Protean eGov Technologies Ltd. expects its core business to continue to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 10–12%, according to Chief Executive Officer Suresh Sethi.

Protean has three core businesses: PAN services, pension services and identity services. He said the company is expanding into new digital identity and API services, expecting growth this year after launching them late last year.

“We now have multiple open digital ecosystems. Our core earlier was pension and tax,” Sethi told NDTV Profit on Thursday. “Today, we are operating in agri, health, digital commerce through ONDC, mobility. So, there are multiple open digital ecosystems.”

Protean participated in the Income Tax Department’s PAN 2.0 MSP bid but was not shortlisted for the next selection stage.

“PAN 2.0 was an RFP to design, develop, integrate and maintain the complete IT stack currently run by the Income Tax Department, and this is not something we run today,” Sethi said.

“Our role since 2003 is collecting applicant data for PAN applications and updates and securely transmitting it to the ITD, which handles the PAN number allocation on its own systems. We then issue the PAN card. These are two separate parts of the process,” he explained.

The CEO said that while the company saw the bid as a valuable opportunity to contribute to India’s tax-related digital infrastructure, it was not critical to its top line.

“We were looking at this as another business opportunity. This win would have been another incremental source of revenue. But the existing business stands strong as is,” the managing director added.

He emphasised that Protean’s PAN card services to the government would continue to grow as the market had not saturated yet.

The current penetration of PAN in the country is around 35–40%. There is a huge headroom, new workforce entry every year and so on and so forth, the CEO said.

“If we look at the trends over the last four or five years, 6–7 crore PAN cards are issued annually. Over the last year, we’ve improved our market share by almost 5%,” he said, expressing optimism about growth opportunities.

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. Read more on Business by NDTV Profit.Suresh Sethi emphasises that Protean’s PAN card services to the government will continue to grow as the market has not saturated yet.  Read MoreBusiness, Quarterly Earnings, Notifications 

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