Good morning. Thanks for your time today and the opportunity to present our interim results for H1 2022. We'll initially run through a presentation deck which will take approximately 30 minutes and when we'll then have the opportunity for Q&A. I'll start by providing a business update and then Michael will take over and will present our financials. I'll then pick up again to summarize and provide an outlook. Christian, our Exec Chair, Matt, our Chief Commercial Officer, Arman, our COO, will join us for Q&A. I appreciate that most of you are familiar with our business, but given our unique business model, and for the benefit of those of you who aren't, I'll provide a brief business overview. LendInvest is an asset management platform focused on property finance.
It's an end-to-end proprietary platform that makes it simple to borrow from us on one side and invest into our loans on the other. Our borrowers are landlords and property developers and soon also to be homeowners too, and I'll come on to explain more about that later. We're providing them with buy-to-let development and short-term bridging loans. On the other side of our platform, we have a diverse and global investor base, including some of the world's largest institutional investors and financial institutions. Our platform drives operating efficiencies for us and it makes our brokers' and investors' lives easier. This technology is embedded and as we'll come on to show, is enabling us to deliver exceptional financial results. It's also a significant competitive advantage providing a real barrier to entry.
Importantly, it also provides us with the base on which we'll build out our product offering to scale into other areas of property finance. For our first interim results, we're delighted to present a strong financial performance. Michael will explain this in more detail, but I'm gonna steal his thunder now. Compared with the same period last year, we've delivered a 40% increase in funds under management, with the main driver being that new separate account with JP Morgan. A 32% increase in the assets under management driven by strong growth in buy-to-let. These are long-term loans, so we're building revenue that will support our business for years ahead. On that, we've delivered a 30% increase in revenue which in turn has increased gross profit by 51%.
What we're most pleased about is our technology platform is now providing operating leverage that's delivering exceptional growth in profit with EBITDA up 179% and PBT up to GBP 10.2 million in the six-month period. To achieve this, we've been really busy executing the objectives that we set out at IPO. Back in June, we exceeded over GBP 4 billion of lending since our inception, further validating our business model and proving the scale and scalability of our platform. We also completed our third RMBS, which achieved the best pricing on a U.K. buy-to-let securitisation in 13 years. In July, we listed raising GBP 40 million to invest in the continued development of our technology and our property finance product roadmap.
In the same month, we closed a new financial partnership with Barclays and HSBC, which had a particular focus on the retrofitting and renovation of the U.K.'s aging housing stock. One of the reasons that we wanted to IPO was because as a listed company, the profile and transparency that it provides, we believe will achieve better terms with our financial partners. In August, we were able to improve the terms and extend our partnerships with Citi and NAB. In September, less than a year into our separate account partnership with JP Morgan, and given the strong performance of our buy-to-let product, we were able to upsize the separate account to GBP 725 million. Our technology platform continues to drive sign-ups of new brokers, and in September we surpassed 1,800 broker firms dealing on the platform.
We also launched a new broker portal for bridging which is now attracting even more new brokers for the first time for that product. Finally, we were delighted to announce in October that we'd significantly increased the size of our technology team, including hiring a new VP of Technology. We'd started building out the team for our launch into specialist homeowner mortgages, including hiring Esther Morley to lead the product for us. Off the back of all this activity, we've got great momentum heading into the end of the year, and we're well on the way to delivering the long-term plan that we set out in the IPO. These terrific results and the momentum that we have delivered off the back of years of experience and investment.
The property finance market is a large and attractive market which is dominated by traditional lenders, and it's a market that's still characterized by manual processes and poor customer experience. We're attacking this market using leading-edge technology. We started with a blank sheet of paper and built the platform the way you would from scratch, unencumbered by legacy systems and processes. We've invested over GBP 50 million to date in building our platform and with our core technology embedded, we're now at a really exciting point. We're signing up more new brokers at a faster rate than ever before. We're adding FUM at a faster rate than ever in our history. The combination of this is making it increasingly difficult for others to replicate.
It's driving high growth, and as you can see on this chart, our funds under management have grown with a CAGR of 70% over the last nine years, and we expect this to continue. At the heart of our success is our technology. We said in the IPO that we'd use the capital raise to accelerate our tech roadmap. We do this by hiring more engineers to build out our products, and our tech team is the fastest growing team in our organization. The headcount has increased by 26% in this area over the last six months. It's a constant iteration evolving our platform. We've set up our technology in a way using microservices infrastructure which allows us to do this. We have three key components currently giving us significant competitive advantage. Our broker portal provides a seamless application.
It allows brokers to write more business in less time. It drives higher repeat rates and delivers us recurring revenues. Our rules engine provides highly automated decisioning. It's designed for a human underwriter to make quicker and more informed ultimate decisions. This creates a better journey for the broker and borrower and provides considerable cost savings to us. Our loan engine automates and optimizes the loan allocation and loan management, saving us time and ultimately cost. This leading-edge technology is delivering superior service, which keeps brokers coming back to us. Our broker repeat rate has continued to grow and is now at over 77% from 75% six months ago. Word travels fast, and we're bringing on a growing number of new brokers onto our platform every year.
We now have over 1,800 broker firms dealing on the platform, up from 1,599 six months ago. It's a great model. More brokers on the platform doing more business with us, in turn, bringing more new brokers onto the platform. Together, this delivers exceptional growth. As well as continually iterating our technology, we're constantly looking for innovative ways to expand our product offering. In October, we launched a new EPiC mortgage range providing green mortgages to landlords. The range incentivizes landlords to either improve their property to an EPC rating of C or above, or to purchase a property with a rating of C or above.
There is increasing pressure on landlords to upgrade the environmental efficiency of their buildings, and under current government proposals, by 2025, properties will need to have an EPC rating of C or above to be let to new residential tenants. This product has been an overwhelming success. Just under 50% of all our buy-to-let applications are now on the EPiC range, and we've had an 85% increase in our buy-to-let applications since we launched this product. The product is driving incremental business. Crucially, it aligns with our ESG ambitions, and it's hugely indicative of the direction the property market is moving with environmental issues and climate change becoming increasingly important. We've been busy. Hopefully, you can see we get it done. We're doing what we said we'd do in the IPO, and you can see that set out on this slide.
We've accelerated our tech roadmap. We're launching new products. We're driving higher broker repeat rates. We're growing our institutional investor base and increasing our fee revenue. But what I'm most pleased about is the strong growth in our profitability because that's the output from all of the activity. I'll now pass across to Michael to explain the financial performance in more detail.
Thanks, Rod. As Rod has already mentioned, our profitability for the first half of the year has been ahead of our expectations, particularly due to our buy-to-let product, with adjusted EBITDA up 179% to GBP 13.4 million. There are four key drivers for this growth. The first is the increase in our assets under management over the past 12 months, having grown 32% to GBP 1.8 billion in September 2021. This has been achieved through the growth in our buy-to-let product, which increased 66% to GBP 1.2 billion. The top left-hand side of this table shows how this has generated higher revenue with growth in fee income at 32% outpacing interest income growth of 29% due to the JP Morgan separate account relationship which was new since the prior period.
The second is through a smaller increase in cost of sales, leading to an increase in our gross profit margin from 45% to over 52% across the two periods. We delivered our third securitization in June 2022, which substantially reduced our overall funding cost for buy-to-let, as well as renegotiating our existing relationships with Citi and NAB. In addition to that, we were able to attract Barclays to our platform and launched a new partnership with them and HSBC to provide short-term loans with a focus on retrofitting and renovating the U.K.'s aging housing stock.
The third is through our continued focus on operational efficiency through creating technology which removes friction in the process of originating and managing our assets under management. This technology is great for our brokers and borrowers as it allows them to more easily complete a loan with us, but it also allows us to scale much more efficiently. Delivering technology with a focus on operational efficiency enables us to grow our top line revenue and gross profit at a much higher rate than our operational expenditure, which has grown at a lower 18% since the prior period. I'll come on to talk about this in more detail. The fourth is through a reduced impairment charge.
These provisions are largely calculated using our expected credit loss model, which incorporates macroeconomic data such as GDP and house price index forecasts, along with the borrower's credit information and data points on the underlying security. The macroeconomic picture improved significantly over the six-month period to September 2021 as the COVID vaccine was rolled out and the U.K. economy started to recover. Our impairments charge reduced 45% since the prior period to GBP 1.7 million. These four factors have contributed to our fantastic first half performance with adjusted EBITDA growth of 179% to GBP 13.4 million. The underlying strength of the results has also increased with our EBITDA margin growth going from 12%- 26%. The chart on the left shows the AUM growth across our buy-to-let and short-term products.
As I've just mentioned, our buy-to-let AUM grew by 66% since September 2020. Part of this growth was fueled by the stamp duty holiday as professional landlords saw an opportunity to increase their portfolios. As Rod has already shown, I'm really pleased to say this demand has continued in the second half of the year with our signed applications in November at an all-time record high following the launch of our new green EPiC range and continued improvements in our technology. Short-term lending AUM has decreased by 7% since September 2020. There are a couple of reasons for that. The first is that we reduced our development lending during 2020 as a precautionary measure as a result of COVID.
A number of our preexisting development borrowers completed their projects during the past six months, and given the strength of the property market, were quickly able to sell them and repay their loans. Secondly, new business didn't recover as quickly as we expected in the first half of the year due to labor shortages and material inflation. Our short-term lending October and November pipelines for signed applications were the highest of the calendar year so far, so I expect asset growth to rebound in the second half of the financial year. The chart on the right shows how total income has been increasing in line with our AUM growth, with an overall increase of 30% to GBP 50.8 million. I've already touched on our fee income having increased by 32% due to the successful separate account relationship with JP Morgan.
In September 2021, we had an opportunity to leverage that strong relationship and upsize the separate account funding to GBP 725 million following the sale of a portfolio of GBP 100 million of buy-to-let assets. We have recognized GBP 3.5 million of profits in the interim accounts, with GBP 1.9 million of that brought forward from the second half of the year, leading to a GBP 1.6 million pound profit upgrade for the full year, which was announced at that time. One of the key focuses of the business is building technology that drives operational efficiency. As we have delivered new systems and integrations over recent years, so we are able to scale much more efficiently. We measure our operational efficiency using a KPI metric of OpEx as a percentage of our average AUM.
The chart on the left shows how this has improved over time as the business has grown, but our costs have grown at a much lower rate. This ratio has improved from 3.4% three years ago to 1.3% in the current interim period. Employee costs represents over half of our total non-exceptional expenses in the half, and the table on the right quantifies some of the time savings across various processes and systems that have enabled this metric to improve in recent years. Many of these Rod touched on earlier, but crucially, these factors are additive improvements, so put together they represent a 79% reduction in the time taken to process a loan. We will continue to invest and deliver new technology in the coming years, which will facilitate further improvements in this measure.
I expect this metric to increase slightly in the second half of the year in line with our forecasts. This reflects the impact of post-IPO hiring to facilitate future growth. Accelerating our technology roadmap through increased hiring of technology staff was one of the proposed uses of the GBP 40 million raised through the IPO, and this chart really shows the long-term value in us doing this. Adjusted EBITDA has grown from GBP 4.8 million to GBP 13.4 million since the prior period, and there has also been a significant increase in profit before tax to GBP 10.2 million in that time.
This has been partially achieved through the factors which have resulted in that 179% increase in our adjusted EBITDA, such as growth in AUM and related revenue, improved gross profit margin through increased fees and lower funding costs, and improving our operational efficiency using our technology. You can see in the table on the left the additional factors contributing to this exceptional result in our profit before tax. We have seen a GBP 2.9 million improvement in finance income and finance expense. In the current period, GBP 0.8 million of income was recognized due to our third securitization in June and for the upsizing of the JP Morgan separate account in September, as well as some mark-to-market movements on existing derivatives.
In the prior period, a GBP 2.1 million expense was incurred on the transfer of the GBP 125 million seed portfolio to the JP Morgan separate account. This was part of the overall GBP 4.1 million gain raised in the prior periods on that transaction. We incurred total costs of GBP 3.9 million relating to our IPO in July, and GBP 1.6 million of this was expensed through the current period P&L as exceptional administrative costs, with the remaining amount being booked through equity in our share premium account. In the prior period, GBP 0.8 million of restructuring costs were incurred as exceptional administrative expenses.
To summarize and look forward to the second half of the financial year, I'm really proud to say we've had a strong set of interim results, which have been driven by the performance in our buy-to-let product, and we've shown improvements across all of our key measures, including adjusted EBITDA and profit before tax. Our current trading prospects remain good, with record applications in buy-to-let in October and November from the release of our new EPiC range, and with short-term lending applications being the strongest of the year so far. I expect our performance for the full year to be skewed towards the first half, due to GBP 1.9 million of profits being brought forward through the buy-to-let portfolio sale to JP Morgan, and also through increased costs from higher headcount.
This all supports our ongoing confidence in meeting expectations for the full year. I'll hand back to Rod at this point, who will talk through some of the great opportunities ahead of us.
Thanks, Michael. It's our ambition to use our platform and technology to disrupt the whole of the U.K. property finance market, which is a huge market with over GBP 1.6 trillion of loans outstanding. We're currently doing really well in our existing business. On the buy-to-let side, we're motoring, but we've got a huge opportunity. We've got a portfolio of GBP 1.3 billion against a market of GBP 120 billion. We need to get back to growing, bridging, and development, and we expect that to happen towards the end of our financial year as market conditions improve and borrowers get some more clarity around their project construction costs.
We're about to launch a homeowner bridge product, and we're now really focused on building the platform and the teams for our launch into specialist homeowner mortgages, which we intend to do during the next financial year. We've proven that we can transition through different types of property lending. We've become the platform of choice for investors looking to gain access to this large and attractive asset class. Investors like JP Morgan can access assets at scale through us. It's this that gives us the confidence to disrupt the specialist homeowner market, which has many of the same characteristics of the buy-to-let market that we're already in. We've been really busy over the last six months, and we've had some fantastic results, and we're really proud of them and of the business that we've built.
Momentum is growing, and we're really excited about the opportunities over the next 12 months and beyond. We'll keep growing our FUM and AUM. In terms of immediate projects, we're evolving the origination and credit models, adopting machine learning. We've got the opportunity to refinance our retail bonds and our homeowner bridge product will launch imminently. Given all of this, we remain confident of meeting our expectations. Thanks for listening to our presentation.