2021 Annual General Meeting. All participants are in a listen-only mode. There will be a presentation followed by a question and answer session. Questions will be received via the webcast. To submit a question, please type it into the Ask a Question box and hit Submit. I would now like to hand the conference over to Warren McLeland. Please go ahead.
Ladies and gentlemen, the time is now 9:34 A.M. As we have a quorum of two members registered, I would like to welcome you all to our virtual AGM and now declare the formal proceedings of this meeting open. My name is Warren McLeland, and I am the Non-Executive Chairman of your company. I commence with an acknowledgement of the Gadigal peoples of the Eora Nation as the traditional custodians of this land and pay respect to their elders past, present, and future. The notice of meeting has been sent to all shareholders and lodged with the Australian Securities Exchange on fifteen October two thousand and twenty-one. It has also been made available on the Resimac Group Limited website and posted on the share registry website since that date. I will take the notice of meeting as read.
I refer to the minutes of the last meeting of shareholders of the company, which was for the annual general meeting held on 17 November 2020. The minutes of that meeting have been reviewed by the board and signed by me as chairman on 28 January 2021. The minutes are with the company secretary and are available for inspection. Shareholders will be asked to consider four resolutions at this meeting. As chairman of the meeting, I exercise my right pursuant to the constitution of Resimac Group Limited to request a poll on these resolutions. In order to provide you with enough time to vote, I will ask the registry representative to open voting for all resolutions now. The login instructions to the online voting portal are detailed in the notice of meeting and online voting guide.
I will then read out the resolutions and allow time for shareholders to ask questions on the resolutions. You may now vote on any resolution at any time before I close the poll at the end of the meeting. However, before we commence the formal proceedings of each resolution, I would like to start with my chairman's address. I'm joined today by my director colleagues, Duncan Saville, Susan Hansen, Caroline Waldron, and Wayne Spanner, who appears by video conferencing from New York. Our CEO, Scott McWilliam, Peter Fitzpatrick, our company secretary, and Jason Azzopardi, our CFO, are with us. Also present is Ms. Heather Masterman, representing our auditing firm, Deloitte, and who we welcome to Resimac today as our new audit partner. Our retiring partner, Deloré Nel , has joined us for the last time in his official capacity as audit partner.
We acknowledge and thank Deloré for his years of outstanding professional service and counsel to the Resimac Group. Deloré and Jason are available to address any question you may have on the financial accounts and the results therein. Following my address to shareholders, I shall ask Scott, our CEO, to address the meeting with his comprehensive report for the year to June 30, 2021. It has been a privilege to complete my first full year as your Chairman, and I am pleased to report on the scale and quality of the progress of your company in its business transformation to a digitally powered, value-creating, growth-driven, and profitable enterprise. As a declared growth company, our loan assets under management, or AUM, at FY 2021 end were AUD 13.8 billion. Normalized earnings increased 87% to a record AUD 104 million.
Our capital position is its strongest since incorporation and continues to grow, and the increases in our share price in FY 2021 outperformed the vast majority of ASX-listed companies. This has enabled us to increase returns to shareholders with a total fully franked annual dividend of AUD 0.064 per share. Resimac's leadership in funding and treasury management has again demonstrated its immense capabilities. Their professionalism continues to provide the company with a strong base for us to drive our AUM growth. Financial year 2021 was essentially dominated by the destructive pandemic, COVID-19, which by the second quarter of FY 2021, that is October to December 2020, was becoming more of a manageable problem rather than a plague. The local economy was demonstrating fast recovery and growth, and business activity with expanding consumer expenditure.
Business and consumer confidence was soon hit hard following the summer holidays by the new variant of COVID-19, Delta, which struck Australia, forcing a refocus on controls over people movement, ultimately leading to another wave of lockdowns as the year drew to a close. While uncertainty remains around COVID-19's lasting impact, the dramatic increase in the take-up in vaccination rates across the nation is cause for confidence, if not optimism, about the path forward for the Australian economy. The immediate economic outlook remains challenging to forecast. This is common for any economy experiencing a short, sharp downturn. Increasingly, expectations are gathering pace for another V or possibly a W-shaped recovery.
Others are more conservative, predicting a U-shaped recovery with a possible longer base. Irrespective of the shape of the economic improvement, it is increasingly likely that we will see an immense pickup in inflation, principally caused by worldwide supply chain issues. Unemployment may increase for a short period early next calendar year as a consequence, and market forces are relentless in their expectation that official government interest rates will increase by the end of calendar 2022, 18 months earlier than the RBA was predicting only 6 weeks ago. A federal election is due by May 2022, and the closer we get to that date, more uncertainty will be created. This translates as a higher risk operating environment for the second half of FY 2022.
However, once the election is over and the evidence builds regarding economic recovery, we expect the rebound in GDP will go apace. House price growth in FY 2021 and the first few months of FY 2022 has been nothing short of extraordinary. This has quickly resulted in reducing housing affordability across all capital cities and increasingly regional areas. We expect further macroprudential decisions from regulators aimed at limiting and capping specific categories of lending and/or conditions of assessing loan servicing criteria for borrowers. The ultimate aim is to weaken the growth in lending and introduce a measure of mitigating future house price increases to more realistic and sustainable levels. Overall, we remain convinced that consumer expenditure will expand surprisingly quickly, thereby, from first quarter FY 2023, producing a return to business and investor confidence. International borders are already opening and business and tourism is commencing reinvigoration.
Irrespective of a mix of positive and negative trends that produce volatility in markets and uncertainty, the majority of economists are predicting most negative trends will be short-lived and sustainable economic growth will robustly re-emerge. Crucially, governments, the business community, and private sector specialists are aligned on the expected outcome. In summary, we expect the Australian economy in the period to 2026 will be characterized by relatively low levels of unemployment, low levels of interest rates, and only moderately higher annual inflation, and at least a return to the higher rates of real GDP growth we experienced pre-COVID. Such conditions represent a positive outlook for a continuance of growth opportunities for Resimac Group, notwithstanding a constant feature of intense industry competition and a continual squeeze on margins.
Even with such demanding conditions, we remain confident in our assessment of Resimac's continuing growth, albeit at a slower rate during the next two years than experienced in FY 2020 and FY 2021. Our strategic research gives us confidence to retain, if not expand, further diversify our aspirations. Our capital investment plans remain. We have big expectations from our fledgling asset finance business, especially taking a three-to-five-year view. Strong capital position is a pivot for our future growth, as is our conservative payout ratio, illustrating our confidence in the business. On behalf of my director colleagues, I have pleasure in congratulating our management and employee teams. We admire their ability to maintain a measure of cautious optimism under such challenging working from home requirements, the blending of complexity of living with COVID in personal lives, and the duress and stressful operating environmental conditions have created.
Their unwavering commitment and loyalty to Resimac has been simply outstanding. I shall now ask our CEO, Scott McWilliam, to provide more detail on a selection of the many highlights for 2021 and an overview of the current environment.
Thank you, Warren. Good morning, everybody, and welcome again to Resimac's second virtual AGM. Before I get into Resimac's accomplishments over the last 12 months, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on how grateful we are. We are grateful to our people across Australia, New Zealand, and the Philippines for their resilience in continuing to weather pandemic-related disruption with minimal impact to the business. We are grateful to the federal and state governments for their hard work in keeping our country safe, our economy going, and for facilitating vaccination programs that have enabled us to ease out on lockdown restrictions and start coming together again as a community. We are grateful to our customers, both our end customers and our brokers, as well as our business partners and our investors for their cooperation, collaboration, and support over the past 12 months. Turning now to our financial results.
I'm pleased to report that Resimac has continued its track record of exceptional performance, enabling us to maximize returns to shareholders while continuing to support the needs of our customers and our business partners. For the year ended 30 June 2021, we reported a record profit while growing our home loan portfolio for the fourth consecutive year. These results have been driven by a growth across prime and specialist portfolios in Australia and New Zealand, the development of our broker and direct-to-consumer brands, strong investor demand for our bonds, and the ongoing investment in our digital transformation. Our normalized net profit after tax of AUD 104 million represents an 87% increase on the previous full year result. Our statutory NPAT of AUD 107.6 million also increased 92% on the prior year.
This profit increase was underpinned by home loans. Assets under management had increased by 11% to AUD 13.8 billion, with a record second half settlements increasing by 25% compared to the first half. Furthermore, as a result of our continued focus on process and technology to drive scale in the business, our cost to income ratio decreased significantly to 32.1%. We are also pleased to declare a fully franked final dividend of AUD 0.04 per share, resulting in a total dividend of AUD 0.064 per ordinary share, a payout ratio of 24.3%. Investor demand continues to be strong for our global funding program, which provides our business with a platform for future growth. Throughout FY 2021, we issued close to AUD 6 billion of prime and non-conforming RMBS at the lowest senior margins since before the GFC.
Stable funding markets and lower cost of funds provide us with a runway to aggressively target future growth in FY 2022 and beyond. Diversification has been a major theme for Resimac over the last 12 months. We acquired the remaining 40% of asset finance lender, International Acceptance Group, which we subsequently relaunched as Resimac Asset Finance earlier this year. This launch enables Resimac to offer a full suite of lending products to consumers and also commercial borrowers, and we expect this division to grow materially over the next 3 years. We also introduced new products to our direct to consumer brand, homeloans.com.au, to capitalize on segment-specific market opportunities, demonstrating the agility of a non-bank lender. This includes our affordability product, which helps first home buyers better manage the upfront costs of purchasing a home.
We're also piloting a new green loan, which is an ultra-low rate product we're offering to existing customers so they can purchase and install energy efficient products in their home. Clean energy solutions are a fast-growing segment of the market, and we're excited to be one of the first lenders to help consumers move towards a cleaner and more sustainable future. Throughout 2022, we will be announcing a suite of sustainable and socially responsible products that will form the basis of our ESG initiatives in global funding markets. Our investments in technology have been driven by the need to position our business as not just accommodating the needs and wants of consumers today, but ensuring we are flexible enough to meet and exceed their expectations in the future.
Our new origination system successfully went live in New Zealand recently, with the Australian environment to roll out next month. This system will drive the required scale in our origination process to facilitate the targeted AUD 8 billion of home loan settlements in FY 2024. Furthermore, our new digital core banking system is on track to roll out in New Zealand next month, with the Australian go live scheduled for late FY 2022. These milestones are really just the start of an ongoing digital journey we are committed to for the long haul, whereby we continually evolve our business to remain relevant to our customers in the future. The operating environment. The lending market remains highly competitive and is expected to continue for at least the next 6 months.
Despite this, as announced to the market this morning, Resimac settled AUD 2.5 billion of home loans between July and October this calendar year. These levels demonstrate the production capability and the opportunity for Resimac during periods of minimal disruption during the fourth quarter, FY 2021. Funding markets remain supportive, highlighted by our upsized AUD 1.5 billion non-conforming RMBS transaction last month. Pricing is normalizing to both pre-COVID levels and in line with offshore markets as COVID related programs from the RBA and other regulators begin to taper. In closing, I wanted to thank our business partners, from our brokers to our bankers, who are critical to Resimac's ongoing growth. Thanks to our board for their invaluable service and support they have provided to the business.
Another big thank you to our staff, who have once again demonstrated remarkable resilience, not just ensuring the success of our business, but also through their commitment to the financial wellbeing of our customers. I want to thank you, our shareholders, for your continued support and investment in our business. Thank you.
Thank you, Scott. As previously notified, voting on all resolutions today will be conducted by way of a poll. In order to provide you with enough time to vote, I remind you that the online platform is open for voting on all resolutions. I will now move to the formal business of the meeting. The first item for this meeting is the receipt of the financial report for the year ended 30 June 2021. This item is not required to be voted on. I now ask if there are any questions on the financial report. Before I do this, I advise that we have not received any advance questions for our auditor. However, we have received in advance the following questions from a shareholder, Metro Proprietary Limited.
The questions are: First, in the light of possible movement of official RBA rates prior to 2024, and with our mortgage book now in excess of AUD 13.8 billion, will we have the continuing support of the securitizers to continue to grow our book? And if so, to what size or amount? And second, what would you estimate the growth in our mortgage book and NPAT to be over the next two years? I shall ask Jason Azzopardi, our CFO, to respond.
Thanks, Warren. On the first question, in terms of securitization support, I'm pleased to say in our trading update today, we're actually at AUD 14.5 billion AUM in our home loan book. The support we're getting from existing and potential new warehouse providers, and certainly the support we're getting for investment in our bonds over this calendar year gives us a lot of comfort that we can support the growth of our existing funding strategy over the next few years. I think that's demonstrated by the oversubscription in our most recent Bastille trade where we had to upsize it from AUD 1 billion to AUD 1.5 billion. We're very, very comfortable that, as I said, the current funding strategy will support that.
In saying that, we're always looking at ways in which we can diversify our funding platform and, we'll continue to do so. On the second question, it's twofold. Firstly, what would you estimate the growth in our mortgage book to be? We put out there, obviously, a trading update today which shows the strength in our settlements this year, and we put out that target of FY 2024 of AUD 8 billion of home loan settlements. We're on the trajectory to reach that. Assuming we do hit that, we would expect the mortgage book to be in excess of AUD 20 billion by the end of FY 2024. In terms of NPAT over the next two years, we're not definitely only give guidance on a two-year NPAT number.
What I will say is, it's important not to just think about this business as a home loan business. We are expecting large growth in AUM, but it is a declining NIM environment, which we've communicated significantly in the past. Also, we have our RAF business now. As we've announced today, we're getting very, very good traction in settlement growth in RAF, and we do expect that to be a growth vehicle for the group going forward.
Thank you, Jason. Do shareholders have any other questions on the financial report?
No further questions.
No further questions have been received. We now move to the resolutions, the next item of business. Resolution one relates to the remuneration report. The remuneration report can be found from page 20 of the annual report. Shareholders are required to consider if the remuneration report for the year ended June 30, 2021 be adopted. The vote on this resolution is advisory only and does not bind the directors of the company. Are there any questions with respect to the remuneration report?
No further questions.
No questions have been received. The proxy votes received by the company in respect to this resolution are displayed on the slide that should be visible next to the video presentation of the meeting. Note that a number of proxies are not eligible to vote on this resolution.
Proceed.
Excuse me.
Meeting continued.
Thank you. Next resolution. I now move to resolution two, which is to consider, and if thought fit, pass the following resolution as an ordinary resolution, that Mrs. Caroline Waldron, who was appointed in accordance with clause 13.6.1 of the company's constitution during the year, is reelected as a director in accordance with clause 13.6.2 of the company's constitution. Caroline was appointed to the board in November 2020. Caroline's biography was included in the notice of meeting and in the annual report. The board supports the appointment of Caroline. Are there any questions on this resolution?
No questions.
No questions. The proxy votes received by the company representing 75% of the securities on issue in respect to this resolution are as displayed on the slide.
Should we-
I now move to resolution three, which is to consider, and if thought fit, pass the following resolution as an ordinary resolution. That Mr. Duncan Saville, who retires by rotation in accordance with clause 13.4 of the company's constitution, is reelected as a director. Duncan was appointed to the board in November 2017. Duncan's biography was included in the notice of meeting and in the annual report. The board supports the reelection of Duncan. Are there any questions on this resolution?
No questions.
No questions have been received. The proxy votes received by the company representing 75% of securities on issue in respect to this resolution are displayed on the slide.
Point on one. Point on one.
Congratulations.
Thank you.
I now move to resolution four, which relates to directors' fees. Shareholders are to consider, and if thought fit, pass an ordinary resolution that in accordance with ASX Listing Rule 10.17, and with effect from the conclusion of the AGM, the aggregate maximum sum available for the remuneration of the non-executive directors of the company be increased by an amount of AUD 250,000 to AUD 800,000 per financial year. Are there any questions on this resolution?
No questions.
No questions. The proxy votes received by the company in respect to this resolution are as displayed on the slide. Note that a number of proxies are not eligible to vote on this resolution. We will now proceed to the poll. Computershare is our share registry provider, represented today by Miss Gemma Coyle as Returning Officer. Voting at today's meeting will be conducted via an online platform. For those entitled to vote at today's meeting, if you have not already done so, please log in to the online voting portal as provided in the notice of meeting and the online voting guide. If you are eligible to vote at this meeting, a new polling option icon will appear. Selecting this icon will bring up a list of resolutions and present you with voting options. To cast your vote, simply select one of the options.
There is no need to hit a Submit or Enter button as the vote is automatically recorded. You have the ability to cast and change your vote on all resolutions up until the time I declare the voting closed. Following confirmation by Computershare, final results will be announced to the ASX later today. Please note that I will be voting on directors' proxies that I hold as chairman in favor of all resolutions. I will now allow some time for voting. Thank you. If you could now finalize your voting, as I am about to close the poll. I now declare the poll closed. As noted, the results of today's meeting, once finalized, will be announced to the ASX.
However, I can advise that at this time, based on the proxies received and the votes on the floor for this meeting, that I believe all resolutions laid down today will be carried. Thank you for your attendance today. I now declare the meeting closed at 10:01 A.M. Thank you for your attention today.