Intellect Design Arena Ltd Q3 FY26 – ₹3,025 Cr LTM Revenue, 23% Growth, EPS Volatility & the Great Fintech Puberty Phase

1. At a Glance – Blink and You’ll Miss the Drama

₹12,767 crore market cap. Stock at ₹914. Down ~19% in 3 months. Up ~23% CAGR over 5 years. Welcome to Intellect Design Arena — a fintech product company that wants to be Silicon Valley, but reports quarterly numbers like a mid-cap IT firm with mood swings.

Q3 FY26 numbers looked confusingly impressive: revenue momentum intact (+20% YoY), but PAT fell off a cliff (-35% YoY). Why? Because fintech product companies don’t grow in straight lines — they zig-zag like a crypto chart during RBI commentary.

Debt? Almost zero. ROCE ~17%. OPM ~20%. EPS? Volatile. Valuation? Not cheap, not absurd. The stock trades at ~34x earnings in a market where peers average ~24x — meaning Intellect is priced like a premium thinker but judged like a quarterly accountant.

So the big question: is this a global fintech platform compounding quietly… or an over-engineered product story with erratic monetisation? Let’s open the hood.

2. Introduction – From Polaris Garage to Global Fintech Midlife Crisis

Founded in 2011, Intellect Design Arena was spun out of Polaris Consulting with one big ambition: build deep, product-led banking software instead of billing people by the hour.

Fast forward 14 years, and Intellect now sells to 325+ clients across 57 countries. Sounds elite. But here’s the twist — product companies don’t get the “steady Infosys salary” treatment from markets. They get judged on deal wins, implementations, and whether CFOs sneeze in the right quarter.

Intellect sits at an awkward intersection:

• Too product-heavy to be valued like TCS
• Too services-linked to be valued like a pure SaaS unicorn

Which makes every quarter an emotional rollercoaster for shareholders. Still, the long-term story