Reliable Data Services FY26: Revenue Sprints 42%, Profit Walks Back 24%, and the Operating Profit Hasn’t Moved in Two Years

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1 — At a Glance

Reliable Data Services closed FY26 with sales of ₹185 crore against ₹131 crore the year before — a 42% jump that would headline most annual entries. The trouble sits one line down: net profit fell to ₹6.88 crore from ₹9.02 crore, a 24% decline. Revenue and profit walked in opposite directions for the full year.

The operating profit tells the quieter story. It landed at roughly ₹17 crore in FY26 — the same ₹17 crore it posted in FY25, while revenue between those two years grew by ₹54 crore. Two years of top-line expansion, one flat operating profit. Operating margin compressed to 9.4% from 13%.

The March quarter carried its own reversal: revenue of ₹55 crore rose 3.8% year-on-year, but quarterly net profit of ₹1.28 crore fell 64.9% against the year-ago quarter. The company that machine-generated screeners flagged as “expected to give good quarter” delivered its softest profit quarter of the year.

Receivables of ₹93.6 crore against ₹185 crore of sales work out to 185 debtor days. That figure will keep returning in this entry.

2 — Introduction

Incorporated in 2001, Reliable Data Services provides outsourced services to banking, financial-services and manufacturing clients — back-office processing, front-office follow-ups and management services. The company reports a network of 300-plus locations and a field workforce it describes as 2,500-plus “feet on street.”

The consolidated group is not a single company but a cluster. Nine subsidiaries sit under the parent — spanning BPO, investigation services, healthcare, developer and agri entities — alongside one associate and joint ventures, one of which is a building construction arrangement at C-70, Sector 2, Noida. The auditor’s consolidated report notes it relied on other auditors for nine subsidiaries carrying ₹183 crore of assets and ₹6.88 crore of net profit for the year.

Recent corporate activity clusters in the last eighteen months: an investment in a newly incorporated RDS Beverages entity, allotment of a million warrants in a group BPO company, a change of statutory auditor, and a GST department visit. Each is recorded in its own section below.

The clientele list the company publishes reads like a roll-call of Indian banking — the kind of list that makes the 185 debtor days more, not less, interesting.

3 — Business Model: WTF Do They Even Do?

Strip the brochure language and Reliable Data is a labour-and-paperwork intermediary for banks. It picks up cheques, drafts and documents, chases clearances, coordinates fund movement between banks and their clients, and follows up on old outstanding up-country instruments. In an era where most of this is meant to be electronic, the company still fields 2,500 people to move paper around 300 locations.

The service menu sprawls well past that. Human-resources outsourcing: recruitment, payroll, provident-fund filing. Management services: business consulting, budgetary systems, financial modelling, valuations, due-diligence reviews, project feasibility studies. Then “other services” — bulk data entry, digitisation, drop-box management, IPO form collection, address verification both physical and telephonic. It is less a business model than a list of everything a bank might prefer not to do in-house.

The revenue geography has shifted underneath all of it. In FY22 the split was roughly 46% BFSI and 54% non-BFSI. By FY26 the consolidated segment data shows BFSI revenue of about ₹56 crore against non-BFSI of about ₹130 crore — the “Data Services” name now sits on top of a business where the majority of revenue comes from outside financial services entirely.

Does a company still measured by “feet on street” scale the way a data-services multiple assumes? The revenue line grew 42%; the headcount cost grew with it.

4 — Financials Overview

Figures are consolidated, in ₹ crore.

The March quarter’s revenue barely moved year-on-year while profit fell by nearly two-thirds. The sequential jump in revenue — off a ₹23 crore December quarter — did not carry down to the profit line; operating profit more than halved sequentially even as revenue more than doubled. The board approved the audited standalone and consolidated results for the quarter and year at its May 30, 2026 meeting; the auditor issued an unmodified opinion on both.

5 — Market Expectations & Historical Multiples

This section describes how the market is currently pricing the company and how that compares with its own history and peer group. It is descriptive, not predictive.

The market currently pays about 22x earnings here, against a peer median near 29x and an industry figure of 29.2x. The multiple sits below the peer set, on a business whose full-year profit fell while revenue rose.

What the market appears to be pricing is the top line rather than the bottom: revenue compounded at roughly 33% over five years, and FY26 alone added 42%. Against that sits a flat operating profit, a 9.4% margin, and receivables running at 185 days. The valuation carries the growth story and the collection story at the same time.

One factual observation on market expectations: the earnings yield implied by the current multiple is about 8%, on a year in which reported profit declined.

6 — What’s Cooking

The material events on record are procedural and investigative rather than commercial. In November 2025 the company allotted one million warrants in group entity Kandarp Digi Smart BPO at ₹104.50 each. In April 2025 it disclosed an investment in a newly incorporated RDS Beverages Private Limited — a data-and-BFSI outsourcer stepping into beverages.

The sharper items are on the compliance side. In May 2026, NSE and BSE each levied ₹2,59,600 on the company for Regulation 17(1) non-compliance relating to the quarter ended March 2026. In June 2026, the exchanges levied a further ₹47,200 for a Regulation 17(1) delay, which the board characterised as a procedural lapse and for which it filed a waiver. And in October 2025 the company disclosed that the GST DGGI visited on September 29, 2025, with a summons issued the following day, stating that it was complying.

Five recorded events, none of them an order win. That is the record as it stands.

7 — Balance Sheet

Assets equal liabilities in each column; the sheet balances.

• Borrowings spent FY26 quietly losing weight — down from ₹46.53 crore to ₹24.95 crore, a ₹21.58 crore reduction that lands as one of the year’s genuine positives.
• Other liabilities did the opposite, climbing from ₹48.37 crore to ₹86.64 crore — a ₹38 crore increase that more than offsets the debt paydown on the funding side.
• Net worth grew to ₹71.43 crore on retained earnings, with equity capital unchanged at ₹10.32 crore.

Cash and bank stood at ₹5.25 crore against ₹24.95 crore of borrowings — this is a net-debt balance sheet, not a net-cash one. A company can reduce debt and still not be sitting on a cushion; the current-liabilities line absorbed most of what the borrowings line released.

8 — Cash Flow: Sab Number Game Hai

FY26 is the mirror image of FY25. The year after operating cash flow ran ₹27.83 crore negative — funded almost entirely by ₹25.46 crore of financing inflow — operations threw off ₹26.80 crore, and financing turned to a ₹20.40 crore outflow as borrowings were repaid. Two years, opposite signs, on nearly identical magnitudes. Operating cash flow that swings from deeply negative to strongly positive in a single year is a working-capital story more than an earnings story.

9 — Ratios: Sexy or Stressy?

ROE of 10.8% means the equity is working, but part-time — the return sits below what the business earns on total capital. ROCE of 12.2% describes a company clearing its cost of capital by a thin margin, not a wide one. The PAT margin of 3.7% is where the flat-operating-profit story surfaces: on ₹185 crore of revenue, less than four rupees in a hundred reach the bottom line. D/E of 0.35 reflects the FY26 debt paydown and is the least stressed number in the table. Interest coverage sits at 3.7x — adequate, not comfortable.

10 — P&L Breakdown: Show Me the Money

The Other Income column earns its place here. In FY25, ₹4.51 crore of other income sat beside ₹17 crore of operating profit and helped push PAT to ₹9.02 crore. In FY26 that other income collapsed to ₹0.25 crore — and with operating profit flat at ₹17 crore, PAT fell to ₹6.88 crore. A meaningful slice of FY25’s profit strength came from non-operating income that did not repeat.

Anchor on operating profit and it is unmistakable: the real business generated the same ₹17 crore two years running while revenue grew 42%. EPS moved from ₹8.74 to ₹6.67 in step with PAT — the share count held at 1.032 crore shares all year, so this is a genuine profit decline, not a dilution artefact.

11 — Peer Comparison

Reliable Data trades near the bottom of the peer multiple range at 22x, against a median of 29x. On quarterly PAT it sits at ₹1.28 crore — a fraction of CRISIL’s ₹233 crore and Onemi’s ₹82 crore — while carrying a multiple only modestly below theirs. Colab Platforms’ 632x is the outlier that stretches the table; strip it out and the peer set clusters in the 18–61x band, with Reliable at the low end on the smallest profit base.

12 — Miscellaneous: Shareholding & Promoters

Promoter holding stepped down from 71.77% to 67.79% during FY26 — a 3.98-point decrease, the first movement in a stake that had held flat for years. The promoter group is a family cluster: Sanjay Kumar Pathak (Managing Director, 15.35%), Rakesh Jha (15.04%), Sunil Kumar Rai (13.27%), Sandeep Kumar Jha (12.48%) and Anil Kumar Jha (10.90%), with several smaller family holdings trailing behind. Pledged shares stand at zero. FII holding, negligible for most of the period, ticked up to 0.45%. The shareholder count grew from a few hundred to over 5,000 across the year — a widening base arriving as the promoters trimmed.

13 — Corporate Governance: Angels or Devils?

The auditor, KARMV And Company (formerly Kailash and Company), issued an unmodified opinion on both the standalone and consolidated FY26 results. The company changed statutory auditors in November 2024.

The record carries three items worth stating plainly. First, two separate exchange penalties for Regulation 17(1) non-compliance — ₹2,59,600 each from NSE and BSE, plus a later ₹47,200 fine — Regulation 17(1) governing board composition. Second, a GST DGGI visit in September 2025 with a summons issued the next day, which the company states it is complying with. Third, the promoter-holding reduction of 3.98 points during the year. Pledges are nil and the audit opinion is clean; the flags here are regulatory and procedural rather than accounting, and they are recorded as facts.

14 — Industry Roast & Macro Context

Financial-process outsourcing is a business where the moat is a contract and the cost base is people. Reliable Data operates in the layer beneath the banks — the cheque pickups, the clearances, the address verifications — precisely the tasks that a decade of digitisation was supposed to shrink. The sector’s tension is structural: as banking goes electronic, the paper-handling revenue that built these firms narrows, while the newer digitisation-and-data work pulls them into direct competition with far larger IT-services players who price on scale.

It is also a receivables-heavy corner of the market. When your customers are large institutions and your service is back-office, payment terms stretch and debtor days climb — an industry dynamic that shows up on this company’s sheet as 185 days. The distribution advantage of “feet on street” is real in a country of 300-plus locations; whether it commands a data-services multiple is the sector’s open question, not this company’s alone.

15 — EduInvesting Verdict

The central tension of Reliable Data’s FY26 is arithmetic, not narrative: a top line that grew ₹54 crore over two years sitting on an operating profit that did not grow at all, with a third of the balance sheet parked in receivables and a compliance file thickening at the margins. A revenue chart that keeps rising, an operating profit that keeps standing still, and a collection cycle that keeps everyone waiting.