Please note that this conference is being recorded. I now hand the conference over to Mr. Shivaji from Yes Securities. Thank you, and over to you, sir. Thank you, Roshita. Good evening and a warm welcome to all those who have joined the call. The CSB Bank management is represented by Mr. Pralay Mondal, Managing Director and CEO, Mr. B. K. Dewakar, Executive Director, and Mr. Satish Gundewar, Chief Financial Officer. We specifically thank the management of CSB Bank for giving Yes Securities the opportunity to host their result call. The management will first be making some opening remarks, after which we will throw the floor open for questions. I now invite the management to make their opening remarks. Pralay, over to you. Thank you, Shivaji, and good afternoon, everybody. I will give a brief understanding of the global scenario and then quickly move into CSB specifics. Globally, I think all of you know that the uncertainties have risen significantly in the last one quarter. It is reflected in the movement of interest and currency rates and commodity prices. Bank of England and ECB has cut rates and are likely to cut even further. However, Fed may take a wait-and-watch stance for the timing. The tariff negotiations are likely to impact global growth adversely and may become inflationary for the US as well. The Indian economy is not insulated either from the global uncertainties and will also be impacted to a considerable extent. RBI has taken proactive steps in managing liquidity. Banking systems have remained in surplus liquidity since the last fortnight of March 2025. A series of OMOs aided by benign inflation expectations have also brought the GSEC yield curve down. The money market curve and CD curve have moved down 50-100 basis points during this period. The final LCR guidelines have smoothened the liquidity pressure. RBI has also lowered the growth expectation for the financial year to 6.5% from 6.7% earlier and has started to cut reported to boost the domestic consumption. Taking a cue from the ongoing tariff war and consequent uncertainty, IMF and World Bank have lowered GDP estimation to 6.2% and 6.3%, respectively. We expect the liquidity condition to ease further and more reduction in policy rates in the cards in this financial year. Coming to CSB specifics, on the highlights, first to start with profitability. The net profit for the full year, 2025, stood at INR 594 crore, which is 5% growth on a year-on-year basis. Q4 standalone was at INR 190 crore, which is 26% growth quarter to quarter on a year-on-year basis. Operating profit for the bank for the full year is INR 910 crore, and Q4 FY 2025 is INR 317 crore, with a growth of 17% and 39% on a FY and quarterly basis, respectively. Other income registered a 94% growth on quarterly basis and 66% on a FY basis. Other income constituted 21% of the total income for FY 2025. On cost-to-income side, the ratio is showing a declining trend on a sequential basis and stood below 60% for Q4 FY 2025 at 57.92%. Cost-to-income for the full year stood at 62.82%, which is in line with what last financial year was. NIM could be sustained above 4% on a FY basis at 4.13% in spite of the higher interest rate cost looming in the system. NIM for the quarter is marginally below 4% at 3.75%. I'm sure there will be questions on this. We'll respond then. ROA stood at 1.79% for the quarter ended 31/3/2025 and 1.53% on full-year basis. The bank is holding the contingency provisions intact and is continuing with the accelerated loan provisioning policy. On the liability side, robust deposit growth of 24% year-on-year amid a slow-paced industry growth of around 10%. CASA grew by 10% year-on-year, and CASA ratio stands now at 24.19%. We complemented our funding with FCY borrowings and refinanced based on cost considerations. However, there were some cost escalations that happened for a few months because of the hedging cost, which we can cover through the conversations later. This helped us in maintaining the LCR at a comfortable level. On the liquidity side, efficient management of liquidity risk. We are very, very careful. We said that liquidity is something we'll manage because it was very uncertain what was going on in the ecosystem even three months back. CD ratio stood at 86%. Average LCR for the quarter is 124%, and NSFR ratio was 121%. On the asset growth side, net advance grew by 29% YOY, higher than 2X times our industry growth of 12% YOY. All the verticals have started contributing towards asset growth, and this is the biggest highlight of this quarter and hopefully going ahead. Gold portfolio registered a growth of 35% YOY, while retail assets grew by 24%. SME continues to grow growth momentum and registered a growth of 33%. Wholesale banking portfolio grew by 22% despite the impact of liquidation of DA portfolio, which degrew by 89%, effectively running off the entire DA portfolio. Corporate loans on standalone basis grew 44%, but because of the DA runoff, it came down to 22%. Yield on advances for Q4 FY 2025 is 10.98%. Asset quality ratios are stable. GNPA and NNPA ratios for the quarter were 1.57% and 0.52%, as against 1.58% and 0.64%. Mild improvement on a Q on Q basis. PCR now stands at 83.71% with PWO and 67.19% without PWO. Here we have significantly improved compared to last quarter, where it was 60% to we grew to 67.19%. The bank is holding a provisioning buffer of around INR 185 crore over and above regulatory requirements. On the capital, CRAR was 22.46%, and Tier 1 ratio is 20.59%. Low proportion of risk-weighted assets compared to the industry as well helps us in this cause. On the shareholder value creation, book value per share is at INR 249. EPS for the year is INR 34.23. ROE for the year is 15.44%. We expanded our distribution network to 829 branches, 791 ATMs as of March end. We have added 56 new branches during FY and marked 6 branches as a part of branch rationalization. In conclusion, I would like to say that our top line, both deposits and advances, showed a strong sequential and widely growth. In Q4, our focus was slightly more on the deposit front given the liquidity conditions prevailing in the system. We could manage the funding part and maintaining the liquidity ratios like CD ratio, LCR, etc., at comfortable levels. The asset verticals also contributed to the liability growth by UOF self-funding. CASA also registered a yearly growth of 10%. On the advance front, it is heartening to note that all the verticals have shown consistent growth, signaling the journey that we are targeting as a part of our SBS 23 division. We are looking forward to modernization of our entire tech stack, and this is the biggest excitement that's going on in the bank right now. Through the call, I'll cover some of this a little bit more. We are migrating our CBS to Oracle system, implementation of various around systems. Almost everything in the bank is changing as it comes to the tech stack, which will also help us in targeting new segments, new businesses, transaction banking, wholesale banking, retail. Retail assets will scale up. Everything will have the levers to grow now going ahead after our tech transformation is done. Also, the building of the customer franchise journey will really start at the end of this tech transformation, which at best will be done in the next three to six months' time. This will be a very, very big year for us, and we'll be laying a strong foundation for materializing our long-term goals towards executing this right. We are working as one team and ensuring participation of all staff members. From a digital perspective, also, we are changing the UI/UX. We are changing the OBDX platform, everything. In short, the financial year is going to be more eventful as we have lots of balancing act between growth, cost, profitability, etc., with the migration process. The pace of network expansion remained at least at par with this current in the last year. We will strive to maintain our guidance on key parameters and endeavor to deliver consistently quarter on quarter. In short, as I said before, that sustained build-scale journey which we had started in 2021, 2022, this is the last phase of our build journey. Our scale journey will start from FY 2027. This is the platform we are laying for the scale journey from FY 2027. FY 2027 to 2030 is only execution and scaling. With that, I hand it over for questions. Thank you very much. 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 touchstone telephone. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, you may press star and two. Participants are requested to use handsets while asking a question. Ladies and gentlemen, we will wait for a moment while the question queue assembles. The first question is from the line of Dawal from DSP Mutual Fund. Please go ahead. Hi. Thanks for the opportunity and congratulations on the good performance. I just had two questions. First was relating to the. I'm sorry to interrupt you, Mr. Dawal. We are unable to hear you clearly. We'll move to the next question, which is from the line of Suraj Das from Sundaram Mutual Fund. Please go ahead. Mr. Suraj Das, please go ahead with the question. Your line is unmuted. Am I audible? Yes, yes. Yeah, yeah. Hi, sir. Thanks for the opportunity. Sir, two, three questions. First one is on the fee income. This quarter, the fee income has been very strong. If you can give some rationale and the sustainability of the same. You want to ask all the questions together? I'll answer or one by one. Okay. That is one. The second one is on the slippages part. Slippages, again, I mean, quarter on quarter has some uptake. Is this because of the MFI book? I think that book was minimal for you. That is second part. The third, I think you were saying something, sir, in the opening remarks in terms of hedging and all that thing. If you can explain that, I mean, what has been that thing? Is that the rationale behind your cost of fund increasing higher than the cost of deposit this full year? Yeah. Thanks. Thanks for your question. I'll take the first one first, which is the fee income. Yes, we had a very strong quarter around fee income. The primary drivers of this fee income are insurance, transaction banking fees. Because our wholesale franchise, when you see it's a 22% growth, but this quarter itself, we have grown from INR 900 crore of disbursement to almost INR 1,600 crore disbursement in one quarter. Obviously, along with that, some transaction banking fees have also come in as well. Thirdly, treasury income has also been good for us this quarter. Also, we get some PSLC benefits out of our gold loan and other agri and those kind of portfolios. A combination of all these and others are usual income like liability, credit cards, retail assets, processing fee. Gold also, we had a good disbursement. Gold also had processing fee, which is large enough. A combination of seven, eight items which are there. Within this, gold, wholesale banking, treasury, PSLC, and insurance, these are the five major items which have contributed to this growth. On treasury, I will combine this point along with your last question, which is hedging. What had happened is because none of us knew that liquidity would get comfortable by the end of the quarter, right? Being a very risk-averse kind of a bank, we did not want to take a liquidity risk. We created enough buffer in terms of liquidity into the system, which happened A, through deposits, B, through CDs, C, through FCY, and fourth, through borrowings, other borrowings like SIPB and those kind of. In that, what we did is we were sitting in a little bit of excess liquidity for the first two months of the quarter. Because we are sitting on that, and most of the forecasts which are expected to happen on the asset side came in the last period end, which is in the March quarter. Wholesale business is like that, and we did a lot of wholesale business last quarter. SME also happened in the end of the quarter. This excess liquidity which we are sitting on created some challenge for us in terms of yields. In the money market, you do not get that kind of a yield. We effectively were working on very, very low spread out there. What we did in the process is that we used it for trading for the money market trading. In the process, we gained on a mark-to-market basis. We sold SLR and bought back SLR. In the process, we made some income on the treasury side, primarily because we were sitting on significant excess liquidity at that point of time. You can imagine that after growing so much, up to 30% year on year on the asset book, still we are on LCR 124% average for the whole quarter. A lot of that has come in at the end of the quarter, how much we are sitting. That is how we could do some trading. What we lost on the NIM side, we gained on the fee side. This is a one-off. This will not happen every time. It happened because, A, the GSEC yield curve came down, and B, we were sitting on excess liquidity. This will not happen every time. In the process, we'll get that income on the income side, on the interest income side. Coming to the hedging, this is a part of this. What had happened is we have a 13% book which is now borrowings. Out of that, almost 9%, 8.5% is FCY borrowing. As you know, because of the global uncertainty and tariff war and all of that happened, the hedging cost went up significantly, because of which, while we were expecting the FCY borrowing cost to come down, because these are all SOFR linked, SOFR also didn't come down that much last quarter, and hedging cost temporarily went up, which took our cost of funds higher. That's one of the reasons our overall NIM compression also happened because of that. That we made good through the fee income which you did through the treasury. On your slippages point, yes, you are right that we had some slippages. It was a combination of two, three things. There are some migration provisions which happened this quarter, which was a part of the planned migration provision. Also, our unsecured book which you had stopped some time back, PL, then two wheelers, then some of the agri, some MFI book, etc., which we sort of called either unsecured or pseudo-unsecured, where we take a much larger provision, 50% immediate provision we take. Also, the migration provision, all of this together helped us in or rather given us more slippages in this quarter. The good thing is that this is starting to come down. The inter-unsecured book is less than 3.5% for us right now. We also took some prudent provision in terms of saying that since our overall business has been reasonably good. Let's say there is somewhere we don't need to take it regulatorily. It's not even on our board policy. If some figurative deterioration we are seeing when we are revaluing these properties, etc., normally we will not take them, but we took those as a prudent provisioning we did this quarter. It's a combination of three things. One is migration provision significantly increased this quarter, which was well planned. B is our unsecured book slipped between credit cards, MFI, and PL, and the other unsecured book which slipped a little bit. That we took upfront with 50% provision. Some of the slippages have been happening before also, but those things fully got fully slipped because that's a part of the migration provision. Third is some of the security, which I mean, you need to take this only if you come below 55% or 60% or something like that. We took those prudent calls a little upfront this quarter. Between these three, the slippages are slightly higher, which also led to slightly higher NPA for the quarter. We are pretty confident that come Q1, Q2, Q3 next year, we should be able to do a lot better than this. Overall, slippages were around 1.19%. Slippages, 1.19%. If you look at it previously, our slippages in March quarter last year was 2.16%. June quarter was 1.64%. September was 0.93%. December 0.85%. After doing so much of this thing, what we have done, it has come to 1.19%. It is not that it is significant, but yes, it was slightly higher. This will start coming down next quarter onwards. Hello. Thank you. You're fine. The next question is from the line of Dawal from DSP Mutual Fund. Please go ahead. Yeah. Hi, hi. Can you hear me? I can hear you, Dawal. Sorry, I was disconnected. That's why I said. No, no. Apologies for that. No, I was saying congrats on a good quarter. I just had a couple of questions. First was relating to the margin trajectory. Some of that you explained in the earlier answer. Just directionally, how do you think margins move from year on for, let's say, the full year FY 2026? If you can give some qualitative comment about first half and second half, that would be useful. The second one is on the fee income side, you talked about several factors driving the fee income delta last quarter to this quarter. If you could just sort of normalize it from a one-off that you called out, how much of this is sustainable when you think about FY 2026 or 2025? Would we see similar to asset growth from this base, or it should be lower or higher? Just any comments around that would be quite useful. Yeah, sure. Your first question was on this thing, NIM, right? There, in addition to what I said, see, our overall mix is changing. The wholesale business has started picking up. While it has grown effectively by 22%, actually, if you take the DA portfolio out, we have grown by 42% on wholesale. Incrementally, I just shared that from INR 900 crore of disbursement last quarter, this quarter we have disbursed INR 1,600 crore. That is one impact. Of course, that helps in many other ways, including fees and other things, but it also does not help NIM necessarily. It helps cost to income also, but it does not help NIM. That is one. The second part is that this year, there have been some slippages. Once we have those slightly NPA, which is a little larger, some of the NIM gets impacted, marginal, but that is also there. The third is that we have decisively pulled back on various businesses like high-yielding businesses like PL, agri, MFI. I mean, as I said before, that we are only degrowing those businesses. When we are degrowing those businesses, the high-yielding businesses are significantly coming down as a proportion. Hence, overall, when I look at business to business, like wholesale, what is the yield? SME, what is the yield? Retail, what is the yield? All of that, gold, what is the yield? All of that is holding. Our overall yield is coming down because of the business mix change. High-yielding businesses, we have effectively degrowing. Slightly lower-yielding business on the wholesale, it is growing. This is a part of a journey which we had expected and which we are doing it decisively. The fourth point is what I said, that the cost of fund went up, primarily because we all know that because of liquidity issue, what the situation was. Cost of fund also went up because, A, some of the FD costs were slightly high, which we took. Secondly, because of the thing which I just mentioned, that FCI borrowing, what happened, the hedging cost. I mean, normally, we would have expected it to come down, but it actually went up. That created a calculation issue for us. With all these, our overall yield, sorry, overall yield came down. The other thing what had happened is because we are sitting on idle cash for two months of this quarter, a significant amount, which treasury used to make some money on the fee side. That also where effectively you are either on zero negative margin there, right? I mean, when you pick up an incremental deposit as less than 7.5% after GSEC, where it is. That is also, it's a one-off. I mean, if you can say fee off also one-off, this is also one-off. Overall, it neutralized. From an ROA perspective, if we look at it, I don't see there is any change which is going to happen because of this one-off. Because one-off will neutralize the other one-off. That will happen in next few quarters. Now, giving the perspective what goes ahead now, I think from a NIM perspective, okay, we have definitely hit the bottom. We will not go below where we are right now. On a year-on-year basis, it will be we have to see. Because on a year-on-year basis, the NIM is 4.15%. Our current NIM this quarter is 3.75%. For the full of next year, the guidance will be somewhere in between 3.75%-4.14%, somewhere in between it will be there. Probably somewhere close to 4% is what will be there. I do not think we will go anything below this on NIM decisively, okay? That is on your NIM. What was the second question? The second question was just how to quantify the one-off. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So fees is sustainable, okay? I'll tell you why. Because what we didn't do is we didn't book the MTM booking of treasury, and we lost opportunity. Because we are conscious that GSEC will continue to come down, okay? Given that, we will have significant opportunity to book fees in this financial as well, which is FY26, okay? We have not utilized that. Because who will do that? I mean, we know that interest rates are coming down. What we did is the idle cash, which was lying around, we used that up a little bit. Hence, there is a little bit of amount that has sort of neutralized between NIM and fee income. I think that on a broad basis, we don't see any fee income coming down next year. If at all, we'll grow on top of this fee income quite handsomely. Understood. Just one final thing on the growth. What we saw was a very strong closing of FY25 on the overall growth. Do you see a similar trajectory in FY 2026? We had some tailwinds on gold, etc. Just generally, how do you think about growth for FY 2026? Frankly speaking, the growth is absolutely not a problem for us, except for funding the growth, okay? On the asset side, our wholesale has taken off. Our SME has taken off. Our gold is doing well. Our retail will take off this year after our core system migration and everything. Because all our systems will be in place in the next three to six months. The problem is now we have to see that whom will we give what funding to grow, okay? Asset growth, we can do even higher than what we are doing today. Our constraint will be how much liability we can generate. That is what will constrain our growth. Also, because of that, we will be in a good place to say that which is a franchise growth we want to have, that we'll fund. Which is the lesser risk-adjusted return we are getting, that's where we'll do business. Hence, we're in a good place to do a little bit of choosing and picking of the kind of assets which we want to do next year. What we will not do, in fact, I always say that we play in the range of 8-12% on the yield side. That has become more true because we have almost stopped most of the businesses which are above 12% on the yield side. At 8%, we generally don't go below 8% ever. So between 8-12% is the range. Now we are in a good place to pick and choose. Hence, overall, I think anything within 20-25% growth is given for us now. Of course, we have to see. The good part is a lot of our, that's another point, there's a lot of our fixed deposits. One strategic call we took last year was that we will not lock ourselves into long-term deposits, okay? We knew that the interest rates are going to fall. Given that, the repricing of our deposits will start happening in another quarter or two quarters. Hence, our ability to manage NIM and then get growth on deposits may not be that difficult. Our 44% of our book, which is gold, is kind of non-elastic to the pricing or non-elastic to the interest rate decrease. Those customers, that book will remain between 11.5-12% in terms of yield. Given that non-elasticity that side, okay, and if we are able to get deposits at lesser rates, we should be able to grow deposits also is my view. Yes, that's the constraint which will constrain the growth. It depends on how much deposit growth we can take. Just one final thing is on this tech transition. Any interim impact that you see on the performance, etc., or it should be quite smooth if you are basically expectation? Anything that you want to call out across migration for FY 2026? I know 2026, 2027 onwards, the growth expectation is quite strong. Just 2026, anything that you want to call out? See, I will be practical to say that we have to see how this transition goes. Because any tech transformation of the size and scale what we are doing, probably one of the first in the industry where we are doing OGL OXA, Oracle, the core system, the entire tech stack, the entire digital stack, the entire OBDX platform, the entire database migration has already happened. The entire, this thing, data center migration has already happened. The kind of entire CMS we are implementing, new CMS system we are taking, the LOS new system we are constantly building. We also are doing the supply chain implementation. Effectively, we are building the bank upfresh. In the next six months, the bank will be completely new in all aspect, okay? The way the customer sees the bank and the way that we service the customer, the way we build products, the way we create franchise on the transaction banking, wholesale, retail, SME, everywhere is completely going to change. Our main constraint in this bank was systems are not there. That's why we are not able to do what we wanted to do. Given that, it will be not savvy to say that it will be, I mean, we are not ignorant. We know that this will go through some transition. So far, yesterday was our second dry run. People are very happy with the dry run because we had very little incidences or no incidences yesterday when we did the dry run. Dry run is like a net practice. We are going for the main match somewhere in May. We have to see how it goes. We are giving ourselves three to four months for stabilizing it. We have done everything possible, including training, development, everything we have done. We have to see. We are giving ourselves three to four months for stabilizing. Starting from Q3, which is second half of this year, we will completely go all out in terms of scaling and building the bank. That is where we are. There could be some issues here and there, which is unforeseen, unknown, unknown. Broadly, we have the right people and the right vendors or OEMs or partners who are working with us. We do not see too much of an issue as such. Perfect. Thanks. Wish you all the very best. Thank you. Thank you so much, Bhaval. Thank you. The next question is from the line of Mona Ketan from Dolat Capital. Please go ahead. Yeah, hi sir. Good evening. Yeah, Mona, how are you? Yeah, I'm good. Firstly, again, just touching on the fee base. If I look at the fee income for the full year at INR 87 crore versus INR 53 crore or so last year, could you share the breakup between the purchasing fees, commissions, third-party fees, forex profit, etc.? Could you just give further full year perspective between this year and previous year? That would be very helpful. I don't think we share that level of details in this thing. Whatever we have, we have shared already with you. Beyond that, we don't give breakup of how much is gold on fee, how much is forex fee. I don't think we give that breakup. Do you give that breakup, Satish? No, we don't give that breakup. Okay. Any color in terms of how much is coming from corporate-related fees? That itself could help us understand, because we have talked about that. Yeah. That's what we, I just covered that in one of the previous questions in detail. Just to summarize it, overall 21% is our non-interest income to total income. Out of that, around generally what happens is we are somewhere around 18%. Core fee is around 14, and non-core fee, which is treasury and other related fees, around 4%. That has changed a little bit this quarter and only for this quarter. Next quarter, it will hopefully come back. This quarter, I think core fee has remained around 14-15%, around 15%. Non-core fee, which is primarily treasury and PSLC, has remained around 6%. Rest, 21 minus 14 or whatever, 6-7%. That's the only change which has happened. I explained in great detail why it has happened and why our NIM has got replaced by fee because of this excess fund we are sitting on. Next year also, I would assume the whole of next year because I can't share that number. I know the number where we are sitting on as of today on the 10-year GSEC, what all on the portfolio, FS portfolio where we are sitting right now, we know. That will be much larger than what we had. We really didn't encash the FS last quarter. What we did was trading profits. That opportunity will be there next year as well. That will also be reported under non-core fee. Our core fee, broadly, if you have to estimate next year as well, our core fee will remain around 15%, 14-15%. Whatever on top of that we get, you can sort of calculate it on every quarter around non-core fee, which includes treasury and PSLC. Sir, I'm only referring to the core fee part, which is extra treasury. Would it be possible to get some understanding how much of this core fee of you reported about INR 87 crore of core fees just this FY25? How much of this is coming from the corporate? I can broadly tell you, Mona. Yeah, broadly I'll tell you. It's very easy. Because our core fee, instead of getting into the details, our core fee has four, five components. One is gold loan fee. One is insurance. One is credit card, retail assets, and forex and wholesale listing. Other things will be penal charges and transaction banking fees, forex, and all of that stuff. In this, the heavyweight is picked up by insurance, gold loan fees, and to some extent, the forex and transaction banking fees. Primarily, these will contribute to almost 80% of our fees, which are all, and then there's liability fees, processing fees, penal charges, and all of that stuff. So 70-80%, and almost 100% of this is scalable. If at all, the reason I think we should do better next year is because next year, second half of the year, we'll launch retail assets. Corporate banking has just started. The transaction banking, once we have the CMS and supply chain, those systems in place, we'll do a lot more on that side. I think our core banking fees, sorry, core fees will only improve over a period of time. Got it. Got it. Secondly, on the gold loan book, are you seeing any impact of the draft circular that has come upon? Actually, it's too early to talk, frankly. Because it has not yet become a circular. It is a draft discussion point, and representations are going on to RBI and things like that. Because some of these are a little operationally intensive and things like that. Hence, I will not say that the final circular is yet out. I think impact will be in terms of primarily more process orientation. A lot of changes have to be done to the systems to be fully compliant to some of these things. Because we know in advance now, we have already started. Because our new system will come soon in next quarter, along with that, we'll start making those changes to the systems. It's more execution, more system, more this thing. There are a few things. For example, auction and all of that, those things do not worry us too much. Even businesses which is like repledger business and all that, what is being mentioned there, those also, if they do not come through repledgers, it will come to us directly. If you ask me, those businesses will not stop. The amount of work we have to do is a lot more. Compliance kind of has to be a little more detailed. Systems has to be revamped. I think those are the three main things. Broadly, we do not see too much of an impact of this on our business at this point of time, but we have to wait and watch for the final circle. Sure. Got it. Secondly, on the gold loan book disclosures that you gave around LTV and number of accounts, I see that the number of accounts has declined year on year despite the sharp growth from about 4.9 lakh or so to 4.5 lakh. What explains this? Also, LTV has fallen sharply year on year. If you could just throw some light around it. Yeah, yeah. LTV falling is good news because obviously, with prices going up so much, at least we are not very comfortable in taking the risk of a high LTV on such a high price because we do a very detailed sensitivity analysis of every 10%, 5% drop in gold price, which can happen. I mean, nobody knows. Given that, when prices go up, our LTV actually comes down. That has happened for us. On your question on ticket size, effectively, what you're saying, the primary reason for that, one of the primary reasons for that is that we sort of stopped sourcing gold on business below INR 200,000 because as per the guidelines, below INR 200,000, you cannot have a security. Because of that, we stopped doing that. That's where numbers are coming from. Hence, we moved up. Because of that, the ticket sizes improved. Our ticket sizes went up. If you look at it, our business growth is slightly lower than the overall industry business growth. This could be one of the reasons because we moved out of the lower ticket size because you cannot really do it as per the new compliance process. That is one of the reasons. The second reason, of course, is that as gold prices have gone up, while our LTV has gone down, the value has still gone up, okay? From that perspective, ticket size has also gone up. These are the two main reasons. Sorry to interrupt. May I request Ms. Mona to please rejoin the queue? We have participants waiting for the turn. Thank you. The next question is from the line of Bhavesh Kundani from Swan Investments. Please go ahead. Bhavesh, please go ahead with the question. Your line is unmuted. Bhavesh, we are unable to hear you. As there is no response, we'll move to the next question, which is from the line of Chirag Singhal from First Water Fund. Please go ahead. Yeah. Hello, everyone. Yes, you are. Yeah. Yeah. First question on the guidance on the credit cost front. You mentioned that there were a couple of one-offs in Q4, and you also did some prudent provisioning. For FY 2026, how should I look at the credit cost? I think if you look at our overall credit cost, it is somewhere around 29 basis points. We are keeping our credit cost guidance below 30 basis points next year, okay? We should be able to comfortably achieve that is our view. Okay. The second question is on the other effects. Even that has gone up significantly if you look at it in Q4 versus the previous quarter as well as last year. If you can provide some color as to how should I look at it for FY 2026 and going forward. See, if you look at it overall, our OpEx has been reasonably managed, but I think it is at 28% growth. How much? What is the growth this week? I think overall, our OpEx has not gone up significantly. Yes, what you're saying is because of the significant technology cost, which has just hold on. Let me look at the numbers. 20%. That's what I said, right? Operating cost has gone up by 23% on a year-on-year basis. On our Q3 to Q4, it has gone up by 50-odd crores. That's what they're saying. 60-odd crores, which is a 17% growth in operating this thing. I am just seeing the line by line. Q1, Q1, 17%. All of these are other expenses. Other expenses being other OpEx. Yeah, yeah. Other OpEx. Yeah. Other OpEx has gone up by around 35%, primarily because of some of this technology-related stuff which we are doing as execution starts coming. There is a CapEx and OpEx there. For example, to give you a data, I mean, without being too clinical about it, we have fully utilized our OPEX budget on the technology side, but CapEx we have not fully utilized last year, okay? Because a lot of the execution items, as it comes closer to the D-day, a lot of OpEx expense starts manifesting itself on the technology side because we are now very close to the migration. That is one of the reasons there has been significant increase in the OpEx side. The other reason is in the past quarter, we had some PSL buy on the MSF portfolio because we could not achieve our target on marginal small farmer. That buy through PSLC comes on the expense side. Most of the buy we did in the fourth quarter. These two would have contributed to the overall OpEx increase. On the overall PSL, we were actually net positive in terms of income, but MSF we were negative. That is why we had to buy. Most of it, we bought in fourth quarter. These are the reasons. Right. If you can help me with FY 2022 timings, since you said that in the first two quarters, we will have some more cost towards the technology. Overall, how should we look at this number for FY 2026? I think we should be okay on our OpEx broadly because costs are already baked in. Now we are just executing it right now, okay? I do not see a major, when I was doing the budgeting for this year, I did not see a major OpEx increase with service this year at this point of time. We should be okay. In fact, if at all, what we plan to do is not in the first two quarters, in the next two quarters, which is Q3, Q4, once the technology transformation is done and it is working fine, everything, Q3 and Q4 will expand significantly on our manpower. Because if you saw last year, we did not grow our manpower. We are working on the productivity and all of that stuff. Without full technology, we did not want to unnecessarily invest there. The pending investment on people and this thing will come in the second quarter, sorry, third quarter and fourth quarter of this year. Hence, some of the staff cost will start picking up from Q3 and Q4. Understood. That would be it from my end. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. The next question is from the line of Chandmay Neva from Precinct Capital. Please go ahead. Good evening, sir. I have a couple of questions from my side. First thing, could you give some color on the health of the unsecured book which you talked about previously in terms of the asset quality and if you are expecting any more dispositions from it in the coming quarters? This way, we have taken some prudent calls, and we are fortunate because now it's starting to taper down for us, primarily because the portfolio is degrowing. Whole of last year, we have been constantly degrowing the portfolio. We started this degrowth a year back. Hence, currently, our overall unsecured book is around 3.3% of the overall bank. Within that also, there is one portion which is credit cards, which while it comes as a credit cost, we have ways to ensure that on a net ROE basis, we are neutral. From that perspective, I think while on a percentage basis, it might look high, but the book itself will be so small, less of credit cards, that it will not have a meaningful impact next year. I think in another two quarters between MFI, personal loan, two-wheeler, and all of these products, it will start getting negligible from their perspective. Hence, another one or two quarters to go. In another one or two quarters, it will be in line with what it is today. After that, it will not become material to the bank. Is the incremental provisioning during the quarter entirely attributable to this book? I didn't get your point, but the incremental provision what we did this quarter was because of I explained in great detail that some part of that is some of the migration provision. Some part of that is because of the unsecured, which we took a significant provision. Third is because of some security deterioration which happened in some of the legacy portfolio. While it is not regulatory guideline to take those calls, we took those calls because we said that we will start the new year on a clean slate. From that perspective, we took some more prudent provisioning based on securities which we have. Between these three, we had slightly higher slippages in Q4. Got it, sir. Sir, my second question is on net interest income. If I look at the last four or five quarters, the net interest income has been somewhat flattish. Previously, you've talked about the competitive intensity that comes into play if you pass on the increased cost of borrowing. Could you give some more color on this? Essentially, trying to understand why it affects CSB more than the industry or where do your borrowers turn to if you increase the yields on the product? Yeah. I explained in great detail some of these a few questions back, but let me attempt once again. You're right that our NIM has come down. On a standalone, this is for a full year versus 4.14, is it too bad a number? Probably the answer is no because when we mirror a proper portfolio, eventually, in the long run, I'm not proposing anything above 4.5% kind of a NIM. If at all, it will be closer to 4%. That is what guidance I've been giving all through. It's just that our NIM was slightly higher because we had a slightly higher gold loan proportion. Incrementally, now other businesses are starting to pick up. The real reason for our NIM depletion has been because of the liquidity challenge which was there in the ecosystem. We are sitting on excess liquidity these first two months of this quarter. We did book FCY bookings where we had a significant hedging cost which came up, which has gone away also now because it is linked to dollar index, and dollar exchange is back to 100 or below. Given that perspective, I think we have a slightly while FCY borrowing cost should have come down, it went up temporarily. Again, this quarter, it is coming down. It was a blip one. That is why you saw the huge drop because now our borrowings is 13% of the portfolio. Our borrowings used to be almost nothing a year back. Eventually, that will start it will follow the SOFR and start coming down. It was a kind of a blip last quarter. On a trending perspective, I think we have been coming down, and that is what was expected because most of the mix of the businesses are changing. Our deposit franchise, CASA is not that high, etc. To that extent, our cost of funds is higher than 6%. That will sort of taper down only when the interest rates overall are falling. The good part is when interest rates start falling, on a competitive basis, we'll be better off because our fixed-rate loans are slightly higher. Like a gold loan, another fixed-rate loan is 60%. 23% is MCLR link, which will mirror the overall curve of the deposit cost. Our link to EBLR and TBL is around 15-16%. To the end, where we are fixed-rate loan also, like gold, while they are shorter tenor, the sensitivity of the yields is much lesser. Like credit cards, in a rising cycle and a falling cycle, in both cycles, they remain the same, the interest rate. Gold is also somewhat like that. We'll retain our yield around 11.5-12%. When you look at one year from now, we will be slightly in a better competitive advantage from a NIM perspective, purely based on yield versus the funding cost, which is a spread. Given all this, I think we are very, very confident that because of that one-off that happened last quarter on hedging and because of this trending which will happen, our cost of funding will also start coming down gradually, mirroring the overall GSEC. I think this is our hitting our bottom on the NIM. I don't think it's coming down further anymore. Our overall guidance will be somewhere around 4%. In between what our quarterly NIM was and yearly NIM was. Yearly NIM is 4.13. Quarterly NIM is 3.75. Our next year guidance is somewhere in between of this, around 4%. Sure, sir. That's helpful. Thank you. Thank you. The next question is from the line of Rohit Priyadarshani from Mittal Analytics. Please go ahead. Yeah. Thank you for the opportunity. Congratulations on the good set of numbers. Just two questions from my side. What is your medium-term, like two to three-year target for maintaining the return on assets and return on equity? Yeah. Our return on assets, our guidance is between 1.5-1.8% and return on equity between 15-17%. This quarter, return on equity went up a little bit. For the full year basis, we are slightly higher than 15%. It will be ranging in the 15-18% range. ROA will range between 1.5-1.8%. Closer now, it will be closer to 1.5% right now for one or two more quarters. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Okay. Sir, next question would be like, what are the two to three key risk areas the management is most focused on mitigating in FY26? See, one of the risks which is there in the ecosystem was this unsecured book. I think we have broadly mitigated it. Unsecured, including MFI and retail. We have broadly mitigated it. Some more flow-through will happen, but that will not be that material. Maximum six more months. After that, it should taper down. The second risk was liquidity risk, which is a bigger risk for a bank like us because we are a small bank, and our ability to attract retail deposits is slightly lower compared to some of the larger banks. Thankfully, the liquidity in the system is much better now. I think we have passed the most difficult year for the bank last FY. Still, we have done reasonably well. As the liquidity has improved and overall deposits are getting a little more easier compared to before, one of those risks are starting to get better for us. I mean, mitigation is happening automatically in the system. The biggest thing for us is not risk, but the opportunity. How do we manage the opportunity which is tearing us once the whole system migration happens? Obviously, for two, three months, once the entire migration and the tech transformation happens, things have to take time to settle down. In the process, one or two months, people will be busy doing that. Once that is done, which is another maybe three, four months from now, after that, the biggest opportunity is to build the business from scratch based on the new system it is there. If you ask me, the biggest risk for us is this migration and the entire transformation. The biggest opportunity is also that, and we are waiting for that. I think that's it. Otherwise, I don't see any. The legacy risks are also more or less done because we corrected our portfolio on SME. We corrected our portfolio on wholesale broadly. I don't see too much of a risk. Liquidity risk is hopefully not there. Obviously, the global risk, the tariff risk, and all of that stuff, and a smaller player will always have challenge when the whole ecosystem gets impacted. Otherwise, I don't see any major risk otherwise. Okay, sir. Good to hear that. Thank you so much, sir. Thank you so much. Thank you. The next question is from the line of Rupesh Sathya from Mittal Financial Capital. Go ahead. Hello, sir. Thank you for the opportunity. Am I audible? Yes, yes. Please. Yeah. My first question, sir, is on cost-to-income ratio. Cost-to-income ratio used to be 57-58% annual. I'm talking about the annual number. It has moved up to 62% in the last two years. Where do you see this number in FY2026 and FY2027? If you can give some view, I understand that the technology CapEx is there, and then maybe from the second half of the year, it will taper down. I understand all of that. If you can give some number, it will be very helpful. That is question number one. Question number two, sir, is in terms of philosophy at the AUM level, where do you see the gold on percentage? It is at, I think, 44%, if I remember the number right. Where do you see at a philosophy level, where do you see that number in two, three years? Then the third question, sir, is I mean, despite liquidity, despite negative carry on your book and all of that, you are saying that the NIM will stay at 4%. Then how, and then you are still saying that 1.5-1.8% ROA is your guidance. Then, I mean, there is no margin for any cost of credit spike. There is no margin for error for any cost-to-income spike. How do you, I mean, how do you balance all of that? Because if ROA calculation doesn't work, it looks to me at 4%. Those are the three questions, sir. Sure. Let me handle the first two first. These are more qualitative questions. Cost-to-income, I had always guided that till FY 2027, it will be somewhere around 62-65%. Once the entire ecosystem of the banking gets built up around the core system transformation and other things we are doing, the whole franchise will start playing out. Very quickly, between FY 2027-FY 2030, the cost-to-income will go down to 50%. The journey of cost-to-income from 62 or 65 to 50 will happen between FY 2027-FY 2030. I have articulated that almost every call, every meeting which I have with investors. On your second question on gold, we will continue to do well in gold as long as we can, but other franchises start picking up. If you see, SME has grown by 33% this year. Highest growth for SME ever in this bank. Our wholesale banking, while it has grown by 22%, but if you take the DA portfolio out, which we ran off, and that's a lazy portfolio, we ran it off. Effectively, wholesale has grown by more than 40%. Retail will start the story. I mean, this year, retail actually, if you take AGRI and MFI out, retail has grown by more than 40%. Okay? Because of your degree in retail AGRI and unsecured, some of this, our overall growth is around 24% or 25%. Actual growth, what we are focusing on and which are meaningful portfolio for us in future is growing upwards of 30%-35%. All of these will ensure that gold loan as a mix will start tapering down. Gold loan price every year will not go up like this, the way it has gone up, right? Sometime it will stabilize, sometime it will come down, etc. Given that perspective, our long-term philosophical thinking is wholesale will be 30%, SME will be 20%, retail will be 30%, and gold will be 20%. That is our FY2020-2030 journey. Meanwhile, because you are also asking the cost-to-income question, to ensure that we are there, we have to have a good profit-making product as well. We understand the gold loan business that is helping us in building the other businesses at this point of time. FY2027 onwards, we will see other businesses. They will start contributing more, and hence, we will have a more meaningful mix. Your third question was on ROA tree, I think. It's very, very clear that we are a 1.5 minimum ROA bank and ROE between 15-18%. One needs to, you can do two things. Either you can plan for cost of credit or you can decide good credit in the beginning itself. There are philosophies. I'm not saying what is right, what is wrong. There are philosophies to high-yielding business and provision for higher credit. There are philosophies by which you do lower-yielding businesses, best risk-adjusted businesses, long-term sustainable growth businesses, and better cross-sale businesses in the long run. What you are building on the wholesale side, for example, right now, we are not doing a single business above 9.5-10%. Okay? Our ROE will come there not through NIM, but their ROE will come through fee income and cross-sale and supply chain and all of this for which you are building systems. Same thing with SME. SME is somewhere around 10%, but they are building cross-sale over a period of time. Retail is all a cross-sale game at the end of the day. We, at least, I don't believe in too much of a high-risk, high-return kind of a game. We play in that 8-12% and there our margin for error is very limited. If you look at our last three, four years, you see where our NPA and credit cost has been. This year, it has been a little high because of two accounts, and those are all legacy accounts. I said before that most of the legacy accounts are now at the end of the life cycle for our bank because we have been working on them. Given that, I do not think that because as soon as you start baking in a huge credit cost for the businesses you are doing in your ROA tree, then automatically you start doing higher-yielding business, and automatically you will follow that cycle of higher. It will become a self-fulfilling prophecy, which you do not want to do that. From that perspective, we are pretty confident that we should be able to do somewhere around 1.5% ROA and 15% ROE on an average without too much of a problem. Okay. Okay. Thank you, sir. Just one question, sir. With this transformation, right? I mean, what you are trying to do, I totally understand the logic. Is it fair to assume that AUM and profitability will grow at 20% barring any black swan events for multiple years? Is that a fair assumption to make? Yeah. Give us another year. Okay? Ask us this question next, and we'll call. We'll be able to answer more decisively, but that's the attempt. Okay. Okay. Thank you. Thank you so much, sir. Thank you. The next question is from the line of Sagar Shah from Spark Capital. Please go ahead. Good evening, sir. I just had two questions, and thank you for taking my questions. My first question was regarding our actually liabilities, actually. You had highlighted initially on the call that the main problem is not on the asset growth, but is on the liability growth, actually. This year in FY 2025, we increased branches by around 50. In this particular year, our bulk deposits as compared to total deposits has also increased from 33% to almost 43% out of our bulk and retail deposits. Going ahead in the next two, three years, what are you saying? What steps are you taking to increase your retail base to increase your customer acquisition strategy? That is my first question. The second question was related to data keeping that in spite of a sequential growth on the asset side by almost 10% sequentially from Q3 to Q4, our net interest income actually reduced. Were there any huge interest reversals in this quarter that led to a decline in this quarter? Those are my two questions. Yeah. The second question I have answered in various ways, so I will keep it short. Let me answer the first question. It's a very good question. You are absolutely right. The branch distribution, if you look at it, currently our branch distribution in Kerala is somewhere around 33-34% right now. It was 57% a year back, or a little more than that, two years back. There was a time when it is too sandwich. What it means is that more and more branches we are building, we are building for the future. No longer are we building a branch which will break even in one year; we will only do gold loan and those kind of businesses. These branches are being built for the new transformational technology products, processes, retail, wholesale, transaction banking, SME, all of this keeping in mind. You cannot time it, right? Can I start doing all this after my tech transformation is over? We would be sitting and waiting for these branches to come up and people to come in, etc. Very strategically, we have put these branches in various locations in north, in west, in rest of south, everywhere. We are well distributed. There is a slide, I think, where we show the branch distribution across the country, and it shows how well distributed we are becoming. Now, each of these branches will be able to get leveraged a lot more once our transformation journey is over and the new products and processes are in place. This will help us in building the entire granular liability franchise. What happens? What is till then, can we sit quietly and do nothing when we have an asset opportunity? That is where we are taking some more bulk deposits, which comes at a slightly higher cost. That is where we have taken FCI visits. This is like a bridge funding for us, if you may, for till our entire retail journey starts from the liability side. That will start in another 12-18 months. The acquisition story, which you are talking about, very important, that will start six months from now. We are going to create a full acquisition team. We are just waiting because today, if I do it, we will not get good customers because we cannot offer the products or services which some of the other banks are offering. How will you get good customers? That is why we have delayed it a little bit, but we did not delay the branch expansion strategy in the right areas, which will leverage this entire transformation which we are doing. That is the first answer. If I can add something more to that, just not the branch distribution and liability, retail assets will happen around those customers because the same customer will cross-sell. We will not go too much externally to get business. Most of our asset businesses, fee businesses, everything will happen internally to our liability customers, and hence, acquisition strategy will become very big, and that will help us in our assets, fees, everything else. That is why I am saying that our journey is just beginning now, if you ask me. Coming to the second question on growth versus NIM, I think I explained it two times, actually. The NIM, this thing was primarily because of higher funding cost, a little bit of a carry cost which we had because and that we used in trading and getting it on the fee side. Hence, we had a little bit of an issue there. I think it is behind us. That's why I'm putting my head and saying that we have sort of bottomed out on NIM right now. From here on, we'll only improve on NIM from here, and we'll be somewhere around closer to between 3.75-4.14, somewhere in between we'll play in the whole of next year. Right, sir. Can you quantify the interest reversals in this quarter, sir? There is no interest reversal. There's no interest reversal. I mean, there will be probably, but that is not meaningful, which is a good thing. Satish, you want to add answer to that? I do not know this number. No, when there are slippages, there will be interest reversals. That information, that kind of beneficial information is not given there. What we should ultimately see is in terms of what is the credit cost that is there because whether there is interest reversal or everything or there are provisions, ultimately everything will be captured in the provisions number. For the full year, our credit cost is in 29 basis points, which is reasonable. If you look at it, our gross NPA is 1.57, which is lower than last quarter. Net NPA is 0.52, which is less than last quarter. From a slippages perspective, except for what I already explained, slippages, I do not explain again, I think we are broadly okay. 29 basis points, and our comfort level will go below this next year is a reasonable trade cost to have. Great, sir. At least my last one from my end, at least from FY 2026 and FY 2027, will we see the expansion of branches, the pace to be higher than what we saw in FY 2025? We have every year grew by anything within 50-100 branches. We will retain that kind of a pace after our acquisition because how much we can invest till we have the products, services, and processes, okay? You will see a significant expansion from FY 2027 onwards. To ensure, because we already have 829 branches right now, that is a large enough branch distribution to leverage for at least one more year. FY 2027 onwards, we will start expanding because otherwise, we will be expanding and keeping it idle for systems to come or products to come. I think we have invested enough, and the investment into branches will expand only after FY 2027. Right. This year we'll expand similar to last year. Similar to last year, we'll expand. Okay. Got your point. Thank you so much and all the best, sir. Thank you very much. Thank you. The next question is from the line of Mona Khetan from Dolat Capital. Please go ahead. [Crosstalk] Yeah, Mona, welcome. Just one clarification. The corporate account that had slipped about a year ago, INR 100 crore or so, just wanted to know. I can't hear you properly, Mona. Can you be sitting closer to—I can't hear you. Yeah. Is it better? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. My question was related to the corporate account that had slipped about a year ago. Any update on the recovery there, and what sort of provisions do you hold against it? Unfortunately, because it has gone into a little bit of a legal tangle right now, that's why we could not recover. We have a fair bit of assets out there which is secured with us, and hence, we should be able to recover at some stage. We had expected it, but it went into a little bit of a litigation at this point of time. We are going through the entire process at this point of time. Having said that, we have taken provision as per our board guidelines, which is around 50%. We have taken a little bit more against some of the security, etc., and that's proven provision we have taken because we had thought that we would be able to recover some money this year. Because we couldn't, we have taken some proven provision against that, which is I was referring to some of my earlier comments. Net net, if you look at the PCR, the PCR has come to 67% now from 60% last quarter, and that is one of the reasons for that. Important. Okay. Thanks so much. Thank you. The next question is from the line of Sai Kiran Pulawati from an individual investor. Please go ahead. Yeah. Hi. Thanks for taking my question. Just a few questions, sir. Before you entered for the building for sale phase, do you feel that there are any gaps in the top management, or do you feel some gaps over there to get filled up? That's question number one. Question number two, how do you ensure that you can get your liabilities to grow at an excess of 25% when the system's deposit growth itself is very low? What kind of initiatives you are taking, and how do you ensure that on a sustainable basis to grow the balance sheet at high things or maybe much significantly higher than the industry? Thank you. Yeah. On the management, we have no gap at all, okay? Every senior position starting from CXO level to CXO plus one to regional head to distribution head to product heads. Even our wholesale entire team is now growing at a very rapid pace. The SME team is already in place. Transaction banking team is in place. Every team and every senior management is completely in place, and we do not have any attrition. Attrition with senior management, I am saying, of course, at an entry-level, junior level, there will be attritions. That way, we are doing extremely well in my view, and the team is very engaged in trying to build the bank. The whole motivation is to build the bank to a direct extent. I think there is a lot of kind of engagement with the top management team here. Coming to your question, we are not talking about high teens. I think we should do better than that, okay? The reason for that is if you could do it last year with that kind of a liquidity issue and that kind of a challenge which was there on the liability side, I think it will get a little easier this year for us, primarily because we have a little better experience and post our migration and post our entire systems and processes and products in place. Second half of the year, we should start picking up lots more on the liability side. Thankfully, that time, hopefully, the price will get priced in into the liability business as well because we also do not want to go too much into the long-term liability even now. I think by the second half of the year, when we'll be fully ready with all our products and services, by that time, hopefully, the liability prices also get rationalized a little bit more. We are pretty confident of anything between 20-25% growth. Last year, we grew by 25-30% in a very difficult environment. The management is confident of that. Thank you, sir. That's it from my side. Thank you. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, that was the last question for today. I would now like to hand the conference over to the management for closing comments. Thank you very much for your questions, and we look forward to our next meeting again after a quarter. Till then, hopefully, we should be able to do even better than what we have done this quarter. Thank you very much. Thank you. On behalf of Yes Securities, that concludes this conference. Thank you for joining us, and you may now disconnect your line. Thank you very much.