Everyone, and thank you for joining us today. Looking at the clock, I think it's right on time that we can start nine months performance. It is my pleasure to hand over the floor to Khun Piti to walk you through the nine-month highlight. After that, Chief Digital Strategy and also CFO will walk you through the detail of operational and financial detail. Right after that, then we'll come back with the Q&A sessions with Khun Piti. Over to you, Piti Tantakasem.
Okay. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us. In banking, boring is good. Drama and excitement is bad. Despite tough environment, ttb continue to deliver predictable performance. So predictable that one analyst missed only by THB 1 million. For the first nine months, net profit reached THB 16.1 billion, up 5% year-on-year, while our asset quality stay well under control. Our strategy remains boringly the same. That is strengthening the quality of earnings through better balance sheet, higher yield quality retail lending and building new growth engines in wealth and digital, while ensuring strong risk buffer, liquidity and capital. Most importantly, with our strong capital position, we also remain firmly committed to improving our yield and delivering attractive shareholder returns. Our focus remain clear. Resilient performance today while building stronger and more sustainable returns for the future.
May I flip to the nine months key measures on the next two page? Yeah, this one, please. Turning of our nine months key measures, we remain broadly on track against our full-year's target. NIM has improved. Non-interest income grew strongly year-on-year, and the cost to income ratio remain within our mid-40s% target. Asset quality was well controlled with the NPL at 2.88% and normal credit cost at 100 basis points. Overall, this result reflect the resilience of our earnings and balance sheet. With that, before come back to Q&A, may I pass to our Chief Strategy and Digital and our CFO to take you through our third quarter result in more details. Over to you [Non-English content] .
Thank you [Non-English content] and good afternoon, everyone. I guess, let me provide an update on the first three dimension of our strategy framework and then CFO will provide update on the rest. Let's deep dive into the first component, which is the effective asset liability management. I guess, in the third quarter, our NII continue to improve. This is the second consecutive quarter that our NII improved. We end third quarter with THB 12.8 billion in NII, which show about +4% growth QoQ and +2.9% growth year-on-year. The key driver of NII expansion come from both NIM improvement as well as a moderate loan balance growth. Let's deep dive onto the first component first. On NIM improvement, I guess as Khun Piti point out already, is essentially a similar strategy as what we share in the past.
Really focus on quality loan booking while continue to enhance through high yield retail lending. On the cost of funding also, I think we also manage to lower cost of fund by about 5 basis points QoQ. On the loan balance, the loan expand slightly by 0.3% QoQ. If we look into the component, the part that show promising growth is really the high yield lending that we told the investor that we would like to focus on. If you look into the detail, essentially, product like CYH show a moderate growth of 4% QoQ. CYB, which is Cash Your Book, show a growth of 20% QoQ. Or product like Cash2Go show a 10% growth QoQ.
If we zoom out and look at this high yield retail loan component, you can see from the graph on the right bottom that this component has really expand in term of contribution to our loan portfolio. If we look back into end of 2021, it only account for about 25%. As of end of quarter three this year, that portion has become 34%, and it really helped in term of yield increase that helped boost up NIM expansion. In term of other component also, in this quarter, the large corporate loan also expand slightly at 3%. This help offsetting the decline in SME a little bit. Maybe I move on to the next page.
I think one component that helped push the expansion in the high yield retail loan is our strategy on risk-based pricing. As we shared in the past, we apply risk-based pricing on our Cash2Go product, and it helped boost in term of the growth in the loan booking quite a bit. If you look at year-to-date, we are looking at over 45% growth in new booking year-to-date. This is not just for the benefit of the bank only, it also help in term of benefiting the customer as well, given that over 79% of the customer receive lower interest rate based on our strategy. I guess this is just to reiterate the point that I guess we want to encourage good behavior among the customer and reward the customer who pay punctually.
That's why risk-based pricing is something that we really believe in, and it show a positive result so far. I think the strategy for the bank is to apply the same pricing strategy to other type of loan as well, and we are looking at CYB product this year, as well as the flash card toward the end of the year. So that's kind of the roadmap to further expand this strategy to other types of lending. On deposit, next page. I guess we manage the deposit balance in line with the moderate growth in the loan outstanding. I guess the strategy that I discussed with you guys last quarter still hold. Essentially, we try to manage the high cost deposit in TD product and try to replace that with hybrid product as well as CASA balance.
Also from the customer point of view, this also apply in line given the fluctuation and volatility in the capital market, the hybrid deposit turn out to be a sweet spot whereby customer can park their wealth first while wait and see the direction of the market. Maybe I would jump to page 13, just really quickly in term of our investment portfolio management. Given volatility in the yield curve, as you all know, I guess our strategy remain the same, that we would like to prioritize liquidity as well as stability in the investment portfolio over speculative gain. I guess the key composition hasn't really changed. I think what may shift slightly is us redeploying some of the bond that mature and reinvest it into a fixed rate bond, so that result in the percentage of the fixed rate bond to be 100% as of now.
I think this one is to try to lock in some of the return that has result from steepening yield curve recently. I think that's it in term of the first dimension. Maybe I move on to the second and the third dimension in term of the revenue generation as well as lower cost to serve. On page 16, given improvement in NII, let's look at also non-NII. I think this one, as I also shared a bit last quarter as well, that I think the increase in non-NII in the second quarter may face some normalization in this quarter. I guess when we look at the result in this quarter, it came in somewhat as expected. The key component of the normalization, I think there are a couple components.
First one is when we look at the second quarter result, this one have some one-off or non-core component as we share last quarter. The biggest one being mark to market gain from value pack fund, as well as some of the seasonal dividend payment from our investment. So that caused the QoQ change to be on a declining trend versus second quarter. Also, I guess the fee income, as we discussed in the past, in the second quarter, we observed that shift in customer wealth from deposit to investment. Given that a sizable proportion has been shift already, we saw some of the investment fee normalize a bit in the third quarter. So if we go to the next page.
All in all, if we look at the key component of our fee engine, I would say that compared to year-on-year, still very healthy growth that we observed despite the normalization in the third quarter. But I think the key fee engine being bancassurance are still very healthy growth rate in our view. Investment through mutual fund and structured note may normalize a bit QoQ, but still stand at very high level compared to similar quarter last year. Credit card also showing promising momentum as well. Flat growth QoQ, but compared to last year, is able to stand at 17% growth QoQ through very healthy usage of our credit cards. I guess that's it in term of update on fee. Maybe I move on to our ecosystem. Maybe I touch on the wealth part on page 20 quickly.
I guess align with the direction that we would like to focus a bit more on wealth management business. I think in term of the key component of the wealth management kind of grow in line with our expectation, especially around the credit card usage, as I also discussed earlier. In term of investment, maybe one point noteworthy clarification is the sale of investment product. From the graph here, you may see a slight decline, but just want to be clear that the biggest component that caused the decline is the money market component of our mutual fund portfolio. Given the current interest rate situation, the attractiveness has become less and less. But again, this is the part of mutual fund product shelf that is really low fee.
Even though the decline in total sale of investment product, it doesn't really hurt us much in term of fee generation as you already observed from the fee of investment. On the contrary, if you look at the graph on the right-hand side, you will see that very healthy momentum of the US dollar investment portfolio. Again, this is a result from the bigger trend that we see more and more interest rate differences between Thai baht versus US dollar interest rate, and that result in the attractiveness of US dollar investment being a bit more and more versus the Thai baht investment. On the next page, again, in the past quarter, you may have seen us having announcement on the wealth partnership quite a bit. Again, I guess this is to reiterate our commitment and our focus in growing our wealth franchise.
To us, having the right partner is one of the critical component, given that investment have become more and more globalized this day. In the past quarter, we announced three wealth partnership. Maybe I elaborate a bit in term of each of them. On the partnership with DBS, this one really to help us enhance the whole wealth management proposition as well as the holistic wealth solutions. We hope to work with DBS in term of strengthening our wealth advisory and as well as tapping into some of the product from their side as well. Also, we would also serve as a DBS partner to provide Thai baht solution to DBS customer, so DBS can refer their customer to us as well. On Schroders, this one is to reiterate our belief in open architecture.
Schroders would provide wealth product partnership through their investment team, so that we have a complete product portfolio on shelf, really focused on customer with big ticket size. On the contrary, the third partnership, Webull, this one we embed Webull platform to our mobile banking application, so that customer using our mobile banking application would have access to global investment offering the like of U.S. equity as well as ETF. This one is a self-service platform, so that it would be accessible to a broad customer base of ttb. All in all, I guess all this still relatively new, and we are working closely with each of the partner to grow our wealth franchise further. On digital, on the next page, again, continuous very strong momentum of digital activities.
Based on the latest quarter, the digital sale already account for 61% of our total retail customer sale, which is a very sizable portion. On the next page, just to share some of the recent pickup in momentum. As we share in the past, we roll out our staff assist platform called ttb enterprise or TEP. You can see from the graph on the left-hand side that the traffic and momentum that we observe is on a growing trend. This one really serve as a key platform for all of our staff assist journey from branch network to contact center as well as direct sale. It help us lower the licensing fee that we use the global CRM platform in the past. On the middle column on Yindee Gen AI, again, I guess promising result in term of driving momentum further.
As of today, the Gen AI agent that we deploy in ttb touch can answer about 72% of all the inquiries that the customer ask. This help improve the customer experience as well as lower the cost to serve for the bank. Maybe I move on page 26 in term of the overall expense update. I think the biggest component of the expense is the branch network as well as our people cost. As you can see here that it's been on a declining trend for many, many years. This is in line with what we observe in term of the customer behavior. As customer shift more and more of their transaction to digital, we also observe our sale and service model and operating model accordingly, and that result in us having less branches as well as less number of people over the years.
In term of the OpEx in the latest quarter, we managed to show 5% decline in OpEx QoQ. Again, this one may be driven by some of the one-off component in the second quarter as we share with you last quarter. Also, the part that maybe increase a bit year-on-year, largely driven by the incentive payment to our salespeople. Given a very healthy growth in investment fee or bancassurance fee, we also pay the part of incentive a little bit higher than last year. But when we look at the salary payment, it's more or less stable over the year. That's it in term of update from my part. Let me pass on to our CFO on the remaining three sections.
Thank you, Naris, and good afternoon, everyone. The next session will be on the asset quality, which we still continue the themes to be prudent risk management. Upon this. Next page, please. Upon the conservative asset quality approach, you may see that over the past five years, every number is improving in a sustained way, and especially the last campaigns on the golden portfolio which drive the NPL ratio start to resolve the NPL ratio to be stabilized towards the down trend. One of the proof point in the next page, we still continue the staging on top of the DPD and qualitative.
You may see on the right graph that from the gray one that has 8.2% in the Stage 2, it is coming from the orange, which is by staging definition only 60% and another 40% coming from DPD less than 30 days, and similar to the Stage 3 approach. Another ratio to point out is the drive down of the Stage 2 gradually from about more than 10% in pre-COVID period. Lastly, we drive down to about 8.2%. That drives the LLR to over loans towards 5% from about 3% in the pre-COVID period, too. The next page will be on the update of the You Fight, We Help. I think the overall balance remains at about THB 35 billion or 3% of the total portfolio, while the latest flood, which we launched the Flood Relief Program.
So far, we provide three months support for the retail customer and up to six months for the corporate and SME customer. So far, there are many customers starting to apply for it, but it is still less than 1% of the total loan portfolio. However, it is counting towards the mid of October, and I think to be seen in this October and November on the number that finally apply for it. The next page would be the ECL and credit cost. In third quarter, we set the provision in total about THB 4.1 billion. THB 3.5 billion is the normal ECL, while the THB 600 million is for the management overlay, and the normal credit cost has been increased to about 117 basis points, which is coming from two factors.
Number one is the return to normal trend of the stage upgrade, which we have in the first half, we have a lot of upgrade following the You Fight, We Help programs. The second factor would be the increase in the provisions in the corporate customer that we have set the limit. The LLR that, in this quarter, we drive to 159%, 2% higher than the last quarter. The next page will be the provision by stage, which I think the content is quite remain unchanged. The last one on these sections, it would be overall the LLR ratio, the NPL, which is quite stable towards the downtrend, and we have seen that it is quite sustained over the past five years. Next section would be on the capital efficiencies.
From the THB 16.1 billion of the profit, that would be about 9.1% of the ROE, which we have seen the ROE at the level higher than 9% over the past three quarters. The right graph would be on the NII to RWA, which so far is about 4.5%, quite maintained towards the 2025 levels. The last section would be on the shareholder value creations. I think we still have remain the themes of the four parts to be the shareholder value creations, and the next page, on page 38, it has shown that even though we increased the LLR ratio, we still have the strong capital ratio.
Last quarter, we have the capital ratio of about 18.8%. Looking ahead for the RWA, which we think is quite limited, which is driven by the shift in the loan mix toward the retail lending, we have seen that the capital ratio would be quite stable. The next page would be on the update on the result of the every actions towards the dividend payment. In this year, 2026, we have the increase of the interim dividend comparing to the first half last year by about 23%. This is coming from the two factors. Number one is the drive up of the payout ratio from 60% to 65%. That would increase the dividend by about 13%. The other 10% is coming from the actions of the share repurchase program that we have done THB 21 billion.
This program is one year faster than our plan, and we still have about THB 14 billion left upon the AGM approval. Next page will show the price movement and our share performance. It has been seen that the ttb price has been moved along the SET index, slightly higher than the SET index. The last page will show the financial group. So far, we have five subsidiaries and one associate, which is the Eastspring. The last two new subsidiary, which is ttb leasing, started operation since May this year, and ttb wealth. Our two new subsidiaries has met the target, quite perform well, and the key shareholder still remain at the three groups. Thank you.