally a higher volume quarter for that client, whether it is usual seasonality or something more to it.

Third question is about EBIT margin. Now it is down 60 bps and we alluded to some of the reasons line salary hike, promotion. ramp up. But obviously, there is a offsetting factor of offshoring, significant offshoring. So considering all these factors put together it seems margin is -- revenue is growing broadly in line with the way you expected. Margin seems to be lagging. So if you can provide some sense around how one should look at it?

And one question on other income side. Last quarter, we indicated that noncontrolling interest related and contingent reversal, largely behind. But again, this quarter, we are seeing some movement. So whether this is the last quarter or you expect it to continue?

[Ritesh Idnani, executive]

So let me start by talking a little bit about our collections support business itself, right? First and foremost, we continue to see significant traction in our collections business across first-party collections, third-party collections and legal collections. It's a world-class capability. We continue to add significant clients as well as consolidate our position with several of the top banks that we are the #1 collections provider for. We've added several new clients in this space, particularly in the fintech side as well.

What we -- when I talked about the fact that there might be -- the business might be a little muted in Q4, there will still be a seasonality, it may not be as much as what we see. But we still do expect on the strength of what we've seen on the headcount as well as the deal wins itself, that should bode well in terms of what Q4 should look like itself in general. Related to the top clients, we don't specifically talk about a specific client itself and what played out there. But what I do want to say is that we continue to actively engage with all our large clients and we are continuing to seek and gain new business from them. So I think you're going to see that as a secular theme just by virtue of the engagement that we are seeing with them itself.

I'm going to give a headline message on the EBIT and then I want to call in Dinesh to comment on the EBIT on the other income side. One of the things to bear in mind is that, if you are -- we are investing in building a deal funnel as well as refreshing our sales engine. We are continuing to fund some of these investments, mainly through internal cost optimization and efficiency gains itself.

And therefore, while on one hand, we may see minor impact one quarter to the next on a reported margin but we do believe longer term, this business is set up or rather even in the medium term this business set up a for a structural improvement in margins itself. So on one hand, we may see cost of growth playing out in a particular quarter but I wouldn't read much into that. So I actually think from that perspective, we're still very much on track for the guidance that we provided even last quarter as well as what we reiterated in the beginning of my commentary for the current quarter of where we will end up on the EBIT margin side. So we still be in that 11% to 11.5% range that we had talked about as well.

Dinesh, you want to add anything further to that?

[Dinesh Jain, executive]

No, I think you're right. I think most of their efficiencies are also part of the overall operating margin which we are showing. And I think their, cost of their increments are higher, it's not below, it's almost 120 to 130 bps is on account of increments and promotions and once we offset some of the [indiscernible] the next is 60 bps. And depends on your other income, you're aware that the last year, we have 2 of the acquisitions where contingent consideration not got paid and that was part of the other income. So you can see INR 61 crores was the other income in the Q3 last year, which is currently a smaller number of INR 13 crores, which is more on account of the -- one of the other transaction on the mortgage business side. And going forward, we don't see any other income coming in the coming quarters. It will be like last [indiscernible] will be in the March 31 but the number will be very small, if anything there.

[Operator]

The next question is from the line of Rahul Jain from Dolat Capital.

[Rahul Jain, analyst]

Congratulations on strong numbers. Just one bit, more of it has got answered. On the BFSI front, since we are still kind of seeing a cut down, so when we say that we want to grow into leader quadrant, do you think outside of this vertical, it would be practical or you see a lot of hope in revival in the growth for this vertical as well going into FY '25?

[Ritesh Idnani, executive]

Yes. No. Let me just break this down into different areas where we are seeing the demand, right? So we do believe that BFSI will continue to be -- will continue to grow and be a meaningful part of our portfolio itself, right? The work we do on our customer experience side today across a bunch of banks and fintechs and so on and so forth, is certainly something that is differentiated. And we believe that, that allows us to keep expanding and taking share in that space itself. Our collections capability is world-class and also differentiated because there's nobody else in the market who has that end-to-end capability across first-party collections, third-party collections and legal collections powered by a digital collections platform that we bring to that from an IP perspective.

Third, if you look at the specific processing capabilities that we have built along different assets and liability lines in the financial services space, whether it's mortgage, consumer loans, the deposit side of the house, specific capabilities around KYC, A&L, financial crimes, fraud, et cetera. We believe that all of these areas continue to grow at a rapid clip itself. Our ability to bring all of these capabilities under 1 roof to customers, creates the opportunity for us to build a story in all the markets in which we operate itself. So, therefore, I feel that we have a full arsenal of capabilities. We have a lot of the client base that is there. And our opportunity, if I go back to the One Firstsource framework that I talked about is, how do we continue to just cross-sell and upsell into these accounts itself. And that to me is a piece that we are working hard on and we're seeing some good green shoots of the same.

[Operator]

We'll take that as the last question. I would now like to hand the conference back to Mr. Ritesh Idnani for closing comments.

[Ritesh Idnani, executive]

Thank you all firstly, for joining the call and for your questions. I just want to close out with a few final points. I'm satisfied with our progress on the strategy refresh under the One Firstsource framework. We're seeing a very strong interest among clients for our revamped go-to-market strategy and we're engaging actively with them, especially to structure large transformational programs.

As you can see, this is reflected in our deal wins in Q3, which were the highest in the last 3 years, even as we closed the quarter with the highest ever pipeline in the history of the company. We are also executing well and our headcount addition in Q3 was the highest in the last 12 quarters. This has boosted our confidence in the medium-term growth outlook and as such we are bringing forward some of our planned investments.

We intend to fund these investments primarily through internal cost optimization and efficiency gains. And while this may have a minor impact on margins in any specific quarter, we remain confident of a structural improvement in our margins over the medium term. That's all from our side. We look forward to interacting again with you in the next quarterly call. Thank you.

[Operator]

Thank you very much.

[Dinesh Jain, executive]

Thank you everyone.

[Operator]

On behalf of Firstsource Solutions Limited, that concludes the conference. Thank you for joining us. Ladies and gentlemen, you may now disconnect your lines.