I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. Mitchell Hawley, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Thanks, Ashley, and good morning and welcome to Latitude's results briefing for the year ending 31 December 2024. I'm Mitchell Hawley, Head of IR, and I'm joined by our MD and CEO, Bob Belan, and Interim CFO, Stefano Tognon. In the spirit of reconciliation, Latitude acknowledges the traditional custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea, and community. We pay our respects to the elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. I'll now hand over to Bob to begin the presentation.
Thanks, Mitch. Good morning, everyone. Welcome, and thank you for joining us. I'm pleased to be sharing today that the performance momentum we spoke about in our mid-year briefing has carried through and compounded in the second half of 2024. We've seen a material strengthening across a wide range of our business drivers throughout the year, generating what I characterize as a clear and solid performance turnaround, which you'll see reflected in our full-year result. Our actions have been and will continue to be guided by the five key pillars that make up our Path to Full Potential strategy, which you'll see noted on slide eight.
As a company, we've been focused on a targeted set of initiatives to drive sustained asset growth, improve margins and operating leverage, maintaining a strong and more optimized balance sheet, and embedding a culture that allows us to exploit the competitive advantages we have as a scaled non-bank challenger in our core markets of Australia and New Zealand. Guiding the implementation of this strategy is a talented, globally experienced, and deeply committed executive team, a team that's been further complemented in the last six months with the addition of Steve Rubinstein leading our Money Division, Campbell Morrison leading our operations functions, and of course, the recent appointment of Stefano as our Interim CFO following Paul Varro's departure in December. We continue to make significant progress against our strategic priorities.
Actions have been taken, initiatives have been implemented, and investments have been made to contribute to this year's result, but even more importantly, to ensuring that we're well positioned to deliver sustained profit and shareholder value growth in the months and years ahead. If we turn to slide six, you can see the outcomes of these efforts quite clearly reflected in the key drivers of the business. Last year, we opened 265,000 new customer accounts. That's up 22% year-on-year. New customer inflow is vitally important to supporting our product cross-sell strategy, which is, of course, a key feature of Latitude's business model. This is something we'll continue to stay focused on in 2025 and beyond. We processed over 53 million transactions on our credit cards last year. That's up 7% year-on-year, despite soft retail trading conditions and a general pullback in household consumption.
The total value of these transactions reached AUD 6.7 billion, up 10% year-on-year, and the highest levels in five years. We're also very pleased and excited about the signing of several new marquee partnerships throughout 2024, including Amazon, Coco Republic, Officeworks, and of course, our private label partnership with David Jones. These additions have extended the breadth and depth of our expansive retail partner network, diversified our growth opportunities, and strengthened Latitude's product value propositions, which we're seeing come through quite clearly in our new customer application volume results. In our money division, we supported 86,000 new customers with a personal loan or motor loan last year, which drove AUD 1.5 billion in new origination volume, a record high for us, up 33% year-on-year.
As a result, our money division's ending receivables balances grew to just over AUD 3 billion, up AUD 300 million, or 11%, which has cemented our number two market share position in Australia personal loans behind just Commonwealth Bank. Total interest-bearing receivables for the company, a key driver of future interest income, grew 11% year-over-year, to just above AUD 5 billion, the highest levels since 2019. Importantly, this growth was delivered at higher net interest margins, up 75 basis points versus the prior year to 10.5%. Actions taken to further optimizing our funding structures and pricing strategies implemented throughout the year supported strong yield growth, which Stefano will speak about in more detail a little later on in the presentation. We also maintained diligence and discipline in our credit underwriting, with our 90-day past due metric remaining low at 1.35%.
While up marginally, about 10 basis points year-on-year, this is very much in line with our expectations as delinquencies slowly revert back to historical or pre-COVID levels. Now moving to slide seven, you'll see here that the company has generated AUD 729 million in operating income in 2024 at a yield of 11.3%, the highest since 2021. That's up 11% and 85 basis points respectively year-on-year. Despite inflationary pressures, operating expenses were again very well managed. Work done to further re-engineer our cost base allowed us to shift more working capital into revenue-generating activities, investments that have and are expected to support further improvement in our operating leverage over time. Cash profit before tax came in at AUD 155 million. That's up 59% year-on-year, which led to a Cash NPAT result of AUD 66 million, up 139% versus the prior period.
This is clearly a positive result for Latitude, and it demonstrates the significant progress made in delivering on the performance turnaround agenda that we all committed to. Our tangible equity ratio for the year closed at 7.1%, which is above the upper end of our target range of 6%-7%. This, along with the strong balance sheet and profit performance of FY24, has led Latitude's board to declare an unfranked dividend of AUD 0.03 per share, equivalent to 47% payout of our after-tax profits. In closing, our priorities for the coming year will be anchored in ensuring that the core fundamentals of a high-performing organization are deeply embedded in the way we operate the business day to day.
We'll be looking to capitalize on new growth factors through product innovation, distribution channel expansion, and extension into new industry segments, addressing the payment and lending needs of customers that are unmet or underserved by current incumbents. Ongoing investments in technology are vital in meeting the evolving needs of customers, improving operating efficiency, and innovating to compete further, and also improving shareholder returns. We are now beginning to realize the benefits of significant investments made in recent years, and our investment strategy going forward will be aimed at achieving these same outcomes. As I shared previously, we see AI and GenAI technologies as highly relevant capabilities for us. To date, these solutions have been mostly focused in our customer service function, but we see many more opportunities for these and other innovative technologies to help further transform our business in the months and years ahead.
With that, I'll now pass it over to Stefano to take you through some of the technical details of the results in a bit more detail. Stef, over to you.
Thank you, Bob. I'll start the review of our results on slide 15, which highlights some of the key metrics for the half. Starting from the left-hand side of the slide, you can see the continued momentum in our volume growth across our twin engine business units of money and pay. And specifically in the second half, money loan origination was up 24% year-on-year to a new record high of AUD 747 million. Pay purchase volumes across cars and interest-free plans rebounded strongly as well, up 15% year-on-year to AUD 3.7 billion. Total volumes for 2024 stood at AUD 8.2 billion, up 13% from prior year. Receivables grew steadily on the back of volume growth, as you can see in the bottom chart or the first column. The money portfolio was up 11% to AUD 3 billion, and our pay receivables were up 6% to AUD 3.7 billion.
We were able to deliver volume and receivable growth while also improving margins with our operating income expanding 128 basis points year-on-year in the second half. I'll come back to this topic in a couple of slides. As you can see from the bottom chart in column two, credit quality remained benign in 2024, with net charge-offs down half and half due to seasonal movements. Moving on to the third column, our focus on cost discipline that Bob just talked about remained very much unchanged throughout 2024. Specifically in the second half, underlying operating expense management largely offset inflationary pressures, leaving room for volume and growth investments, which largely explains that half and half OpEx growth.
A combination of these trends translated into an AUD 38.5 million cash impact in the second half, continuing the strong momentum in our earnings recovery and AUD 65.9 million for the full year. As Bob mentioned, these, coupled with solid balance sheet and our tangible equity ratio at 7.1%, enabled the board to reinstate a dividend of AUD 0.03 per share, unfranked. Turning to the next page on slide 16, we unpacked the drivers of volume growth in the second half. As you can see in the top left chart, both our Money and Pay businesses were strong contributors to our volume growth, with Pay also benefiting from the volumes generated by the David Jones partnership that was launched in 2024. Repayment rates seem now to have stabilized their downward trend from the highs of the COVID period, as shown in the bottom left.
The result of higher volumes, normalizing repayments, and the onboarding of the David Jones backbook in July led our total receivables to grow 8% year-on-year to AUD 6.7 billion, the highest balance we've had since after COVID. Interest-bearing receivables in the line beneath the chart, they are up over AUD 0.5 billion year-on-year, or 11% to AUD 5 billion. Turning to the next slide, slide 17, we break down here the growth drivers of our operating income for the second half, which is up 81 basis points half and half, and 128 basis points year-on-year. The growth was primarily driven by higher interest income, up 85 basis points. And as you can see from the dollar breakdown in the bottom left chart, roughly a third of interest income expansion was driven by higher receivables, what we call AGR, average gross receivables.
And the remaining two-thirds was the result of pricing actions across our Money and cards portfolios. I'll spend a second more on this, highlighting that loans originated by our Money business in the second half had, on average, a net yield 150 basis points above the existing portfolio yield, therefore supporting margins on a go forward basis. And similarly, across our Pay portfolio, net income yield was up 90 basis points, half and half. Looking at the middle of the chart, cost of funds stabilized in the second half very pleasingly compared to the first half, as higher swap costs were offset by the proactive refinancing actions we took throughout 2024 to deliver better spreads and greater flexibility to our funding program. Turning to page 18, this is a slide we've shown in the past and really shows the evolution of our operating income margins over the last four years.
At the bottom of the chart, you can see the stabilization of the funding cost in the second half of 2024, I just talked about, and that follows a steep climb over the previous two and a half years, and in that period, as we discussed before, we have continued to work strategically on the improvement of revenue yield, which has risen in every of the last six halves to 17.7% in the second half of 2024. This has translated into a strong recovery of our operating margins, which stood at 11.3% for the full year and 11.7% in the second half. With more rate cuts possibly on the horizons in both Australia and New Zealand, in addition to the ones that occurred just this week, we see the potential for our operating margin to improve further. Turning to page 19, we'll spend a minute talking about our credit quality.
Starting from the left-hand side of the page, the quality of new loans originated across our Money and Pay business remains very strong. Our top-rated customers represent and continue to represent approximately 70% of our volumes. A strong labor market has helped offset cost-of-living pressures felt by consumers and are driving the normalization of delinquencies and net charge-offs that we have now been talking about for the last few halves. The second half of 2024 was no stranger to this normalization theme. Noting, however, that as we discussed in the last earnings call in June of 2024, our Money business changed its charge-off policy from 120 to 180 days past due, aligning it to the Pay business, but more importantly, best industry practices.
This has led to a slight, and if you wish, technical increase of delinquencies in 2024, which is not really comparable to previous periods due to this methodology change. So to enable that comparison on the slide, we have added in the chart on the right side what the delinquency rates at 30 days and 90 days past due would have looked like if our money business had still been running on the previous 120-day policies. So all in all, the chart shows that the progressive reversal to long-term pre-COVID averages is continuing. It's on the way, but our credit quality continues to be very strong. Quickly turning to page 20, just highlighting the discipline we maintain underwriting and collection and how that translates into net credit losses of 3.15% in the second half and 3.3% for the year. We are very pleased with our second-half NCO performance.
We are cognizant that there is some seasonality at play here, with second half usually coming in inside the first half, and we expect this trend to continue in 2025. Therefore, we expect some slight uptick in NCOs in the first half of this year vis-à-vis the second half of 2024. On the right, you see our credit provisioning remains very strong at 4.29%, or roughly 1.3 times the net credit losses we recognized in 2024. Moving on to the next slide, page 21, this is actually the first time we show this page. We thought it would be helpful to bring together the review of our revenue yield, our cost of funds, the net charge-offs by showing the evolution of what we call our risk-adjusted income or RAI margin in 2024.
Our RAI expanded by 94 basis points in the year from 7.1% to 8% and 118 basis points half and half. That was driven by, as you can see in the slide, by the improved revenue yield we discussed previously, up 138 basis points, only partially offset by the increase in the cost of funds, which is really a story of the first half of 2024, not the second half, while losses remain relatively stable. When compared to pre-COVID levels, and by pre-COVID levels, I'm really thinking about the averages of 2018 and 2019, we see that the revenue yield is now broadly aligned to those historical averages. Credit losses are getting there, and that leaves cost of funds as a key focus area for potential RAI margin expansion in the medium term.
And to that extent, we are encouraged by the RBA decision early this week to cut cash rates by 25 basis points. As we point out in the right-hand column of the page, 100 basis points reduction in cash rates translates into approximately AUD 40 million of additional pre-tax earnings for the company and roughly 60 basis points of RAI margin expansion at the current portfolio size. And we do anticipate that both the RBA and the RBNZ will provide consumers with additional rate relief. And therefore, we believe now it's a great time to continue to invest in our future growth and competitive positioning in the market. So the evolution and composition of our operating cost base underscores this point. As we outline in slide 22, we maintain a very disciplined approach to managing costs. Cash OpEx was up 4% in 2024, broadly in line with inflation.
But I'd say more importantly, we continue to improve productivity in the second half with the declining employee expenses on the back of our operating model changes, flat occupancy costs, and only marginally higher IT expenses, the majority of which was driven by vendor contracts inflation. That really created the capacity for us to continue to invest in growth and efficiency initiatives, which added roughly AUD 12 million to the second half of operating cost base. And these are high-conviction investments in digitalization to improve customer experience, employee efficiency, marketing technology, cybersecurity, and artificial intelligence. Turning to slide 23, I'm not going to spend a ton of time on this page. It just summarizes the notable items recorded in the second half.
The only item I'll flag is that we have booked the last of the amortization installments on the value of certain tangible assets we recognized at the time of Latitude separation from GE. That's a charge to P&L worth AUD 16 million in the half and AUD 36 million for the full year. And the absence of these non-cash items in 2025 should significantly help in reducing the gap between our cash and statutory earnings going forward. The remaining and smaller notable items booked in the half largely offset each other. I'd like to close my remarks on page 24 with a snapshot of our funding program, which received a boost in 2024 with AUD 1.6 billion of new-term capital raised across four securitization deals, AUD 2.7 billion of warehouse funding refinanced near at better pricing and structural terms.
We have extended maturities anywhere from two to three and a half years entering 2025 with only 10% of our maturities due in year. This will provide our treasury team with the capacity and flexibility to further optimize our capital structure in 2025. Maintain balance sheet strength with AUD 1 billion in headroom to support receivable growth. TER ratio at the upper end of 6%-7% target range and much reduced corporate debt balance at the end of 2024. With that, I'll turn it back over to Bob to take us through the outlook page and his closing remarks.
Thanks, David. Just five brief statements from me related to the outlook to close things out, and then we'll open it up for questions. Point one, we've done the hard work to build a more agile and focused business. Fundamentally, we believe that this puts us in a really strong position to deliver continued shareholder value in 2025 and beyond. Point two, we believe the macroeconomic settings are quite supportive for our business model. Alongside ongoing focus in continuing to execute well against our strategy, we're quite confident in our ability to generate strong and sustained profit growth next year and beyond. We expect the interest rate cycle to ease, as Stefano talked about. We expect to continue through 2025, which, along with the work planned to further optimize our treasury program, we expect to further improve our funding costs in the next 12 months.
This, along with the full-year run rate benefit of the pricing actions and margin management initiatives that Stefano spoke to that happened throughout last year, is really expected to support some further level of interest margin expansion. And finally, despite cost-of-living pressures, a strong labor market and mortgage rate relief is likely to support consumer spending and lending demand as the year progresses. And with that, I'm more than happy to open it up for questions.
T hank you. If you wish to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. If you wish to cancel your request, please press star two. If you're on a speakerphone, please pick up the handset to ask your question. Your first question comes from Tom Strong with Citi. Please go ahead.
Good morning, and thanks for taking my questions. And congratulations on a good result, very good momentum across the business. Bob, I just had a question around the interest rate plan. When we go back six months ago, we're talking about how much the penetration and utilization had come down over the last couple of years. You have added some merchants now, and you've pleasingly turned back to growth on a year-on-year basis. How are you sort of thinking about demand for the interest-free plan side over the next 12 months, just given the environment that we're in?
Yeah. Tom, I think there's two real opportunities to drive growth here. If you look back to where our interest-free plan sort of volume was back in 2018, 2019, it was materially higher than kind of where we're at. And during the COVID period, when household savings balances were high, demand for credit was low, that offer was not as relevant to our retail partners and also our customers.
What we've seen in the last 12 months is a real change in the tide of that dynamic, and to my mind, we've got two real opportunities. One is continue to find new marquee scaled partnerships where our interest rate proposition is relevant in supporting those retailers' customer needs, and two, we've got work to do with our existing partners to grow those volumes back up to where they were three or four years ago, and so both of those two things will remain hyper-focused for our teams going forward. I might just add one other point, which is in the last sort of three or four months, we've been doing a lot of work on understanding where can the interest rate proposition be added or become relevant outside of the traditional categories that we've had coverage in, right?
So really strong and deep penetration in electronics and home and furniture, et cetera. But know that the team is working really hard behind the scenes to figure out, are there new categories that we can look at to offer our interest rate product and help sort of support the future growth trajectory? So hopefully that answers your question, Tom.
No, no, that does. That's very helpful. And I guess just as a follow-up, just a question on the revenue yield. I mean, we're sort of back to pre-COVID levels, and we've got some benefit of, I guess, repricing to come through over the next sort of 6-12 months based on what you've already put in train. How should we sort of think about this in a cash rate-cutting environment? Will you feel pressured to pass some of that on, or do you expect competition to remain quite rational?
Look, Tom, time will ultimately tell, but what I would say is that we put a priority on growing our assets at the same or higher yields, and so is it likely that competition will kind of ramp up? Yeah, I do think that that's likely, particularly as rates kind of come down, but what I will say is that maintaining very strong margins and strong returns on those assets is really important to us, so what I would say is that ideally we are growing both, which is what you saw happen in the 2024 financial result. One of the levers that you have to grow volume is price, but I hope that our actions over the last 12 months have shown that the management team has been incredibly disciplined about when to use the pricing lever and use that in a really disciplined way.
And I would add, Tom, that as you alluded to at the beginning of your question, you have pricing actions that took place in the second half of the year where you will see the full year annualization benefit in 2025. So that should continue to support margins. You also have a series of actions that we took on the funding side throughout the course of 2024 in order to tighten spreads and increase flexibility of the funding program. That also you do not see the full annualization effect in 2024 P&L. So that will continue to support margin in 2025 as well.
Maybe one last thing, Tom. You're probably getting more from us than you really wanted. But here's one last point for you, which is one of the dynamics of this year, and frankly last year as well, is particularly in our money business with personal loans and motor loans. We're acquiring new customers at materially higher margins on the front book relative to the average on the back book. And so the flow on, as that continues to compound, as let's call it sort of lower yielding vintages from the past begin to fall off and are replaced with higher yielding vintages, that should provide some sort of NIMS support as well.
No, that's very comprehensive. Thanks.
Once again, if you wish to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone. Your next question comes from Jonathan Mannes with Bank of America. Please go ahead.
Hi, Bob and Stef. First of all, congratulations on the strong result and the continued improvement in the business coming out of a challenging period. My first question, if I can, is around charge-off rates falling down to the low threes. Just given the recent growth in the book, which won't have had a chance to season yet, do you expect losses or charge-off rates to normalize back to sort of the mid-threes in 2025, or are you seeing anything on your origination that could be structurally lower moving forward? Thank you.
Thanks, Jonathan. We're obviously very pleased with our performance in the second half. As I mentioned earlier, that said, we recognize there is some seasonality right in the second half vis-à-vis the first half. As I alluded to before, we expect a slight uptick in net charge-off in the first half of this year. When you look, though, at the net charge-offs for 2024, we are at 3.3%. So that's not far off that mid-three% that you see this business generate through the cycle when you look at long historical averages. So we do expect some normalizations around that in 2025, again, appreciating the seasonality impact of the first half vis-à-vis second half.
Jonathan, there's obviously a tight correlation, as I mentioned, my sort of outlook statements between how the business performs from a delinquency and loss perspective, and also the strength of the labor markets. What I would say is the labor markets remain strong, but how strong they will remain and how long they remain that strong for is still an open question. What I will say is that we're not going to sacrifice or trade off on the discipline of our credit and underwriting strategies.
And as you can see, Jonathan, our level of provisioning remains very healthy. It actually went up by eight basis points from 4.21% to 4.29% in the half.
Understood. Thank you very much. And my second question just around the operating costs. Obviously, they were higher in the half driven mainly by investment spend. Just for our purposes moving forward, is the sort of 190-195 a new base that we should be working off, or is there some lumpiness that we should be pulling out?
From a cost perspective, we did identify a very tangible opportunity for us to invest in our future growth, Jonathan. So you shouldn't read that the AUD 12 million as now on expenses is going to continue on a go-forward basis. That said, we're going to continue to invest in the growth of the business. So it might not be AUD 12 million each half, but our commitment is to ensure that as the profitability recovers, we continue to invest in the future growth, and the growth of future years continues.
Jonathan, part of running the business in a really agile way is looking at the business performance on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly basis and making investment decisions as the business is evolving throughout the year. I think that's a real hallmark of how we, as a leadership team, run the business. And what I would say is where we see opportunities to invest in growth, we're going to capitalize on that. Inherent in doing that is strong underlying performance. And so as we see the opportunity, we will put capital behind high-yielding, high-return growth opportunities as often as we can.
Yeah. And our commitment in future growth obviously comes in on the investment side. That said, we're obviously cognizant of ensuring that the trajectory from a cost-income ratio perspective that you've seen we've delivered in the half continues as we improve margin and work on the revenue side.
Understood. Thank you, guys.
There are no further questions at this time. I'll now hand back to Mr. Bob Belan for closing remarks.
Nothing further for me except to say thank you all for joining us. We, of course, will be doing what we usually do, which is meetings in the coming week or two with a number of our investors, as well as the analysts. Again, thank you for participating today, and we will all catch up very soon.
That does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.