Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Latitude's 2021 full year results call. I'm Matt Wilson, Head of IR at Latitude, and I'm joined this morning by our MD and CEO, Ahmed Fahour, and our new CFO, Paul Varro. I'd like to begin firstly by acknowledging the Wurundjeri people who are the traditional owners on the land from which I'm hosting this meeting today, and pay my respects to their elders, past and present. There will, of course, be an opportunity to ask questions at the end. Star one to register a question. Let's hand over to Ahmed Fahour for the highlights.
Thanks, Matt, and good morning, everybody. I'm assuming you have the presentation deck in front of you. I'll refer to the slides that I'm going to speak to. Clearly, Paul and I are not going to do all of the slides here, and there's an MDA and a whole bunch of information that supports our announcement this morning. What we'll do is a short presentation and leave enough time at the end for questions- and- answers. Let me begin by saying a bit of an understatement to start with, but 2021 was an extremely challenging year for Australia as a country, and certainly for all of us as individuals. Particularly us Melburnians, who put up with the longest lockdown of any major city in the world.
Despite the economic and health challenges that existed in 2021, I'm proud to say that Latitude weathered the storm really well and produced what we see as very satisfying results. As you can tell already from the announcement, we made a Cash NPAT of AUD 232 million. Very importantly, when you look back on the year 2021, eight of the 12 months were negative months for the economy. Despite those lockdowns and declining consumer confidences, we still managed to produce an increase in profit. The key highlighted results, as I said, is profit increase. Our balance sheet and the strength of our balance sheet is managed, as measured by Tangible Equity Ratio, TER, was at 8.7%, which is up from 6.7% last year.
We increased profit, we grew the business, and increased our capital strength. Even with the extra capital that we had in our balance sheet, we still managed a return on equity of 17%, which is, as I'm sure many of you would be aware, well in excess of a cost of capital and in excess of any, most industry, benchmarks. These three ratios give you a clear sense of the strength of the business and the performance that we had. What you can see is what the key drivers in this presentation are of that success in 2021. Some of those relate to, how we ran the business and the strength of our, cost management. We managed to, despite growing the business, still get the productivity benefits that we experienced through the investment in automation and digitization.
Costs are down, and Paul will cover some of these elements with you. We grew our business, and we grew it really strongly. Clearly the highlight for us was our lending business. We lend for personal loans. We lend for auto loans. This business makes up one-third of our profit, and its volume was on a skyrocket, up 42% on 2020. It really took off. The other big highlight for us was the New Zealand economy and the New Zealand business. Right across the board, New Zealand was a great success. In New Zealand, we didn't have the same level of lockdowns in 2021 that we experienced in Australia, and the economy performed very strongly.
One of the reasons our business does well in an economy that is open for business, which is what we anticipate the rest of 2022 will be like. When you look at New Zealand, its installments business was up 10%, for example. Last but not least, another big driver of our success has been our risk management and credit quality. Risk management and credit quality has been a highlight of this company for many years. In addition to very disciplined cost management, we were able to grow margin, net margin by 41 basis points. We call it risk-adjusted income. That's where you take your revenue less your direct bad debts. That RAI yield was up 41 basis points. Again, Paul will take you through that. That's the success of 2021.
Clearly there were challenges, significant challenges that we had to wrestle and deal with, and we did so, I believe, successfully. The first and major one that I was speaking to was the continued lockdowns, particularly of the eastern seaboard that took place between July and October, that knocked the economy, knocked the people's confidence and clearly meant that our business wasn't able to participate and function in the manner that we did. That was a real disappointment. The flip side was we managed to get out of that, and I talked about this concept of revenge spend. Well, boy, did we have revenge spend in this economy in November. November was a great success. We were back at volume levels that made the peak years of 2019 look like very average days.
We were able to really get back into our strides and shows how this business does well when lockdowns are not in place. We are very much leveraged to it. Just as an example of that, just as a by-the-by, if you had the same level of travel, if the borders had not been shut, if we just had the same level of travel in 2019 on our famous 28 Degrees card, and we were able to get the same volume in 2021 as we had in 2019, which is roughly AUD 2.5 billion, our total company-wide volume in the year 2021 would have been close to 20% volume growth instead of the 4% volume growth that we experienced right across the board.
That's just an example. Now what happened is Omicron turned up in December and clearly slowed down the economy and people's confidence as that took hold. You can see there on slide six, where I mention that that took a real chip off our growth that we were experiencing. I'm pleased to report that as of February, by the end of January, we have started to see the business grow again. Despite the not so great January from a forward flow point of view, February is off to a really good start.
We're pleased to see that this particular, let's not call it a lockdown, but it's almost a self-imposed lockdown by consumers that took place in the middle of December and a lot of January seems to have abated and we're now back on a really good growth path, probably towards the last week of January and certainly in the beginning of February. The single biggest challenge that Latitude faced in 2021 was the extremely high elevated repayments of debt. It's a forward sign of people's confidence. It's an immediate indicator to us of how the consumer is thinking about their savings, their wealth, and their general fears. I know people use different indicators.
We look at debt repayments and see when people make extra repayments and faster repayments, this is a sign that they're worrying about things. What you can see in 2021 is it was as high as it was in 2020. We gave you the reference of what a normal repayment level looks like in 2019, which is closer to 90%. This is the major reason why our revenue fell in 2021. The biggest factor was people repaid their debt much faster than our volume was able to grow during that time period.
The good news is, for us, the very good news is that this seems to be now stabilizing and that we are in a position as the economy now bounces back as it looks like it has from this particular variant that hit us in January, that we are entering back into a normal stage. When that happens, this business is really structurally leveraged for growth. That's the summary of 2021. I'm just gonna touch a couple of other points before I hand over to Paul that you'll see. On page seven of the deck, you can see the makeup of the volume growth, you can see the OpEx, and Paul is gonna take you through those. I do wanna call out how pleased we are with the strength of the quality of business that we're writing.
Our margin is up, as I mentioned, close to 41 basis points, which is a big bounce back. In 2021, we have a better RAI margin than we had in 2019. This is a really positive point, and it shows the quality of business that we're writing. The average loan that we're taking on at the moment is a higher quality loan than what we wrote in our peak profitability year of 2019. It gives you a sense of the strength of the consumer and the quality that they have, but it gives you a sense of the quality of the balance sheet that you have here. There is no question whatsoever that the profit that we make is on the back of a high quality, good quality customer and business that we're writing.
You can see that in the bad debt charge-off. Our net charge-offs are down to 233 basis points, which is a staggering 30% down on the 2019 level of net charge-offs to AGR that you can see on slide 7. The next slide that I wanna take you to is a reminder of the Symple acquisition on page 12. We made that acquisition in 2021, and this year, we start to get the benefits of that investment. Already, our personal loan business is doing incredibly well. We are the second biggest lender of personal loans in Australia, only behind CBA.
We're bigger than the three other major banks in writing new personal loans. Our performance in November and December, and particularly in the beginning of this year has been terrific. We've maintained our strength, we've maintained our position, and now we're only tackling half the market. We now have the full personal loan market that we can attend to, and this puts us into an even stronger position in what looks like 2022 being a very exciting year for our personal loan market. By April, no later than April, and it might be a little bit earlier than that, but certainly by Easter, all of our personal loan origination now, all of it, will start to flow onto the Symple Loans platform that we acquired in 2021. This is fantastic.
This will lead to a lower cost, a quicker time to yes, and a much quicker time to cash. We will be among the best, not just in Australia, but we're benchmarking the best in the world in this category. So it's very, very exciting for us. You would have heard on Friday about the definitive documents being signed for the acquisition of Humm's consumer finance business. Slides 13, 14, 15, and 16 that are in this deck are a summary of what we presented already on Friday. I don't intend to cover those in any detail other than if you'd like to through Q&A. I do wanna draw your attention to slide 16 for a moment and say this is a very exciting acquisition for us.
With Symple, we got a great tech platform that basically stopped us having to spend 2-3 years investing in a modern receivables platform that accelerates time to yes and time to cash. With the acquisition of the Humm consumer business, not only will it deliver to us close to AUD 100 million of annualized earnings of profit before tax. Think about how much money that is relative to the purchase price and relative to our business. It delivers, in addition, a great brand, 60,000 merchants. It delivers to us 2.6 million customers in addition to our 2.8 million customer accounts, and allows us to cross-sell even more personal loans than what we do in our existing portfolio.
In our existing portfolio, we have a less than 10% penetration, and it derives for us AUD 100 million profit before tax in these results, in our results today. Imagine that situation where we now double the number of customers we have and are able to offer cost synergies that delivers these kinds of results. It's really exciting, and it sets up probably the most amazing year in 2023 for this organization. Let me conclude by just making an obvious point on slide 19, and that is our dividend. We made a commitment from our board during the year that we would pay 60%-70% dividend payout ratio, and we said that in the second half of the year that dividend will be fully franked.
I'm really pleased to say that the company has delivered on that promise, and now for the second half, AUD 0.0785 dividend, giving us a total of AUD 0.157. I'm sure many of you can do the math. That's a 7.7% dividend yield based upon the Friday night closing price. Our ability, as you can see from the right-hand side to pay for that dividend is very clear. We're able to reward our shareholders with this great dividend, with a strong balance sheet, and an ability to look forward into the future with great excitement. Let me hand over to Paul to just walk you through that P&L, and then we'll go to questions- and- answers.
Thanks, Ahmed, and good morning, everyone. What we thought we'd do is, if you move to page 21, just lay out some of the key metrics. Not gonna walk through them in detail, as Ahmed's covered off a lot of them already. If we turn to page 22, I'll take you through some of the operational drivers of the results. Top left of page 22 is volume, and as Ahmed said, we're up 4%, led by PLs and Auto, and we've talked about installments and Omicron as well. Bottom left, the elevated customer repayment rates remaining at 2020 levels, but obviously above 2019. That really makes it hard for us to grow our receivables when payments are elevated in that way. You can see on the right-hand side, we have stabilized receivables, which is a really good result.
Certainly we feel good about our position as we exit 2021. As you can see, the relative difference, 2020 versus 2021, it's a delta in terms of an average receivable of about AUD 550 million. That's one of the bigger drivers that I'll take you through in the subsequent pages. I'll now move through the P&L. If you go to page 23, so operating income, as you can see there on the top left-hand chart, down AUD 107 million. About two-thirds of that variance is due to that asset variance of AUD 550 million. The other 36 is based on price. You can see on the bottom left-hand side there, we've just done some volume rate variance analysis for you. On the price variance, there's really three main drivers to that.
One, we've improved the competitiveness of our pricing, both in PL and Auto, but also in Go and Gem as well. We're also delivering a better quality mix, both in PL and Auto, along with elevated payments, and also product mix, where we've seen the auto portfolio grow faster relative to personal loans. So those three parts are really what drives the 66 basis points that you see in the bottom left chart. As I'll take you through a little bit later, though, we're getting paid for that, based on our risk-adjusted returns that Ahmed alluded to as well. If we move to page 24, what we've done there is just lay out the origination quality on the top left-hand side. As you'll see, we've continued to see higher quality originations, which, one, results in improved delinquencies.
You can see that in the bottom left-hand chart, which has really improved all the way through 2019 through to 2020. Lower charge-offs, top right. We've already alluded to that. Then on the bottom right-hand side, however, we're left with reserves in a strong position, which we consider quite conservative. You can see there our exit rate of 4.28, relatively similar to pre-COVID levels. We feel that's in really good shape going forward. If you move to page 25, this really shows the result of those better losses and, in particular, the lower charge-offs in our risk-adjusted income. As you'll see on the top left chart, RAI yield up 40 basis points, which is really delivering better returns for the portfolio.
I talked about the 66 basis points that you can see there at interest income, more than being offset by the 94 basis points at net charge-offs to deliver the 41 basis points in risk-adjusted returns. We feel really good about that metric, and obviously our risk-based pricing, in particular on PL and Autos, is serving us well. The bottom left-hand chart really is just the dollars. RAI, despite the yield upside down AUD 30 million, but if we move from risk-adjusted income, I'll take you through OpEx, where we've also had a good result as well. Operating expenses down 4%, that's despite increasing marketing, in particular for PL and Auto, but also for installments as well, up AUD 16 million. This is more than offset, though, by our simplification and OpEx model changes on FTEs, down AUD 12 million.
In the other, there's a number of different items driving those reduced costs, but really there's three main drivers that make up AUD 10 million of it or half of it, and that's lower fraud, lower occupancy costs, and digitization on our collateral as well. If we move to page 27, our core OpEx was down, but our significant items are also down AUD 20 million as well. If we move to page 28, I'll just finish up on our funding. We've had another strong year. Just as a reminder, we've got a strong and diversified funding program with about AUD 5.8 billion in drawn funding and about AUD 2.3 billion of headroom. It's very well diversified across 50-odd investors, half domestic, half international. We're a programmatic issuer, issuing in benchmark size with diverse collateral.
Our funding program remains really, really strong. We've had another good year. You can see there on the left-hand side with 5 transactions as well as a corporate facility. We're active, we're actively hedging our costs, so 36% of the portfolio is already hedged, and we've got a progressive strategy to proactively manage our earnings in 2023 and 2024. Finally, on the bottom right-hand side with our capital, so it's up AUD 300-odd million, largely due to the issuance of the Capital Notes, Symple as well as profits, but it leaves us in a really strong position to grow and exit 2021. With that, I might hand it back to Ahmed to close out.
Well, thank you, Paul. Of course, you know, I know that there's a lot of other information that's in this document that we would be happy to, you know, during the week for all of our investors and the media, we have some time set aside where we can cover off on a lot of the detail that you're interested in, but we're happy to take your questions. Our operator will tell you how to do it.
Thank you. To register a question, please press star one on your phone and wait for your name to be announced. If you wish to withdraw your question, please press star then two. If you're on a speaker phone, please pick up the handset to ask your question. The first question today comes from Josh Freiman from Macquarie. Please go ahead.
Hi there, guys. Can you hear me?
Hi, Josh.
Hey. Thanks for the opportunity to ask questions. Just a couple from me. The first, if I sort of focus on that, those impacts to pricing on the sales finance book. You guys saw material pricing changes in that book to improve the competitiveness of the proposition. Are you guys able to provide some color on the competitive dynamics that you guys have experienced just in the second half after that pricing change? And then also whether you expect further pricing outcomes to be required to drive further growth in that area. My second question, I'll just address after you've answered that one.
Yeah, sure. I think it's worth pointing out with the pricing changes of the PL and Auto as well as Go and Gem, but specifically on Go and Gem, just the extra color on those. What we did is reduce the APRs from, say, on Go at 22.94 down to 19.90, and on Gem, 24.9 down to 19.99 as well. I should point out actually, that creates capacity for us in terms of our cost horizon as well as we look forward. The other change that we've made on that product, Josh, is actually implement six months interest free above AUD 250 on Go as well. Those are both those products are really well-positioned for the future.
What we've seen with that value prop change is more spend in the scheme above AUD 250. We feel really good about those changes. It actually aligns the value propositions between Go and Gem as well, which clearly delivers a clearer message for our customers and our merchants as well.
Josh, in addition to what was said there, on the one hand, from a competitive point of view, we wanted the product to be, you know, ultra-competitive from an interest rate point of view. On the flip side, though, I'm sure you're aware that we increased the monthly fee, from around AUD 5 to around AUD 8, and we canceled the basic rewards program, which was driving costs, but not a lot of benefits. The benefits that we wanted to create was a 6-month interest free for those customers that use that platform, to be able to compete in that window for those that have good credit and wanna do installments-based lending. The work that we did with customers indicated that they valued that significantly more than they valued just the general rewards program.
We've been balancing the margin very, very carefully, and I'm pleased to say the risk-adjusted margin is actually up, on the basis of all of that work. What was your second question, Josh?
Sure. Thanks for that. Second question is actually still around the cards and sales finance, but more around the regular spend on the cards. Just conscious that with the Humm acquisition, you're increasing the size of your cards book. We're sort of entering into an environment where the majority of the market expects rates to go up. Just with that in mind, I just wanted to know if you guys already do, and if not, are you looking to hedge the impact of any rate rises on that book?
Okay. Thanks for that, Josh. Yeah, in the Friday presentation, you may remember that, we broke down the composition of what's buy now, pay later versus the traditional, what's called sales finance versus the general purpose credit cards. As you know, general purpose credit cards is a very, very small component of our business, but it's also quite a small component of the Humm business. There's no question that the bigger part is the sales finance component. What I think Paul was alluding to was two parts to that, to the answer to your question.
The first one is, Paul mentioned that by having change the mix to a lower APR rate and a higher fees, that we were able to balance the economics quite well. Humm, I've noticed, have done the same in their announcements, and I'm sure you'll take that up with them. We are very conscious that they are also tackling the issue of fees versus APR rates. Now, here is the good news. The good news is that as we've lowered the headline APR rate in 2021, if the cost of funds rises, as it may do, 'cause remember, right now, it's the forward curve going up, not the current BBSW. BBSW is still where it was.
The short-term funding costs are not rising at the same rate as the forward curve is, which is clearly up nearly 100 basis points into next year. As that flows through into our average cost of funds into the future, we have the capacity to match the interest rate that's charged to the interest cost as it emerges. If we hadn't taken that action in 2021, we wouldn't have the same firepower, clearly. You can see that we have a natural hedge in the ability to raise rates, if necessary, if the actual costs go up, into 2022, particularly into 2023. The second part of your question, part B of question two, was around our hedging program.
I'm really pleased to say that not only do we fully hedge the interest-bearing portfolio, you can see that's about a third of our business that's fully hedged and has been, but we've put in place inside our organization a systematic program that particularly hedges the forward flow of the year 2023 and 2024. We are not hedging the variable rate component in 2022. I just want to be very clear about that in our numbers. Because the current short-term financing cost, as you're well aware, is not moving. What's moving is the forward curve, and therefore, what we're hedging is the forward flow.
Then last but not least, the Humm business, I'm sure you're aware or may be aware of this, but they do hedge the predominance of their business and they are already on the variable rate stuff. One of the things that we did in our due diligence was to look at that into the future. That is an area where they do a very good job in hedging that portfolio as well. We're very pleased and comfortable with the position that we inherit with that acquisition. Thanks, Josh.
Thank you once again. To ask a question, please press star one on your phone. The next question comes from James Ellis from Bank of America. Please go ahead.
Thanks very much. Just a couple of questions. Firstly, the effective tax rate seemed to be a little bit lower in the second half compared to previous periods. Just wondering if you could talk about the drivers there and what you think might be a more normal rate going forward. Then second question is on the repayments being elevated. Just are you seeing any green shoots of that coming back down, or should we expect that the repayment levels which, you know, to remain at these, you know, the level now going forward, basically?
James, thanks. We're gonna have to fix the technology. You're gonna have to get in front of Josh at some stage here. That seems to be a particular pattern. James, thanks for both those questions. Look, I'll just cover that repayments one, and Paul will give you the answer to the tax question. The repayments one, I think I made an observation and like, you know, when we say you used the word, you know, green shoots on that, the answer is, we saw a very small green shoot right at the end of January. Versus the other time periods where it's been just crazy. Our anticipation from what we can tell is that it's inextricably tied to consumer confidence.
There are a couple of other variables at play as well. We are anticipating that as the economy rebounds in the coming month or two, that repayment level will subside. The evidence for that is in the year 2021. You can see it very clearly what started to happen as we exited October. If you look at that October, November time period where the economy was quote-unquote returning to normal, you could see debt repayments were also coming back to normal. Part of the challenge that we experienced in 2020 and 2021 was and still remains the issue of the excess cash that's sitting in the economy. That's really the single biggest challenge that we've had to deal with.
When there's so much excess cash and people were getting barely any interest in the bank, well, then it's a logical thing of what people do, which is they just pay off debts. But we definitely have seen a stabilization. A good indicator of that, I don't know if you, in your research report, which I think you did this really good research report on, consumer debt repayments and consumer profiling. I think you can see very clearly that credit card receivables or balances, sorry, that was the word, actually started to stabilize and slightly grew in the November, December period, and certainly we can see the similar trends. So when you can see the stabilization of credit card balances, which is normally the go-to place where people wanna pay off the debt, that's a really positive indicator.
Paul, do you wanna handle the tax question? James, we can cover a bit more of that when we catch up in due course.
Yeah, no worries. James, just on the effective tax rate. Going forward, we expect it to be at the 30%. There are just a couple of one-offs that helped the 2021 results. As we wound up one of our trusts, we got a one-off benefit of AUD 1.5 million. Then we also had a one-off in 2020, which inhibited that result or made the tax slightly higher. If you'll notice, the tax in 2020 was just above the 30% and it's just below the 30% in 2021. Going forward, you can expect it to be at the 30%.
Sure. Thank you very much.
No worries.
Thank you. The next question comes from Tony Mitchell from Ord Minnett. Please go ahead. Tony, your line is live if you'd like to ask your question.
Yes. Oh, thank you. Well done on the result, gentlemen. I'd just like to ask you, the stock coming out of escrow, do you anticipate any of that being sold in the short term?
Hey, Tony. The stock coming out of escrow is a really positive announcement, and everybody on this call is well aware that the single biggest challenge that's outside of management's control outside of debt repayment you know the second biggest one is liquidity of the stock. There's not enough shares available for people to buy and sell in our company. You know, for a multibillion-dollar corporation, we're lucky to trade 100,000 shares a day, as you know very well. It's really held back the company, this lack of liquidity. You know, we've been really looking forward to this stock being made available so that we can get liquidity back into the company, into the company's shares.
The second part is obviously I'm not in a position to speak on behalf of KVDS, the shareholder that owns 65% of the company. They can speak for themselves in that regard. But what I can say is they've indicated to me in the strongest possible terms that they are long-term holder, they love the company, they've invested in it substantially, and they are not going to do anything to hurt the stock price. I feel like they're very supportive shareholders who wanna do the right thing. There's been no indication. This is not to put anything aside there, but there's been no indications to me that in the short term, they intend to sell the shares at this price.
Right. Okay. If they don't sell it in the short term, then liquidity stays the same, clearly.
Yeah, sorry. What I meant to say is, on the market.
Yeah. Right. Okay. Can you give us an indication of the impact of the Symple acquisition? What will that do for profitability, EPS in the next couple of years? And then as a-
Yeah.
As an adjunct to that, given that the Humm transaction goes through, what would be the combined benefit of both of those acquisitions, in terms of your EPS in a full year?
Okay. Well, if you turn to slide 12, I've indicated in 2023 that the annualized impact of the Symple acquisition is approximately AUD 40 million annualized, and in-year it's AUD 32 million. You got AUD 32 million in next year in-year, in-year, that's a key word, and you got AUD 41 million for Symple. These are profit before tax. Then we've indicated with the Humm acquisition that in-year in 2023 is AUD 55 million in-year of 2023, and 19 million is the annualized impact. When you add up these two items, you've got approximately, in-year 2023, AUD 87 million to the P&L profit before tax, and then you've got well in excess of AUD 130 million annualized in 2023.
You know, take off 30% tax and divide it by 1 billion shares, and there's your answer. It's extremely accretive and highly attractive, and that really underpins our confidence and our belief into why this company today, at today's earnings levels, you know, 9x earnings and 7.7% dividend yield, and you can see and hear how pretty excited we are about the year 2023.
Okay, that's good. You're not quite sure, are you, about the additional shares that are gonna be on issue? Because if for some reason the Latitude holders don't approve the current form of Humm, you'll only issue 45 million shares instead of 150, which is a big difference. Are you assuming that the 150 goes through?
Our assumption is that the 150 million shares will go through. Clearly that's what we've done this so that we can deliver, you know, on the current plan. However, with 150 million shares, we've indicated that it's double-digit earnings per share growth with the Humm acquisition, right? Double-digit earnings per share growth with the issue of 150 million shares. If the shareholders don't want to issue the shares, if they say, "No, no, don't issue the shares, use your excess cash reserves that you have," clearly the earnings per share will be significantly higher than what we're predicting being double-digit. What I'm saying to you is, you're gonna win both ways.
Clearly, if the shareholders don't wanna issue the shares, then it'll be, you know, using the excess cash and significantly higher earnings per share.
Can I ask you, with the Symple acquisition, has the integration of it to date been as you would expect?
Better than what I expected.
Okay. The other question I've got. You've mentioned before about your share you'd like to replicate in the variable loan market what you do in the fixed loan market.
Yes.
You've got a 26 per share. It's 26% share in the fixed market.
Yes.
Do the acquisitions of these two companies, what is that? Are they involved in variable at all?
Yes. Symple only does variable.
What would that take you to the market share in that area then?
Oh, look, we haven't predicted Symple. We bought the tech platform, and it only just started doing its variable rate product. It's a very small player. Overall, when you add fixed and variable, we're at about 12% market share when you add both. We're still number two in Australia after CBA.
Mm.
When you add in both markets, right? In both fixed-
Right.
Variable. Now, when we made the acquisition 4 months ago with Symple, we had said that if you look at what we've naturally acquired and assume that you could do the same in the variable rate that we've done in the fixed rate, we're clearly in the next 3-5 years going to double our business.
Right. Can I ask you, if assuming you're successful with Humm, what impact does that have on the variable market?
It doesn't have a specific impact on the variable lending market because Humm doesn't participate in personal loans.
Right.
Tony. It doesn't do that. You're probably thinking about the fact of what I said, what Humm does for us. Humm brings in 2.6 million buy now, pay later and installments customers.
Mm.
They have no personal loans given to them, fixed or variable, if we can do for them.
Mm.
What we do for our current customers.
Mm.
We have a massive distribution opportunity to do personal loans and auto loans with customers who haven't been offered that product because that's not been available inside Humm. That's a really big cross-sell opportunity that's not factored into those synergy numbers that I gave you earlier.
All right. How long do you think it'll take you bid down Humm, assuming you get it in June?
Assuming it's June, we've indicated that the synergies will start to flow through immediately, but it's a 12-month program that we've outlined in our case on Friday.
Okay. Given that you've made these two large acquisitions, is it foreseeable that you'll make further acquisitions, large ones, in the foreseeable future or you're gonna bid these down first?
Can you say that again, Tony?
Given that you've made these two large acquisitions or the other one hasn't crystallized yet, will you be making further acquisitions in the foreseeable future?
Oh. Oh, no. Look, right now, our focus is, you know, the next 12-18 months, while we bed down Symple. Like Symple, we've got a massive, you know, go to market announcements that are coming through in March about the front end of our book. The back end of the book is fully integrated by September. We're hopeful that in the next, you know, 4-5 months that then we'll get the Humm consumer business, and that's gonna keep us busy for the next 12-18 months.
Right.
As you can see here, Tony, there is a lot of really exciting things on our plate. We're gonna be head down, bum up. Let me just be really clear. The organization now has this fully baked in. We're very clear on what we're doing. We're bringing in some really excellent management from the Humm side. I'm really pleased to have Rebecca and a number of her senior executives come over and help us run that business as we integrate it into the organization. That's a really positive sign. We have Bob and Paul and some of the Symple people doing a great job on the lending side of the business. We're always gonna be open to, you know, what I would call as long as they are very shareholder accretive opportunities.
If those things came along, we have some capacity, but right now, my focus is on bedding all of this down.
The other question I've got is what percentage now, once you get Humm through, what percentage of your business will come from overseas?
Oh, very minimal. Like, I think I gave one slide here that says even with these acquisitions, it will be 3%-4%.
Okay. All right. Well, well done.
All right. Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Thanks, Tony. Thanks for your questions.
Okay.
Thank you once again. To ask a question, please press star one on your phone. We'll pause for a moment to allow parties to enter the queue. Thank you. At this time, we're showing no further questions. I'll hand the conference back to the presenters.
Well, thank you all very much, and I really appreciate. I know that there was a lot of information here for you all to digest. Let me summarize and conclude by saying, I'm really proud of the team's effort in 2021. It was not easy with working from home and listing the company and undertaking all of the actions that we have over the last 12 months. They've done a terrific job, and we are very proud custodians of this company, and we look forward to a very exciting 2022. Thank you all very much. Look forward to the one-on-one meetings that we conduct during the week, and we'll see you then. Goodbye.