Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Bendigo and Adelaide Bank's Digital Transformation Market Briefing. I acknowledge the traditional custodians of the many lands on which we are meeting today. For me, live streaming from Bendigo, that is the Dja Dja Wurrung people of the Kulin nation. I recognize throughout Australia the traditional custodians' continuing connection to land, water, and community, and I pay my respects to their elders past, present, and emerging, including those who may be present on this call today. My name is Marnie Baker, and I'm the Managing Director of Bendigo and Adelaide Bank. For those listening in to this call, I also provide an audiovisual of myself. I have long brown hair and a pale complexion, and I'm wearing a light blue jacket and white blouse.
It is my pleasure to host today's briefing, and I thank you for joining us to learn more about our digital transformation journey. We have set aside an hour and a half for a 40 minute presentation, and then for the remaining time, those on today's conference call will have the opportunity to ask questions. Joining me today are two people who have both played integral roles in driving the bank's digital transformation. Firstly, Ryan Brosnahan is Bendigo and Adelaide Bank's Chief Transformation Officer, and he will speak to you about the bank's transformation journey. Ryan joined the bank in 2019 and is responsible for driving our organizational and technological change program.
With more than 20 years international experience in the financial services industry in Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom, Ryan has led significant and complex growth and transformational change initiatives across multiple functions and businesses in financial services. Ryan has a deep passion for harnessing the power of technology to improve the way people live and work. Following Ryan, you will hear from Xavier Shay, Chief Executive Officer for Up. After starting his career as a software engineer in Melbourne's startup scene, Xavier spent almost a decade working in the engineering leadership team for global payments company Square, leading and coaching teams across the United States. He returned to Australia in 2019, where he joined Ferocia and was recently appointed as Up's Chief Executive Officer. Xavier is inspired to help people live their best lives through financial enablement.
His ambition is to remove the stigma around saving and spending that stops people from taking charge of their financial life. While today's briefing is not a financial performance update, I will take the opportunity to restate the outlook commentary provided at our full year results announcement in August. As stated at that time, we expected to see further pressure on our net interest margin over the year, which will be more than offset by income generated by continued above-system residential lending growth. Also stated in August was our objective to deliver a further reduction in the cost-to-income ratio. Today, we will provide more detail about the acquisition of Ferocia and the bank's digital transformation journey, where we've been, where we're going, and how the ongoing investment in growth and transformation is building what's needed to achieve our stated target of toward 50% cost-to-income ratio.
We understand the privileged role we play in the lives of our customers and their local communities, and we know what is important to the individuals and businesses who choose to bank with us. We know that by feeding into prosperity, not off it, we can create long-term value for everyone connected to us. This purpose is unique to our bank, which is today one of Australia's oldest and most trusted brands. Along with trust, there must be capability, the necessary ingredient for our customers' choice of banking providers. This is a critical component of our strategy, a strategy that we believe will shape the future of banking and importantly, deliver positive outcomes for our shareholders. Reducing complexity while continuing to build and uplift our capability through modernizing and transforming our business is vitally important for our future, and it's a future we're genuinely excited to shape.
Delivering and embedding digital capabilities to improve the experience for our customers, as well as digitizing and automating core processes, is a key part of our transformation roadmap, as is reducing complexity and costs. Importantly, through all this change, our deeply human and personalized relationship approach to banking will continue to shape the connections that matter most to our customers. Because fundamentally, it's our customers who are at the center of our transformation program, and they must be. At the center of our acquisition of Melbourne-based fintech, Ferocia, is a simple, crystal clear mandate. We are reimagining banking. When we launched Up, Australia's first and largest mobile-only digital bank platform in 2018, we set out to disrupt the industry and shape the future of banking for a whole new generation of customers.
Today, with the highest-rated banking app, unparalleled customer engagement, and a vision to be Australia's number one consumer lifestyle brand, the time is right to scale up and create a full service proposition. Up is winning young customers away from the Big Four at speed. Most of Up's customers are under 26 years old and are highly engaged. Over 25% of active customers log in over 100 times per month to the app, and 40% log in more than 50 times. Up's customer engagement is unparalleled when compared to global peers, and its rapid growth has far exceeded all expectations. In three years, Up has welcomed more than 430,000 customers and nearly AUD 1 billion in low-cost customer deposits, empowering a new generation of savers and securing a market-leading position with this emerging influential demographic.
It's at a substantially lower cost of acquisition compared to traditional channels. As we further accelerate Up's rapid pace of innovation and growth and further expand revenue opportunities through Up, customers of our other brands will also benefit from Ferocia's digital innovation and experience. Powered by technology-led customer experience design and run by an internationally experienced team, the acquisition brings outstanding digital and technical expertise to the bank. There is no time lost on integration activities, given Up is already supported by the bank's core infrastructure. All investment can go into further developing and building out the customer experience. The acquisition allows Bendigo and Adelaide Bank to further develop its digital ecosystem, adding Up's exciting product roadmap to the existing offerings provided by the bank, including the market-leading digital home loan capability of our partner, Tic:Toc.
More than 40,000 Up customers are saving for a home loan, with Up scheduled to introduce home loans to its product suite early in 2022. While the Ferocia team have joined the bank, they continue to operate as a standalone division with a unique innovation, engineering, and design culture. The acquisition of Ferocia cements a nine year partnership between Ferocia and the bank, uniting our collective innovation, heritage, and match capabilities to accelerate the bank's digital transformation and further grow a unique digital banking proposition. We are responding to our customers and their changing behaviors and expectations, positioning ourselves through transformation and delivering new ways of banking. We stand apart in the market with our own unique strengths and opportunities. We have the size and capability of a big bank and the pace and agility of a small bank.
We're commercially focused and community-spirited, digital by design, and human when it matters. We're not the same as our competitors, and we're not running their race. We innovate and collaborate where it counts, and we partner for the long term. Our track record over many decades proves this, as you saw in the opening video. We are nimble and able to accelerate our digital transformation and shape the future of banking, not only for our existing customers, but also for a whole new generation of customers, building capability for the future and connections for life. We want to delight our customers, to give them an experience better than they expected, to reimagine the way banking is undertaken, so it's not something that our customers have to think about, but it's seamlessly integrated into their lives.
Our whole team is committed to this excellence and delivering on the plan, a plan that plays to our strengths and that of our partners, that scales our platforms, creates value for our customers, drives long-term sustainability for our business and the communities we serve, and provides strong and improving returns for our shareholders. Together, we're on this journey for our over two million customers and for all Australians who want an experience that is less about banking and more about them. I will now hand over to Ryan.
Thanks, Marnie. Good morning, everyone. I'm excited to be here today to talk through how we are fundamentally changing the way we work at Bendigo and Adelaide Bank to make it easier and simpler for our customers to interact with us, while also making it easier for our people to deliver to our customers. Everything around us is changing, and so are we. Look at how the last 20 years has changed how we watch movies or the fact that one of these chips is 8,000 times as powerful as the other. We have unique competitive advantages that can't be easily replicated, and our digital transformation will amplify these, along with providing us the ability to scale efficiently. We recognize that customer preferences are radically changing. Customers expect a Netflix or Uber-like experience from any company they're interacting with.
This means experiences have to be always on, personalized, seamless, and easy. These trends have been accelerated even further by the COVID-driven environment we have been in over the past 18 months. All these changes lead us to a fairly logical answer. We should become a pure play digital bank. But that would mean we give up everything that makes us special. That is, a genuine and authentic human connection, grounded in a deep sense of purpose, and the many ways this shows up. From our leading NPS scores, the efficient deposit-raising capability of our network, the trust in our brand, and the advocacy we are afforded by our customers and communities right across Australia. We also have some really amazing digital and data assets that are helping turbocharge both our growth and transformation agenda, such as the Up platform, which Xavier will speak about soon.
Our data and analytics capability, which enables us to tailor offerings to individual customer needs, our BEN Express digital home loan, and many others. Our 163 year history proves that we have an innate ability to continually innovate, to adapt in response to change. How many other companies are still successfully operating in Australia after 163 years? Now more than ever, we are leveraging these innovation capabilities as we adapt in response to the ever-increasing pace of change of the environment we are operating in. The bank we are building is digital by design, but human when it matters. We have clearly identified the work we need to do and the value it drives. To do this, we are simplifying our products, processes and technology. We're modernizing our technology platform. We're re-engineering and automating our core processes and building new digital propositions.
The three pillars of our digital transformation are simplification, modernization, and digitization. By simplification, we mean we are reducing the number of brands we have in market to three, Bendigo, Up, and Rural Bank. This means we can use the power of the Bendigo brand more, which is already one of the most trusted brands in Australia. We have narrowed our focus on fewer customer segments. We are now focused on young people starting out, those who want to buy a home, savers, small businesses, and farmers. As we simplify, we are removing half the products we operate today. We are also removing half of our processes and half of our technology applications. In parallel, we are building capability by modernizing, so we can continually adapt and respond to what our customers need to succeed. A core part of this capability is modernizing our technology estate.
I recently heard Brett King say that the reason the world needs fintech is because banks around the world run on 1960s technology, the mainframe core banking system, and are offering a 14th century based product, the bank account, which is protected by a 1st century security mechanism, a signature. He is obviously being provocative, but there is an element of truth in this. We are in the midst of unwinding the labyrinth of technology we have and rebuilding it in a way that is digital first, run in the cloud, API-enabled, and driven by microservices. This enables us to create connected, seamless experiences for our customers, built and run by us and/or our partners. For example, our merchant services proposition for business customers from Tyro.
Our digital mortgage, BEN Express, powered by Tic:Toc, and our real-time FX and cross-border payments service in Up that is provided by Wise. This approach also means we start to eliminate the disadvantages of being small, as we can create brilliant propositions for our customers and therefore move faster and incur less upfront cost. For example, last year, we enabled our customers with the ability to sign documents digitally in six weeks from having the idea through to customers actually executing documents. We moved our entire workforce to working from home in two days at the start of COVID. In commencing our move to cloud-based hosting, we moved our first 30 workloads to AWS in 30 days. When I talk about this modernization, I'm not talking about the future. This is now.
We are well into rebuilding our technology, and Xavier will talk about the Up platform, which is built 100% in this way. Hopefully, you've all joined Up and experienced this difference for yourselves. Xavier will talk more through what he and the team have created. A digitization approach includes both digitizing and automating core processes and also digital transformation, bringing new digital propositions to market, such as BEN Express, our digital home loan built on the Tic:Toc platform, and adopting a digital mindset in everything we do, from the way that we work together, the way that we design experiences for customers and the way we develop, test, and deploy software. We are focused on digitizing the right experiences and interactions with our customers to make these interactions easier and more convenient.
This focus on digitization through an operational excellence lens enables us to remove friction, lower our costs, improve speed, consistency, and scale for growth while also being more productive. For example, in our home loan processing area, we have improved productivity by 25% over the past year by re-engineering our processes, cross-skilling our staff, and using data and analytics to focus in on and unblock bottlenecks to improve flow. As I mentioned earlier, we recognize that in continuing to build on the momentum of the past year and to excel into the future, partnerships, collaboration, and innovation remain intrinsic to everything we do. With a strong history in these attributes, as you saw in the video at the start, we understand the significant benefits and opportunities they bring to our customers, our organization, and our shareholders.
A great example is the recent acquisition of our partner, Melbourne-based fintech company, Ferocia, which was a successful partnership built over many years. Ferocia brings to the bank outstanding market-leading digital and technical expertise and has consolidated our ownership of Up, Australia's highest rating banking app. Up's customer engagement is unparalleled when compared to global peers. In three years, it has welcomed more than 430,000 customers who trust us with more than AUD 950 million of their deposits, while at the same time, it has helped empower a new generation of savers and adds to our customer base a really complementary demographic.
As we further accelerate Up's rapid pace of innovation and growth and expand revenue opportunities on the platform, customers of our Bendigo Bank brand will see significant benefit from Ferocia's digital innovation and experience as we accelerate the build-out of our own digital channels and apply the same approaches and technologies we've been using on Up. We have a plan, and we're two years into the execution of this plan. We have made a great start to building our future. We have simplified our business by reducing the number of technology applications we run by 13%. We've simplified our merchant services model by partnering with Tyro, which enabled us to switch off 90% of the systems associated with running this service. We've sold non-core businesses.
We've commenced integrating Delphi and Alliance businesses into the Bendigo products and systems, the first of which we will complete in the next quarter. As far as modernization goes, we've established multi-cloud capability and have containerized our workloads in a way that we can easily move between different cloud providers. We have proved this by moving workloads from AWS to Google in a few days. We have become an open banking accredited data provider with the phase I of open banking delivered on time. This initiative has also enabled us to deliver critical new enterprise-wide capabilities, including customer consent management and real-time streaming of data, both of which will be critical as we leverage open banking capability into our customer propositions. Also, real-time data streaming capability starts to move us into a real-time world to provide more timely data to customers and also improve how risks are managed.
We have moved 10% of our target state technology applications to the cloud. For new and upgraded applications, we are implementing more than 80% of these directly to the cloud. On our digitization and broader digital journey, we've improved our customer experience by introducing the ability to upload and sign documents digitally. We've built a seamless way for customers to authenticate their phones for mobile banking that we are rolling out in the first half of 2022. We have recently deployed an API-driven automation capability that has enabled us to reduce the time it takes to classify income and expense information that feeds into the credit assessment process from 77 minutes to seven minutes per application. We have launched a digital home loan called BEN Express, which leverages the Tic:Toc platform.
All of this was achieved against a backdrop of our business growing significantly ahead of system. We are holding ourselves to account with a simple set of clear metrics, which we will be radically transparent around to show progress on a frequent basis. We have made a great start to building the future over the last two years by significantly progressing our simplification, modernization, and digital transformation roadmap. This has enabled us to both grow in parallel to transforming, to walk and chew gum. We have a lot to look forward to as we continue to execute this plan over the next three years, which will enable us to bring our vision to life, to be Australia's bank of choice for customers, people, partners, communities, and shareholders. Thank you. I'll hand over to Xavier.
Hi, everyone. I'm excited today to show you a bit more about Up and give you a taste of the type of customer experiences and approach we're applying that we're also excited to bring to the rest of the Bendigo organization. We've been working with Bendigo for the last nine years. They're a fantastic organization with strong values alignment with us, and we're feeling really good about how much more we can do being more closely together. At Up, we believe that we can take people from a place where money is a cause of stress and anxiety to somewhere where they're actually having a bit of fun with their money. It's not just about being in financial control. They're actually looking forward to playing around with their savers, looking forward to checking their balance.
For a lot of people, Up is actually the first time they've been able to save money, which is really powerful. I've pulled a couple of recent reviews, and we're continually seeing things like Life-changing. I've never been able to save before, Bank app that actually helps save you money and makes banking a whole lot of fun. We have all these innovative features like roundups, goals, pull to save, real-time transaction notifications, automatic categorization and insights, covers and forwards. People are using all of these features and more to completely change their relationship with money. While we see this every week from our five-star reviews that we're getting from our customers, we see it come through in our metrics as well. More than 2/3 of our new customers are from referrals, which leads to a very low cost of acquisition.
We've been able to grow to our current size with very little investment in marketing, and we're just now starting to increase that to supercharge what is fundamentally a word-of-mouth driven acquisition loop. Our active customer base is growing at about 2.5% month-on-month, and those active customers are making more than one purchase per day. We're the number one rated bank in Australia on both the app stores with a market-leading NPS as well. Our customers really, really love us, and they're telling their friends, and that means a consistently low cost of acquisition for us. What's also cool is that we're appealing to a really complementary demographic to Bendigo.
Over the last two years, we've attracted five times the numbers of 18 to 25 year-olds than the Bendigo brand has and nearly three times the 25 to 34 year olds who are a prime first home buying audience. Behind all of this is a real wealth of design, technology, and product experience from the Ferocia team. The 70 person team at Ferocia has been doing this a while, and this is what enables us to build things that customers really love, get them out the door really quickly, and make sure that they're reliable. We've had extremely good uptime. We're deploying multiple times per day, and we've done world-leading partnerships with folks like Google Cloud and Wise in order to deliver really top-notch experiences to our customers. Today, I want to spend a bit of time talking about our product roadmap and how we think about things.
We have a public roadmap. If you search for The Tree of Up, you'll find it, and there are two parts of it that I wanted to talk about today. The first is Up Home. This is our top priority at the moment. It's what we're spending most of our energy on. While you could think of this as just offering home loans to upsiders, I wanted to use this as an example to talk through how we approach this type of feature from a customer experience perspective. Typically, with a home loan, you'll see people talking about how long it takes to apply, the rate, all that sort of thing. For us, the home loan financial product is merely the thing that enables what people really want, which is homeownership, and that's a multi-decade process.
You spend years saving up for a deposit, hours or days actually going through the application process, and then potentially decades repaying. We wanna think through what does the customer journey over that entire lifetime look like, and how can we be there to support it? That leads us to think that what we want is a digital and financial manifestation of your home in Up. There are many things we can do here. Home insights, helping you understand and budget for your running costs. We can do dedicated home savers that help you save up and figure out your deposit, the type of home that you could afford, and what impact different savings changes would have over time.
We can have tools to help you easily manage your repayments, such as roundups and repayment boosts, and also going one step further and helping people get ahead, helping them understand, well, what does a healthy home loan look like? For example, if we could help people get ahead on some of their repayments, that's gonna put people in a really strong financial position. One of the advantages that we've found through this Bendigo acquisition is that it's opened up a really powerful partner opportunity with Tic:Toc Enterprise to take care of a lot of the technical pieces in the application process. While I said this was a small part of the journey for customers, it is one of the bigger parts as far as the build complexity goes, and Tic:Toc have already solved that part. This lets us focus on the customer experience portion that we're really strong on.
We're building this out and testing it at the moment and currently forecasting our first customers being onboarded in March. We know from our labeled savers that we have over 40,000 engaged customers actively saving for a home, with many right on the cusp of purchasing. We have a really strong and cheap non-broker channel for this new feature. That's Up Home. The second thing I wanted to talk about was our multiplayer banking strategy, or as we like to say, "Making Up better with mates." 2Up is something we launched earlier this year that is a really good example of this. 2Up is our take on joint accounts and like we're doing with Up Home at the moment, we didn't just launch a standard joint account product like everybody has been asking us to for a while.
We took our time to figure out what's actually going on here. What we were seeing is that despite having a shared financial relationship for years, a joint account was increasingly the last thing couples would get. You get married, maybe you get a house, and that's finally the impetus to get a joint account. Couples are sharing finances much earlier than that, sometimes as early as splitting the bill on their first date. We wanted to understand how we could help people with technology much earlier on in their relationship. Things like making it really quick and frictionless to set up, ensuring that you still have your one player identity, and even things like making it easy to close down in the event things don't work out. All this innovation in the joint account space has led to a couple of things for us.
It's been a growth driver. 45% of 2Up accounts have one or both parties as new Up customers. 55% of people using 2Up have never had a joint account before. What we're seeing is that we're creating an entirely new market segment here. Again, this is very low cost acquisition for us. We find all this very exciting. What we're looking at with some of our other multiplayer features is to go wider than two people and see if we can create more viral growth loops that will lead to more and stickier customers. One of those multiplayer features we only just launched is Slices. Slices is our take on bill splitting. From your transaction notification, you can straightaway slice a purchase between all of your friends on Up. This is built on top of our unique payments infrastructure, which is really strong.
We already have the ability for people to request money from other upsiders, and this feature builds on top of that. What you're seeing here is a really gorgeous and usable way to either do straight Slices or get into the details and adjust how much each person is contributing. We're really excited about this feature and our customers are loving it too. We're already seeing hundreds of Slices per day. With Slices set up, you can send out requests with a message or a GIF. We've got a bit of a leaderboard there to help encourage everybody to pay back quickly. As part of this, we've also done a fun little promotion where if you split a purchase more than AUD 30, you'll have a chance of us chipping in and getting a slice on us, which is pretty cool.
It's continuing on a theme that we started with Perk Up, which was really popular. Perk Up was where we were using our real-time capabilities to randomly pay for people's morning coffees. These sorts of nice little flourishes work really well for us. They're cheap marketing that our customers really get a kick out of. It's the sort of thing that they go to socials with, they tell their friends about, and it really reinforces our continued referral and low cost growth. Slices is just one more multiplayer feature. We've got more coming. Shared accounts is probably the next one that we're thinking about. That's Home and Slices, and hopefully you can see that we haven't just taken banking online. Every new feature is creating a new market and a new customer base. What we're doing here is completely reimagining what banking can be. With that, I'll hand it back to Marnie.
Thanks, Xavier, and thanks, Ryan. As you can see from what we've presented today, the work undertaken to date and the investments that we've made, you know, position the bank well for the future. We're fundamentally changing the way we work at Bendigo and Adelaide Bank to make it easier and simpler for our customers to interact with us, while also making it easier for our people to deliver to our customers. We're simplifying our products, processes and technology, modernizing and scaling our technology platforms, re-engineering and automating our core processes, and building new and exciting digital propositions. Our acquisition of Ferocia and investment in Tic:Toc is driving a significant step change in our digital transformation strategy that's delivering market-leading experiences for customers through a low-cost acquisition channel and to a highly engaged customer base.
90% of Up customers are new to Bendigo and Adelaide Bank, providing a low cost, stable source of customer deposits and clear opportunity to scale and become a full service proposition. We remain resolute in our determination to realize our vision to be Australia's bank of choice and will continue to call on our point of difference, our strength of purpose, digital innovation, customer and community connection to position us for ongoing success and shape the future of banking for all our stakeholders. I will now open for any questions from those on today's call.
Thank you, Marnie. We will now begin the question and answer session. If you'd like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. If you need to cancel your request, please press the pound or hash key. Our first question today comes from Jonathan Mott at Barrenjoey. Please go ahead.
Yeah, thank you. It's Jon Mott here. Just a question on the whole concept of attracting customers through deposits, young customers, and then migrating them to mortgages. It's not really a new strategy if you think companies like ING have been doing this for decades now. The challenge that you get is you grow a lot of customers and they do save for a deposit. But when it comes to buying a home or getting a home loan, they tend to then just go out to the mortgage brokers and don't necessarily end up there. These companies have really never seen anyone around the world who's been able to migrate from a deposit into and then cross-sell into a mortgage. What gives you confidence that you're gonna be able to achieve this when basically no one else has been able to achieve it in the past?
Hi, Jon. Thank you for the question, and good to have you back on the calls. Look, you're right. This is not new, and I'll throw to Xav in a moment, who I'm sure will shed some light on the customer base and the specifics around that customer base and why we're so confident about it. It isn't a new thing. You know, I think the work that we have undertaken, the insights that we have gleaned, the connections that are being established here through this Up customer base gives us great confidence. Xav, I might actually just throw to you, if that's all right, and provide your-
Yeah.
Insight.
Yeah, for sure, and it's a great question. I think the thing that is new for us is the level of engagement and brand loyalty we're seeing from our customers is pretty much unlike anything we've seen in Australia before. Like, this isn't just a new product that we're launching together. We already have 400,000 customers, and they're telling us, We wanna move our home loans to Up. We want to bring all this stuff together, and we don't wanna have to be using these other banks. Yeah, now, of course, there are always gonna be some customers who are going out to brokers or who are trying to get optimized for the cheapest rate.
There's a large cohort of customers who, what they find is, by using Up and helping make their money and banking more approachable than it has been before, they're able to get better savings behaviors. They're able to get better prepayment behaviors, and that's the thing that's actually helping them, not just be more in financial control, but actually feel more in control as well. We think we've actually got something relatively unique there. We're feeling pretty confident about how that Up Home product's gonna go.
Just following up on that, would you therefore have to offer a very sharp price? Because it's good to wanna bank with someone, but when you're borrowing several AUD 100,000 or a lot more than that in Sydney and Melbourne, at the end of the day, push comes to shove, price is gonna be the key driver for the vast majority of people, especially first-time buyers. Does that mean you're gonna have to be very sharp on price?
We do think that rate is important, and I think given our the low-cost base of our model being fully digital, we believe we can be very competitive on rate. We're also providing a lot of value through sort of our integrated experience as well. We think we can find a really nice sweet spot there that's gonna really work for our customers.
Jon, [crosstalk] I want to say.
Will it be offered by brokers as well? Sorry.
Sorry, Jon?
I'm sorry, I missed that.
Oh, sorry. Sorry, it's [inaudible] . Didn't mean to cut you off then. Is it gonna be offered by brokers as well, or is it only digital?
This is a direct to- [crosstalk].
We're not planning [crosstalk] to go by brokers at the moment.
It's a direct [crosstalk] to customer proposition.
Yeah, we'll be selling directly to customers.
Sorry, we're jumping over the top of each other. It's a direct-to-customer proposition, Jon, and you know, you're exactly right when you talk about rates, et cetera, if you're only looking at it as a pure financial transaction. As you know, as we heard from Xavier earlier, this is about a relationship that starts well before before a home loan is even considered to well after. This is about a long-term relationship with customers. The holy grail, Jon, I know, but I've never seen anything like Up in my time in 32 years in banking, and I'm quite excited about it.
Great. Looking forward to it. Thank you.
Our next question comes from Josh Freiman at Macquarie. Please go ahead.
Hey, guys. Thanks for having me. Just a couple of questions from me. I guess first, if we look at some of the targets you guys spoke to, you expressed some pretty aspirational targets with respect to sort of reduction in core systems and applications, card uptake and automation driving time to approval and credit decisioning. I guess my question here is really how are you operationalizing these targets to ensure they're delivered? In that respect, are the executive or middle management being remunerated on those targets? I'll just wait for you to answer before I ask the second question.
Yeah, I'll throw to Ryan in relation to this question, but I'll cover off on the exec remuneration. Absolutely, the key performance measures for the executive, actually, a large part of that actually constitutes the transformation program. Not just on the digital transformation, but the broader transformation program for the organization. There is a strong linkage. Ryan, I might let you speak to the first part of the question.
Thanks, Marnie, and thanks, Josh, for the question. Yeah, you're right. They are aspirational targets but are also very achievable. We've got a plan that we're working to get to those targets and you know, things like core systems, that's really critical for us, because the reality is we have to deploy change multiple times today because we've got multiple core banking systems. That's those sort of things are the base that enables us to then unlock the efficiencies around product numbers and also is the path to digitizing and automating our core processes. They are aspirational. We've got a plan that the collective team across the organization is committed to achieve them, and we're making great progress. Yep, I agree they are aspirational, but are also really necessary to give our customers the experiences that they need and demand from us.
Perfect. Thank you. I guess for the second question, are you guys able to provide more color or detail on that migration and decommissioning of core platforms? In that respect, are you sort of shifting towards the core platform underpinning Up and sort of how does that play out in terms of trajectory of cost reduction?
What we'll be doing, we'll be giving updates around those metrics at our financial updates each half year. In terms of the core banking system, we're doing two things. We're essentially hollowing out our core banking system, so we're externalizing all the services to make it faster and easier for us to deliver change. The Up platform is plumbed into our target core banking system today. There's actually no additional integration to do there. We're moving our other cores onto that core also. Another two things we're doing, we're essentially centralizing onto one core, and then we're hollowing out that core to externalize all those services that sit on that core to make it easier and faster to deliver change.
I think it's really important just to reiterate that, 'cause sometimes I think it sort of gets missed in the messaging. But the Up platform itself, so the customer experience layer of that actually sits on top of Bendigo's core banking system now. The core banking system that we use for our retail network, et cetera. It's the one core banking system that we'll be taking forward, that we'll be consolidating the other systems into. It's already there and it's already integrated, so there's not any additional cost there either.
Thank you.
Thanks, Josh.
Our next question comes from Brian Johnson at Jefferies. Please go ahead.
Good morning, and thank you very much for the presentation. Really good stuff. Marnie, just a few questions if I may. I know this is not a financial presentation, but you've thrown it out and reiterated the guidance. When we have a look at it, on the net interest margin down, but growing a multiple of system, and one exceeds the other on positive jaws. Are things better or worse than what you thought when you released the last result?
Thanks, BJ. Good to hear from you, and I would have expected a question, so happy to take that. Look, that was the reason of actually probably restating what we said in August. You know, when we said there we were talking about that there was gonna be some pressure that came on NIM over the year. We still expect that there will be some pressure. However, we do expect that to be offset by the income generated by the continued above-system residential lending growth that we are seeing. Absolutely there is NIM headwinds. There's still the competition that we're seeing, you know, across the industry. We're carrying slightly higher liquids at the moment, you know, off the back of the TFF, et cetera. Of course, there's that mix of the products too, between fixed rate loans and variable rate loans that's also having an impact as well. No, you know, this would be the time to provide an update if we thought that there was a change to that, and we're not saying that. Brian- [crosstalk].
Sorry, Marnie. Can I just go back to Marnie, and I get that the initial guidance was vague, and I kinda get that. If I was in your position, I'd do exactly the same thing. Can we go back to the question? Does it feel better or worse? Because the guidance is necessarily vague, and I get that, but I just wanna get directionally, does it feel better or worse from the environment in August when you released the result?
I think [crosstalk].
I'm sorry to push you on that, but you put yourself out there.
I think overall, if I take all the different- Because you're right, there's a whole heap of variables that come into this. Overall it feels much the same.
Okay, great [crosstalk].
Does that answer [crosstalk] your question, Brian?
Marnie, just the second one. Yeah. Yeah, it does. You're saying it's the same. Marnie, just the second one, if I may, and as I say, I want to compliment you on everything you're trying to do. But Bendigo is still a relatively small player that still doesn't earn the cost of capital. You've underperformed the market over the last 12 months. You've actually underperformed the banking sector from a share price over the last 12 months. While all this is very good and aspirational, I'm just wondering if you could run us through what is the financial discipline or the valuation attributes that you run over all this incremental investment? If we can just get a feeling for that, and if you can, let us know when do you think that this will generate Bendigo basically reaching a cost of capital return on equity? What, how do you assess the investment case? When should we expect to see you earn your cost of capital on the basis of these investments?
I'll just speak specifically to these investments, Brian, because that's what this presentation is about, today. We did indicate at the full-year results that there was going to be some additional cost associated in this year in bringing Ferocia on board, and we talked about that being 1.5% of costs additional to our cost base. We do expect that we will see positive earnings late in the FY 2024 period when we expect based on the current projections and what we know today. Then a couple of years after that is when the earnings itself will have covered the cost of capital of this investment.
Marnie, just a final one. How does Homesafe fit into all this?
It doesn't directly fit [crosstalk] into it.
Feels like [crosstalk] it's an old legacy product.
It doesn't directly fit [crosstalk] into it.
Okay. Great [crosstalk]. Thanks, Marnie. I appreciate it. Fantastic. Thank you.
Thanks, Brian.
Our next question comes from Richard Wiles at Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.
Good morning, everyone. I'd like to ask a few questions just on some of the technology initiatives you've talked about today and also how Up fits into the, I suppose, the broader bank strategy. On the technology, you mentioned Bendigo Express and the use of the Tic:Toc platform. How much of your mortgages are being originated on that platform today? And do you envisage a time in the future when 100% of your mortgages will be done via that platform? That's the first question. Secondly, you talked a little bit about the core banking systems, which was helpful. It sounds like your intention isn't to replace your existing core banking system, but rather consolidate down to the sort of main one at the moment.
Excuse my ignorance, but what core banking system are you using? And thirdly, with Up, do you think about it as a standalone entity, with a desire to, you know, turn that into a profitable business which will obviously require, you know, a lot of lending, that Marty was referring to? Or do you just think about it as a source of customers, a source of deposits, and perhaps a source of, incremental loans, for the broader Bendigo group?
Thanks, Richard. I might just answer a few of those questions here, but I'll actually throw to the other guys too, who might like to jump in and provide their thoughts as well. I'm probably gonna go backwards here, just 'cause I'll recall the last thing that you said. If I've missed anything, Richard, please yell out if I miss anything here from the questions you asked.
Thanks, Marnie.
The first was around Up as a standalone entity or whether a source of customers. Look, we're looking at this as a full service proposition. You know, it has started looking very much at savers and spenders, and in bank talk on the deposit side of the ledger. But there's absolutely an opportunity here, and that was you know, our vision and the reason for actually bringing this closer into the organization was that we actually see a really exciting future here around a full service proposition. Someone might like to add something in a moment, but and then from the core. Oh, sorry, do you wanna answer that, Xavier? You look like you're about to.
Yeah, just real quick on that. I think the other thing as well is given the complementary brand, like the Up brand versus the Bendigo brand, they're very different. They appeal to different customers. They sort of mean sort of different things to different people. I think thinking of it as a standalone thing, I actually think is the right mental model for how we're sort of developing out the feature set, and just working through that full service thing that Marnie was talking about.
Can I just [crosstalk].
I think the other thing [crosstalk] that I would add to that is that.
Ryan, you were about to add something, then Richard, we'll come back and make sure we've answered that question for you [crosstalk].
The other thing I'd add to that, Richard, to what Xavier just said, is we're also seeing Up as a great test bed opportunity for accelerating the way we deploy capability into our Bendigo digital channels. It's a really unique market of 430,000 customers that we have an ability to test and learn really quickly that enables us to actually deploy with less risk similar capabilities into the broader Bendigo customer base.
Okay [crosstalk] Thank you.
Does that answer that question, Richard?
Can I just follow up on one thing? It goes back to what Marty was asking about. I mean, you got 430,000 customers. You got almost AUD 1 billion of deposits. On a standalone basis, that's not great because you're basically paying for deposits. You know, you're not earning anything on loans. Now, when you start doing loans, as Marty pointed out, you're gonna target this demographic, and there's a good chance that they're very price-sensitive. One thing you've told us about Bendigo over the years is you actually don't compete particularly aggressively on price. You know, a lot of your customers actually love the service and the human touch.
Why wouldn't you just take those Up deposits, AUD 1 billion of them and growing, and just use them to fund to fund Bendigo mortgages to that sort of more traditional customer base at less aggressive pricing? Or do you think actually now Up needs to stand on its own and, you know, be a profitable bank in its own right and therefore go after those probably more price-sensitive mortgages? That's the bit that I don't quite understand about the Up strategy.
This is a-
Yeah.
The customers on this platform, this is the next generation of customers coming through. They're expecting something very different from their financial provider. You know, and we term it reimagining banking, but we're looking at doing something very, very differently. You know, it's not supposed to just be a funding arm. This is about servicing the next generation of customers in a way that they are looking for from a full service proposition. Do you wanna add something there?
Yeah. There's a really big assumption in your question around the degree to which these customers are more or less price-sensitive to the rest of the Bendigo customer base, which, I don't think we're gonna see the sort of difference that your question implies there, based on everything we've seen today.
It's not the market-leading price now [crosstalk].
Thank you.
From a deposit perspective.
Yeah, exactly.
On the core banking system, retail finance system is our core banking system. I'll just add something there too, where we're consolidating onto the one core banking system. It's 94%-95% of our customers are actually on that core banking system that we're migrating everything to. So the vast majority is there today, which probably provides some insight into what Ryan was saying before about when we have to deploy changes to multiple systems, whereas the vast majority of our customers are on the one system. So it makes a lot of sense to remove the costs associated with having multiple systems and get them all onto the one. Did that answer that question [crosstalk] Richard?
Yep, that's great. Thank you.
Uh-
Yes. Thanks, Marnie [crosstalk].
In relation to [crosstalk].
The third [crosstalk] one is mortgages.
Yeah. BEN Express, which we've white labeled the Tic:Toc platform. They provide that ability to do that. It's not a big part of our mortgage portfolio, as you would expect. It's very early into that at this point in time. Do we see it becoming a larger part? Yes, we do. But again, what we're talking about with Up is a similar, you know, white labeling of a lot of that functionality and being able to use that also through Up. Whether we continue to have Up and BEN Express over time, that's something that we'll assess at the appropriate time, but they're both basically drawing off that core functionality from the Tic:Toc platform. We do see it becoming [crosstalk].
I assume that at some [crosstalk].
A more material part in the future. Absolutely.
Why wouldn't you just close down your old mortgage origination system and do everything on the Tic:Toc platform?
The BEN Express?
Yeah.
Well, we don't own Tic:Toc. We've got an equity stake in Tic:Toc, but it's a separate company in its own right, and it's actually got a separate proposition to the market. What we have done is white-labeled that platform so that we could have our own direct channel as well.
Why couldn't you use that as a sort of banking-as-a-service proposition and write all your home loans using that low cost, fast- [crosstalk].
But that's-
An automated system rather than using your old system? Just get rid of your mortgage origination platform and use theirs [crosstalk].
That's what we could do, yes. You know, that it actually absolutely provides you the opportunity to be able to do that. That's not something we can- [crosstalk].
Richard, just to add to that as well.
Sorry, Ryan.
Just to add to that as well, Richard, Tic:Toc obviously also have started breaking down the services in that platform. Absolutely, it gives us the opportunity as we're transforming to essentially buy those functions as a service, as we replace our current loan origination capability.
At the moment also too, Tic:Toc is very much targeted at residential lending and a certain LVRs and those sort of things. It's actually not to a full market yet either. Over time, depending on their strategy and where they go, you could actually absolutely utilize that platform.
Yeah. In your funding agreement with them, what is it? Seven years? You're basically-
Yeah.
Tied to them for seven years. Sounds like a new Ferocia.
We have funding arrangements with a number of parties. Tic:Toc's one of those parties that we do.
Okay. Thanks, thanks for answering all the questions.
Thanks, Richard.
Our next question comes from Brendan Sproules at Citi. Please go ahead.
Good morning, team. Thanks for letting me ask a couple of questions. Look, I'm interested in what these investments and how they'll impact the development of your existing business over time. My first question is: we're seeing a number of banks now in Australia start to reduce their physical distribution. Do these investments that you're making here, where your customers are interacting with you know, primarily online or on their phone, enable you to actually accelerate the reduction of your physical distribution across your existing network?
I might throw across to Ryan for you to give your thoughts in relation to this. This is the ongoing evolution, isn't it, of understanding what this sort of capability provides us. Looking at our distribution and ensuring that we are providing our products and services in the best way that we can, in the most efficient way that we can, that's actually gonna meet the needs of our customers. Our customers do make choices in relation to where they wanna source these you know our products and services through and from. We'll continue to adapt our models according to the preferences of our customers. Ryan, is there anything you wanted to add?
I mean, what this enables us to do, Brendan, is to have true multi-channel capability and to be able to serve up for customers to go in and out of different channels based on how they want to interact with us. Now that's obviously a core part of who we are and how we think that customers will want to continue to interact. Some customers will want a total digital proposition, some will want the ability to actually talk to someone, a real person, at some point through those interactions, and some customers will continue to want actually a full human interaction.
I guess these capabilities enable us to deliver that proposition in a common way, irrespective of how the customer chooses to interact in terms of channel, and also enables customers to go in and out of different channels and for us to be able to recognize them as they go in and out of different channels. It really does make it much more customer-friendly in terms of how customers interact rather than today, essentially lots of things are piped, based on the one channel you're interacting with.
Maybe if I could just have a follow-up question. I mean, obviously there's quite a bit of investment that you've had to put in to develop this capability. To what extent is, particularly, say, the digital application, there's obviously a lot less manual handling of applications, you know, through these new processes. To what extent can you improve your returns by, you know, reducing some of your footprint in operations, some of your footprint in product set? We've seen a lot of banks reduce their product set or aiming to reduce their product set significantly. To what extent can you now accelerate that and obviously improve the overall returns of the whole Bendigo business?
That's a good question, Brendan. You know, it does. You do this well, you do increase the productivity. There's one thing to reduce the costs, and there is the opportunity there to reduce the costs. There's another to be able to actually grow, you know, at a quicker pace. You know, we've seen that even ourselves with what we've deployed to date. You're seeing that in our, you know, in our above-system growth that we're achieving. A lot of that is as a direct result of the things that we've been deploying and our ability and capacity to actually now grow at a quicker pace than we have seen in the past.
Thank you.
Just a final call for questions before we wrap up. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one. We appear to have no further questions, Marnie. Sorry, I believe we've had a last question, last minute question from Andrew Triggs at JP Morgan. Please go ahead.
Thank you. Andrew Triggs, actually. Could I maybe, Marnie, just to follow up quickly just on your commentary on the outlook statement. Just the APRA stat suggested a deterioration in loan growth over the September quarter. It looks like mortgage growth was about system or slightly below and business lending growth was negative. Just interested in any observations on what that might be. Was it just not participating in some of the very aggressive fixed rate pricing during the quarter, and also what gives you the confidence of that acceleration to the remainder of the year?
Thanks, Andrew. You're right in relation to the statistics, but we're seeing that momentum continue to grow, though. From a total lending perspective, of course, you've got the seasonality of our agribusiness there. We've actually seen in our, you know, in our target SME segment that that's been, you know, broadly flat. This is sort of a lot of that's at, you know, because of the increased level of customer repayments, which is a good thing, which means that our customers are in a good position. We do expect residential lending growth to be above system for the year, and we're actually seeing that momentum grow. We can actually see that in our application numbers which are better than we've ever seen in the past. We're quite confident about the current projections that we had out there and the current commentary that we had around above-system growth for the full year.
Marnie, just on the agri commentary. I mean, NAB saw extremely strong growth despite seasonality and now has 1/3 of the market and market share. Are you seeing some impacts from their strong growth on book?
Look, both across agri and business, you know, a couple of the major banks are very competitive at the moment. You know, we're not fair weather bankers. We're there for the long term in relation to our customers. We're continuing to, you know, see the level of growth that we would sort of hope to expect. In both of those segments, especially in agri, you know, they've had a bumper years. Unfortunately it goes counter cyclical, doesn't it? When business customers or agri-business customers are doing well, it doesn't necessarily translate into increased business on our balance sheet. It goes the opposite direction. No, we're pleased with how we're growing in those two segments.
It's very competitive, you know, in both, like I said, agri and business. I don't see that abating in the near future either. We're still comfortable with the level of customer growth that we're getting and that'll translate into balance sheet growth at the appropriate time when it's appropriate for those customers to do so. Thanks, Andrew. Is there any further questions?
We've had no further questions come through Marnie, so I'll pass it back to you.
Thank you. Well, I will wrap it up now then and just thank you all for your for your interest. We are really excited in relation to our digital journey and the transformation that we're making, you know, within our own business. I hope that you're equally as excited about that as we see the benefits of this digital transformation start to flow through to, you know, our customers and to our shareholders. Thank you again for your time, and we look forward to seeing you next time. Thank you.