CMS planning to hire 1,000 employees in next two months as it expands

Leading cash management services provider CMS is planning to hire 1,000 employees in the next two months with salaries upward of Rs 30,000 per month as it expands into service vertical of cash collections for its partner banks, NBFCs and microfinance firms, a company official said.

CMS Info Systems (CMS) has signed up for cash and cheque collections with several companies, including, Mahindra Finance, L&T Finance and Hero FinCorp.

Anush Raghavan, Senior Vice-President and Head Cash Business Unit of the CMS said that with a network spanning over 115,000 ATMs and retail outlets that spread across 98.3 per cent of districts in India, the company is uniquely positioned as the "backbone of the circulation cycle" of the economy.

"While CMS has built out the offering for NBFCs, we are also looking at the cash pickups from the other industries such as travel, education; cheque collections for the insurance industry, apart from doorstep banking service for senior citizens.

"CMS is looking to hire 1000 employees in the next two months. We will continue to expand and hire more in this fiscal," he said.

The company, he added, will be working with NBFCs and microfinance companies on both B2B collections and also B2B2C collections.

CMS handles cash processing to cash-in-transit, from cards to ATM network management, retail management and managed services.

The company said large NFBCs are currently dealing with hundreds of local collection agencies. Citing an example, it said that any vehicle finance company will be spending Rs 100-300 crore a year on their collections. The opportunity for collections is in the size of about Rs 4,000 crore a year, just in the auto space.

Though disbursement of loans happens digitally, EMI payments happen in cash. More than 80 per cent of loans are repaid in cash, said CMS.

Apart from cash collections, the collection agents of CMS would also be undertaking other services for NBFCs and MFIs such as KYC and other tech-enabled services. Average salary of such collection agents could be upwards of Rs 30,000 per month, CMS said.

Raghavan further said cash is still the king in India as RBI data shows that 87 per cent of total consumer transactions in the country happen in physical cash.

"The business of cash is not going away with digital and tech payments coming in. India is still a long way to adopt digital payments because of issues with financial literacy, basic literacy, technology adoption and availability and other social issues," he said.

Cash collections service is predominantly for semi-urban and rural towns, CMS said. Cash usage continues to be high among Rural and non-metro towns in India.