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;