Welcome to Credit Corp's 2023 half year results presentation. I'm Thomas Beregi, the CEO of Credit Corp. Our objective is leadership of the credit-impaired consumer segment. We define our market as people who've had trouble with credit, most having defaulted on a previous obligation. We operate in very competitive businesses, and three competencies are critical to our success. We must have superior analytics and discipline, because our business is all about pricing and managing risk. Our operations must be strong to compete. We must be sustainable and compliant to deliver on our promise to our debt sale clients, other stakeholders, and the community. This ensures that our business can continue. Applying these competencies, we target to deliver strong earnings growth into the future while producing acceptable returns, which we define as a return on equity of 16%-18% with a conservative financial structure.
We have strong metrics and approaches for each of these competencies across our three businesses. Our leadership has earned the confidence of our clients and customers, producing a record level of half year investment. The way we account for things means the profit for the half was suppressed. We incurred upfront loss provisions and marketing expense from record consumer lending. We also bore the costs of rapidly increased U.S. Resourcing, which won't start to convert into collections until the second half, and we experienced continued runoff in our Australia and New Zealand debt buying business. Earnings expected to recover over the second half. Lending profit should grow from around AUD 4 million in the first half to AUD 25 million in the second half as loan volume moderates and we record interest income from the enlarged book.
U.S. collections are on track to increase as we bid down the rapid growth in resourcing. The U.S. outlook is for increasingly favorable Purchased Debt Ledger market conditions with strong unsecured credit growth and rising charge-offs. We purchased more heavily than we expected in the first half, so we'll take a breather and reduce our U.S. outlay over the balance of the year. Our U.S. focus will be on making sure we grow collections and achieve targeted returns. The recurring payers book is growing, and this already points to improvement. Lending is a key driver of growth for Credit Corp. At its current size, the loan book will produce AUD 146 million in annualized revenue. Demand for our Wallet Wizard branded cash loan product was higher than it's ever been, and arrears and losses remain within expectations. Our core Australian New Zealand debt buying business remains sound.
While we've increased our share, the market has contracted, and there aren't any signs of a short-term recovery, so continued run off from this segment can be expected. Investment will moderate over the balance of the year, and this will build the financial capacity to secure attractive investment opportunities as they arise. We remain on track for a full year net profit after tax in the range to AUD 90 million-AUD 97 million. We raise our investment guidance in line with first half performance. Purchased Debt Ledger outlays are now expected to be in the range of AUD 290 million-AUD 295 million, and net lending is expected to fall within the range of AUD 140 million-AUD 150 million. Thank you.