Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Investors Day of Bancolombia. My name is Carlos Daniel Raad Baene, and I'm the head of investor relations. We're pleased to have here with us our CEO, Juan Carlos Mora, Jaime Villegas, our COO, Cristina Arrastía, CCO, Cipriano López, CIO, and José Humberto Acosta, our CFO. The event will divide into two moments. We'll begin with brief presentations from our executives, and then we'll have a Q&A session exclusive for the analysts that follow the bank. Let's begin the opening remarks of Juan Carlos.
Thank you and welcome to all of you. I hope you are all well. Thank you for joining us today in this Investors Day of Bancolombia. As Carlos said, today, we will address several topics in depth, and we'll focus on Colombia as our main market, which is almost 75%-80% of our operation.
We'll have an outline. I'll give you our objectives, and then we'll look at our strategic capabilities and how these, in turn, have been applied to our business. Likewise, we'd like to emphasize our Nequi, which is the development of our neobank. Lastly, we'll talk about the impact of this strategy on our financial situation. Afterwards, we'll have a live Q&A session to develop whatever topics you would like to hear about more. Undoubtedly, we are living in a very, very complex situation, not only because of technology, but mainly it's because of the development, where the users, our clients, are demanding from us new capabilities, and that's what we're addressing. We clearly know that we're here to promote an economic development that's sustainable and seeks well-being for all. We have three fundamental pillars.
We want to enhance the protective network of the countries where we operate. We clearly know that we have to help develop cities and communities to make them more sustainable, and that financial inclusion is fundamental. It's core to us. With this strategic mission, therefore, we clearly know that growing is our purpose, but growing, keeping our financial soundness. Of course, we've experienced very challenging times. Nobody expected what we went through in 2020, and we've known how to face this properly. Today, we have the capability, the strength, our equity to grow, focus on those capabilities that we're developing and to see how we move on towards growth. Growth is important in our geographies, along with the development of strategic capabilities, which are not based only on technology, but others that we're developing.
For this, we clearly understand that the experience of our clients is fundamental. In these times in which consumers are in digital, they're increasingly demanding and more so with banks. For that, we're developing at the bank capabilities that I'll talk about ahead and what we're focused on customer experience. There's something important to us, people, the persons, the culture, how culture has to develop. It's gotta be agile, open, a culture that attracts the best talent and retains it, 'cause there's no doubt that in these competitive times, the struggle for keeping talent is one of our main topics to face. We clearly understand that talent is fundamental. All this is framed by a vision. It's wellbeing for all. It's a development of those countries where we operate so that people have a higher wellbeing. What strategic capabilities are we developing?
Jaime Villegas next will deepen about these, but I'd like to talk about several topics, special topics, and it's our capability and our distribution channels. Traditionally, Bancolombia has developed a strategy based on a distribution capability that's outstanding. In the past, our network of offices played a fundamental role, yes, as well as our ATMs. Today, those offices and branches are migrating towards a more service-oriented services. Today, it's quite transactional, and we're working on that, yes. ATMs instead, providing cash and receiving cash. But today we have a fundamental tool, and it's more than 21,000 banking correspondents in Colombia, along with the digital capabilities, turns Bancolombia into unique platform. It's not only the digital capabilities that we're developing, but how they complement our physical offices that nobody else has in Colombia. We have...
We're spread out throughout Colombia, and we can make transactions physically and digitally, complemented by digital capabilities which are more and more, and that we'll discuss ahead in Cristina's talk. A deep knowledge of our clients clearly has to do with the experience that I mentioned before, understanding our clients, and that's tied to the use of information. For more than eight years, we've been developing capabilities to use information to have that knowledge. Today, you'll see some applications of that profound application, how we understand our clients, how we anticipate, how we've turned from being reactive to be proactive in our relations with clients, and how this is tied to the experience that I mentioned, which is so fundamental. There's a clear role, and it's that we understand that financial services are evolving, and they're doing so to become orchestrators of additional capabilities.
Therefore, we understand that our relation with non-financial activities is fundamental, and that leads us to ecosystems in which we will be acting with different capabilities. Sometimes we'll be major players, sometimes we'll be backing the major players. But that vision of ecosystems allows us to advance as well, and that's something we'll be seeing ahead. Technology, architecture, our capabilities are fundamental as well. Not only these, but digital transformation that has led us to have capabilities that serve our strategic vision, the experience of our clients, the growth of being able to compete in a market in which there are new players. We understand they will also bring new challenges, but we're convinced that we have enough capabilities to compete. I'd like to underscore that Bancolombia, in past years or in the past year, really has had an outstanding performance acquiring clients.
How we've grown not only with our digital platforms, but overall with our acquisition of clients. More than 2 million new clients in the last year and a half in Bancolombia. That shows how our demand and our supply is great in this competitive market. Today, it's very competitive. This topic of technology is developing, it's assisting us, and it's closing that strategy that's fundamental. We're developing, for the past 3 years, capabilities of design as well, which join that experience of clients, a relation with clients, and design is also fundamental. As you can see, we have capabilities that go beyond the finance, data analytics, the experience in design, and the creation of processes which are closer and we're there. It's still underway. We're developing this well. Talent strategy, which is one of our objectives. There we advance to work with agile methodologies.
We have to be swifter. We have to provide value propositions backed by cloud technology, and which allow us, with that vision of people working with agile methodologies to develop quickly and to have the capabilities to serve our clients and their experience. Clearly, we compete in every segment. We have the universal banking experience. We serve the financial, the basic financial needs of individuals, as well as the large corporations with structured products. We'll continue with that universal banking vision because we understand that that integration has advantages that others don't. We can integrate the flows which move from individuals to corporations and so on. Bancolombia is in the middle of those flows, which move through our organization with all these capabilities that I'm telling you about.
We have a strategy which clearly has a vision, which is developing the capabilities, competitive capabilities for today's world. We acknowledge there's an increasing competition by traditional players and new players as well. We're convinced, and we hope to show you this morning how in detail we are progressing. This is a path of transformation that develops, a path in which we have to move quickly. We have been doing well and the results are there. With this, I'd like to end these opening remarks in which I gave you an overview, and now let's look closely at the capabilities, strategic capabilities of the bank. For this, let's invite Mr. Jaime Villegas, our COO, who will provide you details about how we've been developing our strategic capabilities that I've given you an overall for. Thank you.
Ahead, I'll be available for the Q&A session.
Juan Carlos, thank you, and welcome to you all. As Juan Carlos said, I'm going to talk about several of the capabilities that we have at the organization. The first capability refers, and I think it's most important, to culture. Cultural change is very important when it comes to digital transformation, so I'm going to refer to two particular topics: agilism and in-house technology. We started to look at agile aspects in 2015, and we did it initially with the technology team. We made a significant transformation of the organization, and we created more than 300 cells of work with multidisciplinary teams with 15-day sprints. Throughout this process, to implement this agilism, we realized that it was very important to incorporate this to the business areas.
In 2017, we decided to make a pilot in which we integrated for the Sufi business operations technology and business teams and created a trio showing very significant results. In 2019, we made two additional pilots. We incorporated the teams of, again, technology, operations, and business for the leasing and ecosystems areas. This year, we made the decision to spread this throughout the entire organizations. Today, we have more than 40 agile tribes that seek excellence working in four-month terms. Now, when it comes to international promotion, in 2015, we had about 80% of the people and technologies outsourced. We made the decision of changing this. Our ambition back then was. We had a path that was based on three particular pillars. First, the rotation of outsourced equipment is three times that of internal equipment.
This implied that we were having a significant loss of knowledge. In addition, we wanted to retain talent. This led us to take this decision. Today, we have about 65% of the people work in-house and 35 external. Juan Carlos referred to our second capability, advanced analytics and AI. This was begun in 2014 with three fundamental principles. First, a robust information governance. Second, a centralized analytic platform. Third, federated analytical teams. These three pillars have allowed us to evolve significantly in our analytics strategy. Today, I have more than 1.8 petabytes in a platform that covers four countries. We have more than 250 sources of information entering the platform every day, and more than 200 analysts and data analytics, which are interacting with our platform on a daily basis.
We've had many examples, and many models are being built based on the information that we have in our platform. Cristina and Cipriano will talk about these more ahead. Something I'd like to underscore here, making use of AI, we have our chatbots platform, and we have conversations with clients and employees. The third capability refers to the cloud and open source. Our first approximation to the cloud was in 2014, 2015, when we began to work with Nequi. We did this leveraging a technology that was entirely independent to that of the bank. Nequi was born in the AWS cloud. For the bank, Nequi began to turn more into a lab. We began with the technology teams of the bank, which were more traditional, and we started to see the benefits contributed by the cloud to Nequi.
That's why in 2017, along with the AWS teams, we created a cloud excellence center. For 18 months, we created the foundations for the migration of the bank's applications to the cloud. In 2019, we began the migration of applications to the cloud. Today, more than 30% of the charges are in the cloud. The idea is that in several years, we'll have 100% of our applications in the cloud. Our fourth capability has to do with robotics and intelligent workflows. In 2015, we created in customer services area a center of excellence of robotics. In this center, we built more than 700 robots that have allowed us to reduce up to 450 people. Today are the robots that are making these processes.
Along with AI and AWS tools, we've created capabilities that allow us to take information from physical documents, from phone calls, to turn that information into liquid text, feed those texts into our business models. With that, we seek to have no human intervention in the processes that we're working on. There's a fifth capability, and Juan Carlos referred to the ecosystems already, related to integration with third parties or alliances. I'd like to say three things about this capability. First, the advantage, the competitive advantage that we seek is the simplicity in which third parties can communicate with us, not only technically, but also communication, contractually. We're still developing capabilities, so that these third parties can connect with us simpler. For that, we've had a work plan that I'd like to describe to you.
A couple of years ago, we made the decision that all internal teams would communicate through APIs. Each of the teams has been building APIs in their different applications, so that the teams can communicate. Those APIs have been deployed in an internal marketplace of APIs, which has been available for about a year. The extension of that marketplace of internal APIs is called external APIs marketplace. Through that platform, we'll be connecting with our clients. Lastly, when it comes to anticipating to 2025, there are several things I'd like to underscore. The digital bank, Cipriano will be giving us information about that, and open banking, of which Cristina will be talking about.
When it comes to open banking, we're working hard with the governments and regulators to build a regulation on open banking or open finance, which is being developed right now. Now, all of these capabilities are worked following two fundamental principles. One, data privacy and cybersecurity. Privacy and cybersecurity are embedded in everything we do because they are fundamental, and they allow us to create the trust we need with clients. Okay, keeping this in mind, these capabilities have allowed us to develop multiple products and services. Here's a sample of these. I won't refer to them closely, but I do want to point out three that are in the right-hand column. In that decision that we took to start to have internal in-house people, the factoring core has to do with applications that we are internally looking at in the cloud.
To allow to have the autonomy needed when it comes to our main core banking system, we've made the decision to look at Bandición, which is our core, and with this, to make the migration entirely towards the cloud. I'd like to leave you with four final thoughts. First, the cloud and open source are key enablers that we have embraced for our digital transformation. Second, customers should have more control of their data, and that's why our principles of design around data is important. Third, customers will be better served if there's a cooperation between banks and fintechs. Fourth, and not least important, we need to promote close collaboration among different industries to counter cybersecurity threats. With this, I end my presentation. I give the floor to Cristina Rueda, who will give us more information about how these capabilities are giving good results, business results.
Thank you, Jaime. Good morning, everyone. As Jaime said, our goal is to share with you how Bancolombia has evolved and how the business has evolved in a world, in a market that's increasingly more digital. I wanna split my presentation into three parts. First and foremost, I would like to share with you the elements or different aspects we have at the commercial level. Second, some of the results we have so far. Third, go into digital innovation and some of the big digital strategies we have at Bancolombia to provide follow-up for our clients and customers in their different needs. I would like to begin. By a little bit more than five years ago, we made a decision.
Our decision was to have a strategy focused on the relationship with our clients, and that implied that we needed to understand who those core clients were, what were their behaviors and their real necessities in order to build a real strategy based on meeting those needs, both for people as well as for business. We discovered things as simple as a person, for example, doesn't really wake up and dreaming of a mortgage credit. Their real dream is to have a house, and that the mortgage credit, it's just an instrument. It's just a tool to get to that goal. We set up what some of those needs were that we wanted to focus and then started going on a journey. In the retail business, we deal with everyday things, mobility solutions.
For companies, we wanted to help them to grow their business, make it more efficient, et cetera. All of those needs we can see on those slides. That was the journey we started to embark on. Once we established what is it that we wanted to do and what necessities we wanted to focus on, the next question was, how we were gonna get there. Here's where our strategy at distribution plays out in Bancolombia, where digital channels are an absolutely important solution because aside from making it scalable, it makes the whole operation efficient and more stable. However, we understood across all this process that people, no matter how much digital adoption there is, people don't want to remain only digital. What we've seen all these years is that people continue wanting custom-made advice, and here's where our physical channels come into play.
Colombia is a country where the main payment method is cash, which is why the relevance of our physical channels takes place. We have more than 20 physical channels across our country, as well as an important ATM network, which help us to have that level of service and to provide an accompaniment for clients and meet their needs. However, the branch network, which continues to be important, has been shrinking for four years. In 2024, we hope to have 20% less. Actually, this year, we will be closing 40 branches. Next year, we plan to close another 50. By 2024, we wanna get to 228 because we have seen a change in our customers where, starting from what happened last year, there was a higher digital adoption.
There is a trend change from transactional to relational, and that's where we are in this process. This is something that we will be on top of permanently. Our digital channels, as you can see on the slide, we have five fronts, which serve different segments that we serve. First and foremost, Bancolombia A la Mano, and I will be talking about it in deeper detail in a little bit. It's a digital channel that provides services for customers, which inside the bank, we call it a social segment, related with everything pertaining to financial inclusion. That's how we serve low-income customers by providing them with a 100% digital offer according to the needs of that segment. We also have our Bancolombia super app. It's an app that besides providing transactions for customers, it allows them to acquire financial products and non-financial products through it.
Third, we have investors app, and it's about understanding our private banking customers because they told us that for them, it was very important to separate their investments from the day-to-day app. We wanted to start on this journey and build this application, which is focused to our affluent customers and our corporate customers to handle their investments from there. Fourth, we are the SME banks in Colombia, and they told us that they wanted to have a digital solution tailor-made to their small businesses. In Colombia, they represent 44% of the workforce in this country, and we really have a large number of them as Bancolombia customers. I will be telling you a little bit more about that.
Fifth, we have our mid-size corporate app, which is also incorporating other services serving that segments, SMEs and mid-size corporate clients. How are we gonna do it? Where would we start? We started going on that journey, and in this section, I wanna get to some of the results that we have so far. First things first, as Juan has said, we've had a large growth rate in our customer base. To date, we have a little bit more than 16.5 million clients. This is not Nequi, by the way. This is just Bancolombia. We can see how they're segmented and split across four different sectors we have in Bancolombia. Retail banking and SME banking are the fastest-growing ones. They're growing at a rate of 11% annually.
As part of the retail banking, we have Bancolombia A la Mano, which up to date, we have 5.7 million customers inside our Bancolombia A la Mano platform, and it's the fastest-growing out of them all. It's growing at a rate of 37%. When we take a look into who are those customers getting to Bancolombia en masse, first, we have payroll customers and retirement fund customers. At the bank, we have a really strong strategy. Actually, we have a market share of 33% of the payrolls in this country and 27% of the retirement fund accounts in Colombia. Another very important market are independent workers. How are they getting to Bancolombia?
A little bit more than two years ago, we started working on supporting business growth because we wanted to understand what was happening with SMEs and personal companies in Bancolombia. Practically, their own receptivity means the sale was cash, and they didn't have any other card services to make sales. We understood that one of the first hurdles, one is tax-related affairs, the Cuatro por Mil law in Colombia. Another one was they needed a solution, which I will be sharing the results with you later, which was the QR code, the Bancolombia QR code, which became a solution for especially personal companies, where many of them have joined the banking system, and they have become formalized through this technology, which has caused many personal companies to join Bancolombia to become formalized, and we're helping them grow.
There is another important group, which are remittances and subsidies. Out of remittances, we receive at Bancolombia 64% of the remittances in this country, and our offer is for that to happen in our accounts, which is why Bancolombia A la Mano is a great customer receiver who receive remittances in Colombia. The other thing are subsidies, which last year, as a result of the pandemic, grew very importantly in a very significant proportion. Now, some other topics that I will be sharing with you from other segments. Retail banking, for example, which we will see across all four segments, we have had a very important strategy on everything related to payments and collections from different channels, and that has allowed us to grow in a significant manner when it comes to deposits in savings account and checking account. Also we have the flows.
Customer information helps us bring in more customers. It's creating growth and commissions. We have information, very valuable customer information, which means that we will be able to use it in a much more digital strategy. Our second message is we permanently work on deepening the relationship with our customers. As you can see in the graph on the right, some of the figures of that deepening, highlighting a little bit more than 2.6 million customers on different financing options. Just four years ago, that number was 1.6 million customers, but we have managed to get to 1 million customers. Still, we have a lot of potential. When we say we have 14 million, we can see the opportunities we have to continue delving deeper into this relationship. The other thing is our wallet share, 25%.
We hope to get to 30. In retail banking, we hope to have a breakthrough of 0.42, and actually we are this, the bank for that segment. Our goal is to get to 30% on the retail banking aggregate. As for SMEs, same thing. Our growth in flows and in commissions, same thing, but two messages. We continue working on deepening that relationship, and you can see how 1.6 million customers have some type of collection or payment service with us, and that's reflected in our collections. We have 41% of market share. We are the SME bank in Colombia, but we have a challenge, and that is to get to that, the relationship deepening in our retail banking.
The Bancolombia QR code system is allowing us to have more information on this segment to get to them in a very important manner, as well as continue growing on deepening the relationship and our wallet share when it comes to financing our customers. When it comes to the corporate companies, this segment was actually together with corporate customers, but we separated them. We understood that we needed to have a different value proposal, and we needed to more custom-make our relationship with them. When we started out, we had a 30% wallet share. Today, we're at 34%, and we've been improving on our deepening of that relationship. We want to get to 5 points above what we have today, and we are on an ascending growth trajectory. We can see another reflection of the same thing with deposits and commissions.
On corporate customers, our relationship is really good, same as our wallet share. The drop in deposits can be explained by term deposits. We separated current account from savings. Behavior is the same, and we can see that in growing commissions. This year, we had an important liquidity that, in some way, our customers, especially government customers and financial institutions, when our term deposit rates were low, they withdrew their term deposits, but we continue growing in checking accounts and in savings accounts. We can see that in our market share, where we can see how we've been increasing checking accounts and savings account numbers being the first bank in Colombia by far. When it comes to consumption and household, last year, because of what happened, we started working more on supporting our customers on refinancing and credit restructuring.
At the end of last year, we started going on another ascending growth trajectory, and we have slowly but surely recovered our market share. When it comes to consumption, we're market leaders, and when it comes to mortgage, we're, we come second after Davivienda, but we're working on improving our mortgage credit product so that we can continue going up and get to the first place. When it comes to the commercial portfolio, you can see the results there. We do that very well, and we continue getting some more market share. Now, regarding some indicators that I think are important to share with you when it comes to digital adoption. First, currently, 74% of our customers use our digital channels to transact every month. Second, what percentage of our digital growth are monetary based?
Up to 5 years ago, we know that most transactions were customer inquiries through digital channels, but this trend is changing. Almost 90% of our transactions through digital channels are cash transactions. This is important to note, Bancolombia in the Colombian market represents 40% of all transactions in the country, both digital as well as non-digital ones. That goes to show you the power that our strategy holds from payments to collections and to channels, because that is where information which is so valuable goes through as part of our digital strategy and also commissions. We started working on a strategy several years ago, since 2017. We wanted to digitalize our entire portfolio. We wanted to make more digital sales. Currently, 40% of our total sales we have are digital, and you can see the growth rate along the years.
This is a strategy that becomes more and more materialized as a result of the digital adoption by all of our consumers. Now, this is what I was telling you earlier. This is the strategy that we wanted to set up. We wanted to come up with with a costless solution, especially for small scale customers, as well as personal companies which were unwilling to pay a commission, and their only payment method was cash. Actually, three years ago, when we launched this strategy, we set this challenge for us. Our big ambition was to get 50,000 points or retail points, and that was actually ambitious because up to date, in our acquisition model history, we had from 10,000 at best.
We thought that 150,000 was extremely ambitious, but the reality is that up to date, we have more than 1 million POS, which take Bancolombia QR code as a payment method. That has meant more of our customers have become formalized, more are going into the banking system, and more of them are going into Bancolombia. With a QR code, you can use Bancolombia A la Mano from the Bancolombia super app, but also from Nequi, and that has empowered businesses so that they can grow, and us, it can, it has given us power to attract more information and more customers. We're doing the same thing, you know, in the non-present world, the Bancolombia button, because the QR code is real here and now, and it's given us an idea of how clients through digital banking are with Bancolombia.
These are some of the main figures that I wanted to share with you, and now I'm going to tell you about the digital strategy. Before going to each of the solutions, I wanna discuss what the analysis was that made us make the decisions that we made. First thing, as we all know, our consumers are increasingly more digital, and technology has turned business and transformed them in such a way that they're really here to stay, and other industries even start to disappear. As part of that analysis, we realized that banking could play two roles: being the orchestrator, being the platform where custom-made solutions for your customers are housed or participating in other service providers as bank as a service. Some years ago, we decided that we were going to be a bank-as-a-platform. We wanted to be the ecosystem drivers.
Several components of our system were really valuable, the crown jewels of Bancolombia, as we call them. First and foremost, our brand is very powerful, widely known in the Colombian market with a great reputation. Also, we have a large customer base, and Nequi is included in this figure, and that gives us the power that from our analytics and as per the solutions in our platforms, we will be able to deepen the relationship with our customers and adopt them into our solutions. Also, we represent 52% of the transactions in our country, including cash-based and non-cash based or money-based and non-money based.
As I showed you earlier, 47% of our transactions are money-based, which yields information regarding who our customers are, where they move, where they go, and that is one of the big value factors why we, as orchestrators, are so powerful, and add to that our digital marketing tools to be able to get the results we want. The other thing is we have big traffic. For example, our website, www.bancolombia.com, gets a lot of traffic, and that made us make a decision to become a bank-as-a-platform type of organization. As a result of the demand of our customers who are setting up their platforms and inviting us to participate with our portfolio, we looked into that, and we figured that we could have both models, bank-as-a-platform, as well as participating in other platforms.
We wanted to overlap rather than fill in gaps, and we wanted to go into the banking as a service strategy, and I will tell you a little bit more about that. In bank as a platform, we have 4 digital assets that we are working on. The first one is related with supporting our customers on everything relating with their working capital management. Second, our Bancolombia super app, Bancolombia A la Mano, and Wompi, and I will be telling you more about that. First, Bancolombia super app. A year ago, we changed the app. We wanted to change the app design because it was a purely transactional type of app, and if we wanted to evolve to our relationship-based platform, we needed to change the design. In the beginning, it was difficult. People don't like it when you change things, and satisfaction went to 397.
However, we have been working on improving that satisfaction and that customer experience. Now we are at 427, and we continue working towards improving on the design. This is the most transactional digital channel in Bancolombia. 56% of all the Bancolombia transactions go through the Super App, and we are obsessed with keeping customers active for 30 days. We're at 5.6 million so far, and it's been growing every year. Now, I wanna share with you the services that go beyond transactions that we are incorporating in Bancolombia. Before that, I wanna tell you two things. One, this is a topic where, as I said, we're a platform where we're orchestrating both financial and non-financial solutions, where we have different allies.
Jaime was telling us about how we organized our operational model so that we can connect better with fintechs, with startups, or with other companies providing solutions, so that we can, in a holistic way, provide a solution for our customers. In other topics related to the solutions that I told you about earlier, which were very important and we wanted to work on, was retail banking. We wanted to provide follow-up for our customers in their day-to-day activities, their daily consumption. Second, we wanted to provide them with solutions for mortgage credits. And third, we wanted to provide a solution when it comes to mobility. Now, here's something that's very important. When orchestrating these solutions, our corporate customers, our midsize customers, and sometimes our SME customers are the ones making the products and services offer. Our personal customers are the ones that help us also.
With that applied knowledge and our mobile digital marketing tools, we can join both the demand and the offer and create the results so that these solutions can reach the goals we have set for ourselves. Now let's talk a little bit about what we're doing regarding daily activities. I'm not gonna delve into too much detail. I just wanted to paint a picture of what some of our solutions are. Our Bancolombia super app. I'm gonna talk about some of them. Blink is a digital platform providing a lot of information to our commercial clients, where they can see who their clients are, when they consume their products, at what time they consume their products, where they consume their products, and all of that visibility will help them manage their sales better, both at Blink and Bancolombia solutions.
Starting next week, they will be able to, by self-managing, upload their product offers and wherever they wanna give discounts so that our Bancolombia super app customers can see them there. That way, we will be joining the supply and the demand. Also, we have a customization engine which allow us to join the offer by that product to the most likely person to acquire that product or service. That's an example, and also to Tu360 Compras, which is a marketplace that we launched last week, and it's part of our super app. Our customers will be able to use it to purchase electronics, house appliances, apparel, and very soon, travel. They can purchase that through Bancolombia and also Puntos Colombia. These are some of the solutions that we are incorporating on, in consumption, as well as payments and others that you can see on the slide.
Now, let's talk about mortgage. When it comes to mortgage, we have a marketplace where we have more than 1,800 households from our builders so that our customers can get the place where they wanna live. Right now, we have new households. Very soon, we're gonna have used households, secondhand households. A person will be able to find a place where to live and while also having access to household credits or mortgage credits by doing that. We're incorporating all of the services associated with mortgages and households associated. For example, payments, admin fees, everything related to real estate. Third, mobility. We need to understand mobility as the way we help our customers to go from point A to point B in the most efficient way possible. To that end, we have public mobility solutions and private mobility solutions.
When it comes to private mobility solutions, we have a marketplace where customers can find a car, a motorcycle, a bicycle, or a scooter, and they will be able to purchase it if they want to, or they can rent it. They can rent all of those for a day or for more than three years. All of these solutions can be found in this marketplace, but also our super app allows our customers to pay public mobility fees, for example, mass transport or different taxi companies which have been using the Bancolombia QR code as a payment method so that digital payments increase and cash payments go down. This slide is sort of a picture of the ecosystem we've been building with different allies, which are part of the solutions we have at the Bancolombia super app. Second asset, Bancolombia A la Mano.
Bancolombia A la Mano is an app with a completely digital solution for financial inclusion customers. In Bancolombia, we call that segment the social segment. These are low income populations, and we have people, for example, in payrolls, very low income, people receiving government assistance or remittances, as I said earlier, as well as people who are going into the financial system for the first time, especially young people going into the banking system. Personal companies, as I told you before, and that is due to but the QR code that Bancolombia has been driving and also customers from the rural side of Colombia, where there's a lot of informality and there's a lot of cash payments. This is an important amount of customers we're capturing, as well as customers in the agricultural sector.
There are very important customers in this sector, and the graph shows us how we've been growing, how in the last 4 years, this process has sped up. To date, we have 5.7 million customers, and what we are aiming at is we want to have 6.7 million customers. Now, some figures. 55% of the customers getting to Bancolombia currently are doing so through Bancolombia A la Mano. Our growth rate is 35%, as I said earlier. Second, 37% of the customers joining us are joining the financial sector for the first time, especially when it comes to an app aiding in financial inclusion, and 42% of our customers are active at 30 days. We measure our activity every 30 days, and that's something we do permanently.
What's beautiful is that we've been able to impact 338,000 people in this segment without having to provide any sort of ID or document, because we know from the transactions who they are, and we've been able to deepen our relationship with them. Also, we have cell phone credit top-off, payments, collection solutions. Our customers save up, and all of that is reflected in the numbers that I've showed you, the numbers regarding this app and the solution. What's really beautiful and what's really exciting is that from this year, in July, we changed our trend. We started monetizing, and we can see how that is yielding profit in the last quarter of the year, which has been driven by financing. We've been growing the way we're getting to these customers.
We started getting income, which allows us to yield profit, as well as the digital channels and all of the other channels. Now, here's how we support our customers, especially businesses, to improve their working capital. I'm not gonna go too deep into the details regarding the digital solutions you can see on the slide. I'm gonna mention a couple of them. For example, EDN. EDN is, it's a factoring Mexican company. It's a digital platform allowing customers to enter their ARL, their workplace insurance, and connect with their customers. This allows them to manage the working capital better. This is all thanks to analytics, and it helps them on their management practices. We also have the Tu360 Negocios, a marketplace we launched.
This marketplace is a corporate networking aiming at helping our customers improve their suppliers and their customers through a platform that we at the bank, with our analytics and our digital capabilities, unite both the supply and the demand so that they can improve their businesses. We also have production chains linking, which is another thing that we drive a lot in Bancolombia. For example, agricultural sector or convenience store owners, we help them, as well as their suppliers, to have access to financing from the information we have from the large sellers or the large buyers that allows us to offer them financing products and help convenience store owners or small-scale producers to improve their businesses, as well as improve the working capital of the big companies. Here are the figures.
These figures aren't too big because some of these solutions have been launched during the last six months. However, these are solutions that will be more geared towards corporate customers, mid-sized corporate customers also. We want to help them become more efficient. We wanna help them be more agile. Also, we have all the information, and also we have a financial portfolio treasury, trade financing, and that will drive the growth of the companies in turn. Fourth, Wompi. Wompi is a platform where we are incorporating all of the Bancolombia payment methods, as well as third-party payment methods to get to our customers in a very easy way. We wanna get to mid-sized corporate customers as well as SMEs so that they can consume this platform and be able to access different Bancolombia payment methods.
For example, currently, we're working on getting all of the debit and credit cards out of the system. We have PSE, which is a Bancolombia ACH solution, where digitally, all of these payments are processed. You can get cash. We have Nequi as payer. We have the Bancolombia button as a transaction in digital trade between Bancolombia customers. In the lower line, we have other customers which will be joining our platform soon. Puntos Colombia, our loyalty program, it's another payer. We'll have Bancolombia QR codes, Bancolombia A la Mano. Sufi Te Presta. Sufi Te Presta is our consumption financing channel for those who have no financial credit. They will be able to have a pre-approved credit, as well as pre-approved credits in Bancolombia. It's another financing method. These are some of the examples making up the Wompi platform.
Currently, we have more than 1,700 customers on it, and we believe that this platform is the way we can continue empowering ourselves as a bank who solves our customers' payment and collecting needs, and all of that will be reflected on the growth of their business and the growth of their finances by managing the resources more efficiently. We have Banking as a Service. We started working on that this year, and we are working on three main fronts. These are very powerful fronts, and they're the result of a direct demand by our customers. Some of them are in constructions, and we hope to deploy the first one either in December or in January. We have a solution where Bancolombia accounts become Payments as a Service type of facilities.
Our customers will be able to use them to pay their mortgage, their mobility solutions or consumption, utilities, as well as the PaaS. This has a big demand by our customers, especially corporate customers, who are turning their businesses into platform-based businesses, and they needed to have a complement with financial services. As I said earlier, it's better to overlap than to bridge gaps, at least for us, and we want to provide a follow-up to our customers. To wrap up, for us, it's really important, and as Juan said it, our goal is to achieve customer loyalty. We measure experience permanently across all four segments, where the aggregate of the third quarter puts us at 291. We are the first experience bank at retail SMEs, midsize corporates also.
When it comes to corporate, we're second place behind Banco de Occidente, which is a niche bank. However, we're still working on that. We have a model that allows us to identify on a by segment basis and on a by a sub-segment basis what is it that we have to improve from our experience to capture better value out of our customers, but also to keep being the experience leaders in the Colombian market, as we have done in recent years and as we will continue to do. We will continue working on that so that our customers want to stay with Bancolombia. This is all I had to share with you, and I'll leave you with Cipriano. Cipriano is our Chief Innovation Officer, and he will talk to us about Nequi. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Cristina, and good morning to everyone. For me, it's a pleasure and an honor to be with you today. Throughout this conversation, we talked about strategies or capabilities, how we're reaching the market, and we've talked about ecosystem and how we're competing today. This picture shows you our competitive setting, the fintech in Colombia. Now we have more than 350 companies in these different segments which are part of the Colombia Fintech. 92% of these companies are local, and that shows the talent, innovation, and capability of creating and obviously of building a fintech platform in Colombia. Colombia is the third country following Brazil and Mexico, and I'll show you how we're organized. Cristina told you briefly about all of the ecosystems. These initiatives are made with us with internal and external capabilities.
We're making open, innovative collaborations, and I'd like to talk about how we cooperate and collaborate with our innovation in this global world. Now I'd like to focus in on Nequi, which is our neobank. What's our purpose? To improve people's relationship with money and to empower them to achieve their financial goals and dreams. This is how Nequi was born in 2015, and how we do it easily, without ties, and on a daily basis. Let me give you some examples ahead. In 2014, 2015, we sat down and thought, "Okay, how can we have a different relation with our clients?" Understanding that we had been in operation for more than 50 years, we were leader in the market.
We saw new players coming to the market, so we sat down to build with our clients down the street, with them, understanding what they liked and disliked about banks. We created Nequi, and we launched it in 2018. Nequi consists of three pillars. One, the core. This is vital for Nequi. It's our core really because it allows us to attract clients. 100% digital. It has no cost for clients. It allows us to have an effect of a network, and I'll show you ahead how we have grown exponentially. It has no frictions. It allows our clients to make transactions that are basic. Later, when we moved on to our second layer, the Armario, which is our marketplace, we start to have a close relation with our clients.
Here we have education and financial inclusion, where we work with financial services and non-financial services, and we start to monetize our neobank, called Nequi. The third layer, the external one, is that open world that Jaime showed us. It's that connection with ecosystems that Cristina also showed us, and this is done through Banking as a Service or the apps world. I'll give you some examples ahead. This is really the core of our neobank. What's inside Nequi? When we look at the detail, we subscribe or enroll our clients. Jaime talked about that connection with the cloud. Our clients connect 100% digitally through a facial recognition and biometric. Remember, Nequi is a lab.
We are a lab, and we'll still be a lab to help Bancolombia and to boost our capabilities and to continue competing and providing better products and services to our clients. Once the clients are enrolled, we have a low acquisition cost. They can start to make transactions. When Carlos talked about the strength of our physical presence in Colombia, Nequi, its strength is in Colombia today, but we want to export it. We are operating now in Panama, but we want to expand it to other countries where we operate. Colombia is still a country of a lot of cash. Let me show. I'll give you examples of people that started with the pandemic, and they arrived to Nequi. With Nequi, we can say that we are living the democratization and digital transformation of Colombia. Physical channels are important, yes.
We have more than 4,000 ATMs, which no other competitor has in Colombia. We also leverage with more than 21,000 banking correspondents and more than 15,000 Nequi banking agents. We have a physical distribution network, which is very important for Nequi. As what Carlos Daniel Raad said, we began to launch this, and we're competing, and we're number one in the market in Colombia. What does the first layer give us? It gives us the core, the cash in to make money transfers and payments. Cristina Arrastía talked about the QR of Bancolombia, which is interconnected with the Nequi QR. We're making the best of both worlds, and that has allowed us to attract a number of people which are using Nequi because of the pandemic. The second layer shows payments.
Here we start to see the daily lives, transactions, the intimacy of the client. Those that have a mobile phone at hand, and with that phone, they can make financial, non-financial transactions. Financial means has to do with recharges. Non-financial, if we want to have a physician at hand, we can make a medical consultation through the Armario. The external connection is very important. How we can be more agile, swifter to connect with the external capabilities within this fintech capabilities. Our alliances play a major role in Nequi. Looking ahead, I'll tell you about the strategies and what we dream by 2025. We have to look closer at our financial business as a neobank.
Today, we have a product called the safe card credit for those that reach the end of the month and they need money for their payroll. That's why it's called safe card . We give loans of COP 500,000 to the people. This month we have what's called the Préstamo Propulsor , and that's a big bet of Nequi. It's to really get into the financial world. Later I'll tell you how, but we built a risk model of Nequi. Within El Armario, we also have the payments, top ups, and other services. Cristina talked about mobility. Through Nequi, we also connect with mobility. Very important in Latin America, direct selling. We are developing products, tailor-made products for our large commercial allies to go from B2B to B2C.
These multi-level sales are very important for our clients and also the non-financial third-party services. We have to get more into insurance, yes. Those are challenges and the everyday services clients need. The third element has to do with the connection with third parties, which has led to the QR and the button to use for payments and with API dispersals to pay payrolls with our B2B clients and also daily services, making use of the network and to turn Nequi into a verb. We have to Nequi everything. Nequi . To digitalize cash in Colombia, to fight, I guess, the poor practices of the everyday loan, which unfortunately for those that have lower income. They have to pay their very high loans. The idea is to get into inclusion and financial education through them.
First of all, we have to keep in mind we have a great team that's passionate, knowledgeable, expert like no other, that can reinvent itself, transform itself. We say that a year at Nequi is a, it's a dog year. It's seven years today. Many things are happening in Nequi. Let me give you clear examples. In 2018 we had 800,000 clients. Today, November, we have more than 9 million users. Of those 9 million, 66% are active clients. What does this mean? That those 66%, which is more than 6 million clients at least, are making 11 transactions a month. I mean, we are reaching that effect, which is very important. Yes, competition will increase. Competition is arriving to Colombia, but we have been building a critical mass for some time.
Nequi is not only about transfers, we also have a card. We moved from 2020, the first quarter, 1,200,000 cards, and we'll be reaching 1 million cards now. All these capabilities have been built with a talented and passionate team. We're talking about 500 people in Nequi, of which 85 are in-house. Jaime and Carlos, the challenge is really to promote and attract and retain that talent. Whoever will win the race is the one that has the best talent. We're convinced about that, and we're working strong on the Nequi culture. This also makes me proud to share with you, when we look at the ratings from the App Store and Google Play of all those that have downloaded our application, humbly we say we're number one. The size of the circle is the number of downloads.
In the App Store we have a rating of 4.8, and in Google Play our rating is 4.5. We have competition. Every day we're improving, but we feel proud of being number one, the number one bank of Colombia. A big challenge when we grow exponentially, we multiply our growth by 10, is NPS. That's what Cristina talked about. We have an obsession about our clients, our services. We are 100% digital, so we have to have an easy experience. It's got to be simple. It should be inclusive, and we'll look at this closely ahead. Our NPS is 82%. It's challenging to remain above 80%, but we do it with passion and professionalism to provide the best services to our clients.
Now closing or ending October, we reach COP 1 trillion as our balance, and that turns us into a major role in the financial sector of Colombia. Our acquisition cost is low because of that effect of the network. It's COP 1,300, Colombian pesos, and this has to do with the connection with our risk engines. 30% with marketing and the other 30% with technology. Reaching this base earlier and with 10 million clients means another challenge. How can we be deeper? How can we provide better services to these clients so that we can help them on a daily basis? Here we see examples. We have our Nequi card, PayPal. Now remember, Nequi is a lab. We initially connect with PayPal. Many of our clients are professionals that work and live in Colombia, but are hired with companies overseas.
Those persons can make use of Nequi, and at $7,000 a year is our top. Also non-financial services that has to do with charging our mobile phone. Today we have more than a million clients that are profitable. That's a point to us. How? We moved from COP 5 billion in the first quarter of 2020 regarding our fees and revenues to the third quarter of 2021 of COP 25 billion. The challenge is still high and next year we have to double our revenue. This is more about the figures of 9 million clients. Six million are active, 66%, which in average make 11 transactions a month. This figure that you see of profitable clients, or users, is very important. Who are our users?
As I told you, we are democratizing, after the pandemic, the system at Nequi. We could surf these waves well. Let me talk to you about Camilo. He's 19 years old. Welcome. He began with Nequi because he's got friends in the ecosystem. His parents are divorced, and his father sends him money on a monthly basis, and he's entering the financial world. You could say that that's the first contact with the young people in the financial world. He represents 20% of our customers and makes 5 transactions a month. Let's move on to Andrés. He's called Nequi Panas in the local in the friends of Nequi. That's what it means. He's a client that in which Nequi is its only account. At Nequi, he finds everything he needs, financial and non-financial. On average, he makes 18 transactions a month with Nequi.
This is a person that works. Sometimes it's independent worker or an employee. The first and second group want to save. The way that we've designed Nequi is to promote savings, to promote the reaching dreams and goals. We have Sandra. Sandra is 35 years old, very active in the social media, and her social and political convictions are very important to what she uses. She challenges the financial system, but she feels good with Nequi, how it speaks to her, how it communicates to her, how it's transparent. We have a huge challenge because we're not always her type of first account. She's knowledgeable. She's got credit. Our challenge is to deepen with her. Now let's move on to Magda. She's a young female, active professional. She lives on the outskirts of Bogotá with her husband.
She doesn't feel good about the financial system. Her income, monthly income allows her to save, to enjoy. We are not her first account, but she uses Nequi especially on weekends to travel. She likes to take her motorcycle and visit villages close to Bogotá. We're her cash at hand with her mobile phone. Magda also seeks offers and promotions and which is the best product and service for her. This is 25% of our clients. Here you can see we have a lot of challenges with Magda. Marleni is the fifth group, which is called a bit apart from us.
She obviously wasn't going to be part of the digital world, but because of the disbursement of the government of the reliefs and aids, Marleni is with us because somebody that she knows that has Nequi sent her money. She doesn't have a good education level. She doesn't work professionally. She lives with her husband that's pensioned. She lives off her kids that send her money, but she wants to reach her dreams. She felt far away from the financial system because of the communications, because the way we communicated to her, how we pre-presented products made her fearful. She's not digitally native. She needs the help of her kids to get to know our products, to understand them.
With the last two are types of clients that are 60%, in which we have to work more with inclusion and financial education. Overall, you can see our figures. 55% of our clients are exclusives and 44% are shared with Bancolombia. The average age is from 18 to 45 years old. Here's the big mass. Here you can see also that there are people older because of the transformation that are reaching Nequi and location. Bogotá is 30% of the economy of Colombia. We have 21% of Bogotá and Cundinamarca. It's like 30% of our clients are in Bogotá in the downtown area. We're strong also in Antioquia, where it's almost 8%. When we add on the coast of Colombia, it's 11 million people. They're strong, but we still have to deepen there.
We have a big challenge, and it's the informality in cash, use of cash. How can we turn some of these clients into an option using a cell phone is something that we have to work on. I've told you a great story of six years of many challenges, of an exponential growth, of a passionate team connecting with the client, with the user, designing from the street. This is how we designed our Proposer Credit . We started to chat with clients to understand what they needed, to understand how we could communicate better. A big challenge is how to sell a credit 100% digitally. We sat down also to create a strategy, and we saw ourselves two years from now. These are the six pillars of Nequi's strategy. First, to do the basics well.
When we have 10 million clients and we have 600,000 that enter Nequi a month, we cannot let them down. Stability is very important. To have a service that's impeccable is very important. To be excellent with efficiency, productivity, and with very good service. Second pillar, how can we enhance that third layer, that open world? We have a big challenge is how to connect with businesses. Many of our clients are entrepreneurs and handle Nequi, their personal money and that of the company. How we have designed the Nequi pockets gives them facility to have a space for their business and another space for their personal finance. We have to continue enhancing our B2B, how to meet the challenge that B2B business. A big challenge for Colombia and Latin America is how to formalize these businesses.
As we do so, we can provide better financial education. Third layer or pillar, how to strengthen non-financial services offers. How can we have that marketplace so that the people at Nequi can find everything they need? Fourth pillar, we are a bank. We are a neobank, 100% digital. We have to deepen and consolidate our financial services offer. Later, I'll talk about the proposal, but we have a lot to do there. Since we are 100% digital, we saw, with our capabilities, we have to keep consolidating our deep knowledge of our client, of the data, how to provide contextual solutions, how we can get to know them better. Colombia is a country of regions. Our clients say that, "You and your...
Armado, you can provide me services and products, but they're not applicable to my geography." We have to continue improving with that knowledge of data. Our sixth pillar is that we are a technology company, and we have to develop to have a better mindset with culture and deliverables. With this, I end by saying the following: Nequi is growing profitably. We have taken long, yes, it's true. We've been very careful creating our teams, our risk teams that are in Nequi, and that we've also leveraged with the capabilities of banks that adjust to the reality of our users. The users of Nequi changed in the last year and a half, but now we are confident, and we're quite positive that what we're doing with our Propulsor loan is doing very well.
Only in a month, we've been able to provide more than 5,500 loans, so we're doing very well. This will represent other capabilities that we have to develop, like service, collections, how to help clients to understand better what they've hired with us. This Propulsor loan basically is a pre-approved and upfront loan, which once people enter Nequi, they have this that ranges from COP 500,000 to COP 5 million. The term is from 6 to 24 months, with an interest rate of 24% annual effective and the expected NPL ratio is 10%. We have big challenges ahead for Nequi, but we have a million clients now that are profitable. This ends my talk. Thank you.
Now I give the floor to José Humberto Acosta, our CFO, to provide us figures about the organization.
Cipriano, thank you very much. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us on this day, Investors' Day and Analysts' Day. We have analyzed with Juan the capabilities that we have developed at the bank, with Jaime also, and how we use that capabilities in the commercial world for customers, for products and for market. Nequi's story is a story of growth, which we have told during recent years. Since the results were just turned in a week ago, I'm going to go over a couple of numbers and figures, and my presentation is gonna be split into two chapters. What you've seen on digital, what you've seen on bank efforts, and how that is reflected on the right side of the general balance, and how that is reflected in our funding structure, as well as how we have transformed ourselves in recent years.
On the second part, since back at the last quarter results meeting, we had some concerns about expenses. I would like to go into detail regarding how the expense managers at Grupo Bancolombia are putting out efforts, especially when it comes to digitalization. Without further ado, let's start with the first slide. We've split this part into four big sections. First, this information is just for Colombia, as you will see in all the presentation. Colombia represents 75% of the entire operation, and between current accounts and savings accounts and term deposits, that's how we've split our story during the last five years. The most important change has taken place in savings accounts. Since 2017, we started to have larger growth curves. What's the reason behind that? It's exactly what Cristina told us, and also the infrastructure that Jaime was telling us about.
It's about how we, through different channels, we've been able to secure the preference of our clients. Actually, during the last year, this growth became even more dramatic as a result of what happened with COVID and the subsequent closing down of different cities. Between 2020 and 2021, we've had a combination of two factors. We've had many more customers and larger preference by our current customers. On the right, upper right-hand side, you can see growth at a five-year term. Green represents the last year, blue represents the last five years, but this story didn't start in 2020. We've been telling this story from previous years, and we have secured more preference by our customers at CASA, at savings account, and in checking accounts. That is something that's very significant. Now, I wanna tell you something that happens in term deposits.
Year after year, they've been dropping. That is an absolutely intentional strategy because when banks such as ours, with 20 million, we start to adjust our collection strategy, and other colleagues in Colombia started doing the same thing, so we decided to cut down on the amount of term deposits, which you can see in the margins and in the NIM defense we have undergone during recent years. Now, in the lower left-hand side, you can see the two landscapes, 2017 versus 2021, and I want you to notice our term deposits. Most of our deposits are CASA. They're stable deposits, and these deposits have three features. They're stable and granular, they're cheap, and third, in order to comply with Basel III standards, we have to have a lot of granularity. This fulfills all three goals through what we've seen regarding digitalization.
Finally, market share. Some of you might say, "Well, Humberto, it went up to 3.24%," but taking into account the fact that this uptick from 2023 to 2024 is by cutting down on term deposits, which is why we believe we have a strategic advantage going forward. Our funding is very stable. Further along this presentation, you will see where this funding stability comes from. This is the most interesting part. We have told you we have split deposits by range. Where's the largest transformation? You can see in different colors, we've split it into 1,000, up to $1,000, the first part. On the lower left, right side, you can see it. From $1,000 to COP 40 million, which would be $10,000. From $10,000 to COP 1.5 million.
I want you to notice how these growths have increased. That is a representation of granularity, stability, and low cost. That is one of the very important points because that is a result of the digital penetration of the bank. We've come up with very different collection strategies, a radical difference from the way we used to collect it before. Now, this graph shows us what I've said, growth in savings account and in checking account. Notice that as part of the bank structure, in the deposit structure, we went from 31%-40% of the entire retail banking customers. That is because we're a different bank, and it's also because we're a bank that's better prepared for the future. Now, that's it as far as financial statements. All of these digitalization efforts have caused this. Now let's go to expenses. Permanent observation.
That's where we've had more demanding guidance, and in some cases, we've fulfilled them successfully. We remember your papers, we take them into account, we analyze the expenses, we perform a quarterly analysis growing more than 20% compared to the previous quarter, and we believe that this 2020, 2021. This year can't be analyzed because of the large expenses volatility as a result of the pandemic. We instead wanted to bring you a different vision. This is the annual version, January to September. From January to September, expenses grew at a 9%, which you can see in a comparison between the red line, the red bar and the blue bar.
As you can see in the next three column groups, administrative expenses grew at a 5%, payroll expenses grew up at a rate of 1%, and the biggest increase regarding expenses were premiums and bonuses for employees, because as you've remembered, in 2020, we completely did away with them. So our growth to 369%. Out of that 9%, I would like to explain 5% of administrative expenses. The 1% expenses on payroll is because of a tighter control on FTEs, and the other percentage, it's because a bonus that didn't exist in 2020, but that we did have in 2019. Now, let's take a look at that 5%. That 5% in the upper pie, which you can see in green, we broke it down into the lower left pie graph. Notice the delta, notice the variation.
It is explained at a rate of 36% because of expenses we've gone into when it comes to technology. Jaime Villegas, who was here in the second part of the presentation, was one of the areas that has gone into the most costs as a result of operational expenses. These are the four or five most representative expenses. Cloud migration is definitely a cost that we've been paying for a couple of years now. You know, digital channel evolution and all of the efforts behind APIs, developing Nequi, developing digital platforms, the QR code platform, which has been a resounding success when it comes to compiling customer information. Having said that, these expenses are firmly placed in digitalization efforts, which is something that this bank has been doing consistently for three or four years.
I hope to have provided you with a clear vision regarding what happens with the collection structure and how digitalization has driven part of the expenses. I wanna leave you now with Carlos Daniel Raad, our Investor Relations head, and he will be in charge of moderating the Q&A section. Thank you very much for your participation. Before we start our questions and answers section, I would like to thank our executives for the presentations. I would like to remind all analysts that if you want to ask a question, please raise your hand using the Zoom chat option, and I will be announcing the order of the questions. I would like to invite Juan, Cristina, Jaime, Cipriano, and José to join us on stage to answer questions. While they settle in, we're gonna break for a couple of minutes. Thank you very much.
Andrés, please turn on your camera and your microphone.
Hi. Thank you very much for the presentation. My first question is for Juan Carlos. When you started your opening remarks, you were talking about the strong competitive environment we can see in Colombia and along the presentation, something drew my attention. You still see opportunities to continue targeting some more market share, particularly through the digital strategy that you've so successfully implemented. I would like to understand from your perspective, what do you think about this balancing act between protecting the market share you have now and getting more market share? What would you do to get more market share? Combining that with the metrics you showed us on physical branch closing and business increasing, what are some of your goals in terms of profitability for Bancolombia in the midterm using this digital strategy?
Andrés, good morning. Thank you for your question, for joining us. As to your first question, I'd like to make some comments and then I'll give the floor to Cristina, who will provide you more remarks about our capabilities in the competitive setting. The profitability I'll talk about, and then José can provide us our last comments. The competitive setting, Andrés, has been increasing, really hard, not only with traditional players, but new players. The new players will create more pressure. Why do we think that we'll keep on growing, and why we'll not only defend our first place or leadership in the market in most segments and products, but we also believe we can improve our share. Throughout the presentations you saw today, you saw that we have been developing capabilities. Let me underscore that term, capabilities.
It's not competencies or skills, but instead, we have joined capabilities plus digital topics, which are strong, plus the vision of ecosystems. I'd like to emphasize that when we talk about ecosystems, we become part of the daily part of people, and we have major challenges that are significant, and it's hard to compete with us. We will have competitions of niches of certain products that will lead us to make decisions. Overall, with the strategy that we have provided you today, leverage on the size that we have, our capacity of having networks, plus the digital topics, clearly we know that we have that capability. Indeed, it's happened. We have been gaining market share. Surely we will see shifts in subtopics, yes. Clearly, we will have market recompetition per se, but overall, we are moving on.
For your first question, let's give the floor to Cristina, and then we'll address your second question, Andrés.
To complement what you've said, and we saw it through this presentation, we've been building capabilities that are very strong because of the information that we have and the number of clients we've been developing in different analytical models and applying knowledge. I think that that's fundamental, because it's not that we only have the information and the capability, but the knowledge that we have that has allowed to develop different risk models to reach our clients more effectively. If that is joined by the digital marketing that we have and the digital channels we have, it's easier to reach many more clients.
If in the presentation that I provided you, we saw that our wallet share is at 25% and our fund decision is at 75%, there we have a huge path that we can grow in our market share, for instance, in individuals. If you look at SMEs, which are very important, in which with the strategy that we're developing, we can have that knowledge, that information to reach easily through tools and digital channels. This takes time to reach the independent, but when you have the transaction and you can understand the performance, you can reach them differently. If you look at the figures, we do have opportunity to grow when it comes to retail and SMEs. In corporate and mid-size corporates, there's still room to grow regarding the developments that we're making.
In the corporate is more of maintaining because our market share is very high today. That's what I would add to your answer.
Thank you, Cristina.
Andrés, with regards to your second question, with regards to what do we expect regarding the profitability on a short, medium and long-term basis at Bancolombia, surely we'll be closing offices. There is a source of efficiency that I want to clarify, but it will take time in Colombia since cash is used so much, the physical offices are still important, and it's a strength that we have in Bancolombia today. Yes, we do have a plan to make our offices branch more efficient. We have to balance this with the service, with the physicality that gives us more strength to have places where people can deposit and withdraw cash.
We do believe that there is space to improve our profitability efficiencies. We believe that this year, in 2021, we will have a profitability above 10%. We can be close to 11%. We've said that our vision of profitability on a medium basis is at 12%-14%. For 2022 we should be close to about 12%. With the strategy to be at 13%-14% by 2023 and ahead. José Humberto, do you have something else that you would like to add?
Yes, a couple of things. Hello, Andrés. Firstly, you should understand that part of the expenses that we've shown you have an overlap. Let me give you an example.
Migration towards the cloud is gradually made in which we need to keep the current infrastructure, the physical infrastructure at the computer centers. It's not something that we have automatically. We have to have those double expenses. That doesn't allow us to immediately show the growth of expense. Secondly, we have to keep in mind when we compute ROIs, if you look at the balance sheet, that's the line or item that grows most in capital. There's a lot of pressure on that concept, that item. I don't know if that's an answer. This answers everything that you're asking about.
Andrés, tienes tu micrófono encendido. [/Foreign language]
Andrés, is your mic on?
Is your microphone on?
Oh, that's it. Sorry. I couldn't unmute myself for some reason. No, I mean, the answer is actually very clear. Thank you very much. Just one additional thing. I have a question more for Cipriano around Nequi. The figures I thought was very interesting, especially when it comes to profitable growth. How is it that this profitable growth has a linear trend compared to the exponential growth represented by the number of total users. What's the challenge? What explains the difference between both curves? Is it because of the profile of this marginal customer that's going inside the platform?
Thank you for your question. I would like to answer this two ways. First, remember that core of Nequi, in which has shown an exponential growth, people have received basic services and don't pay for them, so we do not monetize. They're truly the users. We have a low cost of acquisition. Our challenge is to go on to the second layer. It's called El Armario, in which we have two things, the non-financial products for daily services and to make clients use Nequi on a daily basis, to have a bank on their cell phone. What's coming, and I hope in next meetings, I don't know. I don't think it will be an exponential curve, but it will be an uptrend. It's to truly, as a neobank, we can have that profoundization of our clients.
We can provide 100% digital loans, tailor-made in a simple and transparent way. That's how we can see a more profitable growth. Again, how can we profit a lot, have more profitable clients through the daily basis and better loans? Thank you.
Andrés, thank you very much for your question. I would like the next analysts to turn on their cameras and microphones if you want to ask a question. Next question is from Yuri Fernandes from J.P. Morgan. Fernandez from Bank of America will get ready. Go ahead, Yuri, with your question.
Hello, everyone. Good morning. Thank you very much for this opportunity. Thank you for your presentation. The figures are really interesting. I would like you to provide some more detail regarding expenses. It is clear that you went through some expenses, a one-off expense. Not really one-off, but there's an expense overlapping, especially as a result of migrating to the cloud. You still continue having an important percentage of risk provisions, which is a high ratio for a bank such as you with a very important market share across so many lines.
My question is, are you focusing on closing branches and optimizing expenses? There is also an investment plan. Looking at 2022, 2023, what should we expect? Should these expenses continue to be high? What about this 50%? When does it start going down? Give us some trends, because closing physical branches is really important to help you with digital investment, because you will have revenues, but they will be delayed. First you have the expenses and then you have the revenues regarding this digital growth plan. I have a second question regarding this. At the beginning of your presentation, you told us about a lot of different segments, mortgages, SMEs, etc. I have a question. The market is really concentrated. I think this is a product that continues to grow.
What do you think about it as a product? Do you have any specific strategies? Thank you very much.
Thank you, Yuri. What a pleasure to say hello to you, and thank you for joining us today. Both questions regarding the first one, I'll answer, and then José Humberto will back me up, and then Cristina will answer your second question about drafts. Clearly, Yuri, we're living a transitional period. Bancolombia is undergoing a transformation that implies additional investments which go against the efficiency that we would like to have because there is overlapping, as we've mentioned. The cloud, we will get a full benefit from it when it comes to expenses in 2025. Other initiatives as well. I believe that we'll have a couple of years in which our investments and the capabilities that we've discussed today will create additional expenses.
We hope that we have more expenses, more growth and expenses, so we should see improvements. In the cost income ratio, seeking to be below 50%, but we don't think it will be initially way below 50%. Later, we will seek about 40, 45s, but that will be ahead. Our strategy to compete in the universal banking, which gives us the strength to be able to be present in flows into exchange and to have the strength to be leveraged in different segments, allows us to focus on many things and not only in costs. Yuri, we're looking for a balance. We have to be part of that balance. We understand that we have to work on efficiency. It's a task we have ahead. We're not denying it at all.
It's important, but also we have to find that we cannot lose competitiveness because if we focus too much on expenses, we can have a good year, but it will subtract competitiveness on a long-term basis. Our task is to find balance, provided our competitive edge improves and we develop the skills. Yes, we will be closing offices. We're doing that. It will be slower because the cash that's used so much in Colombia, but we do have an optimization in that sense, and we'll be much more efficient as well in terms of handling personnel. José, do you have something else?
Yuri, good morning. Look how the administrative expenses grow. You have to look at the other side of the equation. We have three elements which this 3.5 years have been hit hard.
First, the drop of rates, it's unprecedented globally. You've seen that the rate dropped in the central bank, importantly. Also, loans were not big drivers of growth, so we didn't attract this to create income. Third, we've had to recalculate Stage 3. Also, if you look at that part of the equation, it's hit hard and aligned with what Juan said. We'll reach this goal. In the next years, we'll probably see a growth, accounts receivable that's better. Surely, we'll have higher interest rates in which a bank like ours will be positively impacted. Stage 3 will reach another level, so the path is there. Again, that 5% of administrative expenses talks about the control of costs that we have within the bank's operations. I'd like to share with you when it comes to drafts.
We said that Bancolombia handles 35% of the payrolls for Colombia. We are leader in retail, and this leadership has to do with the credit cards and free investment loans. We're not leaders in drafts. We set out to work to provide a digital and scalable and efficient product. We've launched this product, which is entirely digital, clients can access drafts through digital channels. The law in Colombia demands controls to launch drafts. Now we have a fully digitalized draft system, and we've been growing since the H2 of this year with drafts. We still have a lot to do in this sense, but we think that the number of clients, the payrolls that we have, the digital solution that we have developed, surely we can have a higher share.
We have it for payrolls and for those that are pensioned. In both segments, we have this solution, and we've been growing in this in recent months significantly. Is that enough?
Yuri-
Yuri.
Yuri Fernandes, thank you very much for your question. Next question is by Ernesto Gabilondo from Bank of America. Go ahead, Ernesto.
Good morning. Thank you very much, Juan Carlos, José Humberto Carlos, and all the team. Good morning. Thank you very much for that presentation. It was most interesting. My question is about what other initiatives are you thinking for Nequi? I heard that you are assessing maybe including some insurance, investment products, and if so, what would be the timeline for these new implementations? My second question is, judging by what we've seen in other countries, you know, the intention of developing digital banks and publicly listing them, for example, in Brazil, we've seen some banks do it there. I would like to know if at some point, putting Nequi out into the market at some point. I don't know if we would have to look at a goal in terms of number of customers or profit margins for Nequi to consider it.
Ernesto, good morning. What a pleasure to say hello to you. Thank you for your questions. Allow me to make a couple of comments on both items, and then Cipriano can answer your questions with more details. Clearly, we see it at Nequi, a potential platform. As Cipriano explained, we began with the basic product, easily accessed and free of charge, and that has allowed us to see a very dynamic that's interesting with 400,000-600,000 users a month. Once those users are with us with a high percentage of usage, this is important. In El Armario, we have products that have to do remittances, bringing money from overseas. When it comes to mobility, public transformation, it connects people with their daily needs. You talked about and also insurance and investments. Clearly, yes.
With the strategy that should have a vision of the bank as a service provider and to provide services also to be number one in the market. Today, our main focus with Nequi has to do with loans. We think their developing capabilities to access loans with our users give us a very important projection, and we're leveraging on the knowledge we have in Bancolombia and the knowledge of Nequi, which gives us a major leverage. In the presentation we said that we have 60% of our users are both Nequi and Bancolombia, and that allows us, with our strategic vision, to address them clearly. Cipriano will give us more information about this. With regards to being listed for a development of Nequi, clearly it's a possibility that we're studying.
Nequi was conceived initially as being an independent, even within Bancolombia, although today it's under the umbrella of Bancolombia as a bank. Nequi is independent in many aspects and is leveraged, as Cipriano said, when it comes to the distribution of the network of Bancolombia, it's great. This being listed is something we're thinking about. We have to deepen, however, our profitability strategy. We believe that loans are the path that will lead us to have a better profitability level with our users. Right then, we will assess if Nequi should be in a different status. It was conceived, again, to be independent, and we believe that that development or evolution will come the day, the best day possible. Ernesto, good morning. It's good to say hello to you, and thank you for your question.
Talking about what Juan Carlos just said, I'd like to focus again about the three layers of Nequi. The core, the challenge there is to have the dynamics, to have new users, to keep our technological capabilities, that they have to be sharp, to have an excellent service. With regards to your specific question, let's talk about the second and third layer. Today, in the financial, non-financial business, we have a lot to explore still in the insurance world. There is a great capability that Bancolombia has. We can learn from that capability, but the challenge is how. How can we do things differently? How can we sell insurance 100% digitally? What we tell the customer simple, intuitively, like we did with the Propulsor loan. We'll continue studying, focused.
I would say that next year we'll be focusing on loans and working strongly as well on creating products of investments, of insurance. Within the shelf, we have also embedded experiences. There, I connect. The second and third layer is how through that open banking or banking as a service, we connect with third-party businesses, companies of services or telecommunications. We provide that service to have a collection there, but also we have a B2B connection with our ally, but it becomes a B2C with the end consumer. There's a lot to explore with regards to the second and third layer, with regards to the connectivity. Today, we have our QR, which is a 2.0 QR, in which businesses will have simpler reports. Still, when we pay with QR, there's some frictions for these businesses.
We need QRs that's much more designed for B2B businesses. Lastly, I mean, there are different ways of working today. With what we're living in today in Colombia and in the world, we realize that not necessarily, like you and I that work for a single company, many of our users work for several companies or will do so, and we have to be able to evolve and provide them a good value proposition. Payrolls will migrate to different sources of income. Those people are mixing their personal and professional and corporate experience. We've got professionals that are connected to the world, and we have to adapt to how they work to provide them a value proposition that's tailor-made and to deepen, to formalize the SMEs of Colombia. Thank you.
Thank you, Ernesto.
Next question is by Tito Labarta from Goldman Sachs. Alonso Garcia from Credit Suisse will get ready. Good morning.
Hello. Good morning, everyone. Thank you very much for this presentation and for all the information so far. It's really interesting. I would like to elaborate on Nequi. When you see the opportunity, Juan Carlos, you mentioned credit or loans. What type of loans are you thinking of in Nequi? Are you talking about credit cards? Are you talking about consumer loans, mortgages? I wanna understand that loan or credit part better in terms of income mixing. Also, because you're telling us commissions are growing, but what percentage of the profit would come from credit? The second part of my question is, in terms of profitable users, which is like 90% currently, what percentage of those customers can be profitable in Nequi? Would it be 50? Would it be 100?
Would you have customers who can't be profitable but that are worth it to keep as customers? And when do you see Nequi being profitable altogether?
Thank you, Tito. It's a pleasure to greet you. Let's talk about loans. Let me give you an overview before Cipriano can give us more details. Today's focus is on retail, low retail loans from six- to two-year terms, which are pre-assessed and upfront. If the client, if he or she requests it, can have a quick response to it. We have technologically developed a loan called a safeguard. It's more for emergencies, very low amounts, and it seeks to complement the income of some of our users. Remember, this is a base of users which are independent. Their revenue or income is quite variable, so the idea is to give them an option of loans that will allow them to evolve. The idea is to understand our clients more, so we are focused today on the Propulsor Loan .
We also have loans for independent businesses with the support of the government that allows businesses to develop. It's a range of possibilities dependent of our user's profile. Credit cards, yes, but it's not our focus today. Today, we will complete 1 million users with cards, digital and physical. Some have both. Today it's a card that's a debit card with their balance. We have an established basis to evolve towards credit card. Again, I'd say the retail credit cards are there, it's existing and will continue growing. That will be our focus in which we can control the risk properly, because please understand the challenge here lies not on loaning, but that to have parameters that are within what we expect. We will see an evolution. Meanwhile, we grow.
While we have a larger universe of users, we can understand these users better in advance. As to the profitability, it's a process that clearly we have to go through. As you said, we are at 9% now, but as the loan is given, we will see higher profitability levels. Cipriano will give us a deeper answer.
Thank you, Juan. Hello. It's a pleasure to have you here. Thank you for your question. Let's go back to the second layer, which is called El Armario, where we have the loans that Juan Carlos has explained.
In the next phase, we're going to be talking about an alliance made with a third party, and we'll be entering stronger in the central area of Colombia. With SMEs, that alliance will allow us to prove the strength of Nequi through third parties. We'll be entering other regions, but without losing focus. To reach 10 million users, I have to say humbly, we would never have imagined. Let me tell you about how prophetic this is. We closed at December 2019 at 1.8 users. December 2020 with 4.5 million users, and we'll close December 2020 with 10 million. Truly, everything, the digital adoption has been increased because of the pandemic. We have today to provide a better value proposition that's simpler for these users.
Tito, remember when I wrote that there's a big number of clients, some that arrive to Nequi at random because the government has given them an aid or because somebody has entered the network. There's 35% of people that use a lot of cash in Colombia that want to move on, that want to save, but don't have any contact with loans. There's another group of people, 25%, that know the financial system, but not necessarily we are their first account. There we have to deepen as well, make use of that network. Undoubtedly, while we evolve, we have to reach that 1 million number of cards, the debit card, and the credit card. Very importantly, if you remember that first group that we called the first ones, we had the Nequi card for online and e-commerce purchases.
In Colombia, when you go to the rural areas 30 or 40 miles away from the large cities, some years ago, you would talk with people, and they would have never made an online purchase. Today, people that don't have a high education level are getting into the online purchases. There we have a lot to deepen on. When it comes to profitability, I'd say that we, in a couple of years, 2 or 3 years, we will be deepening and we can change these figures. In Colombian pesos, it's very low, but it's a big challenge. If today, Tito, if we could make every Colombian every month to use a Nequi service and to have 30 cents a dollar a month, we're talking about more or less $3 a year, and Nequi would be profitable. It sounds low, but it's a target.
I would, Tito, to expect 100% of our clients to be profitable is impossible. The idea is to have 50% and that in a couple of years we can have a profitability. The speed of that profitability will depend on the penetration of profitable products like loans. Those are our aspirations today, Tito.
All right. Thank you very much, Juan Carlos and Cipriano. I would like to ask one more question in line with that. If you're growing in credit, NPS at 82, which is very strong, really high. If you're growing in credit and you will have customers who can't get credit or loans, how are you going to handle their NPS to keep it high?
That's a challenge. Clearly, when we have loan offers and there's a client that's refused a loan, that will affect our NPS. Nequi has been very strong in its connection and communication with its users. We have two strategies. We have to be very clear, direct with our answers and explain why. Second is financial education. How we can provide additional financial knowledge so people can understand the why. Clearly, it can have an effect on the perception of our users, which we are prepared to handle, but we believe we have the tools through clear, direct communications. Communication that's very fresh, plus financial education. It can have an effect on a perception that's very high today.
All right. Thank you very much. Actually, thank you for your question. The next question is by Alonso Garcia from Credit Suisse. Go ahead, Alonso.
Hello. Good morning, everyone. Thank you very much for this presentation. My first question is, I wanna touch base on Nequi and the way you're thinking of originating credit or loans. What about this do over law that was just enacted not too long ago? Will it affect any type of credit or loan issuance, given that this law took a lot of people out from the records. The other question is regarding competition in Colombia, the digital component and the physical component are. How do you feel about that? Are you feeling pressured? Are you feeling more reactive, more productive? Thank you very much.
Alonso, greetings. With regards to loans and the amnesty law that was issued recently, let me say the following: We have been preparing for some time now to have enough information about our clients. We won't be impacted from this law. We have to say, the law focuses on small loans that are very old, so its effect regarding information is marginal. What we've been doing, given our position in the market, our share, and the idea is to have our own basis and information about our clients internally and internal models, so we don't have an effect. We're not worried about this amnesty or the effects that this law could have. Regards to your second question, I think Cristina could better answer this matter.
With regards to our distribution of channels, what we've seen is that we have a strength in Bancolombia. Both I and Cipriano have talked about this. As we advance in every digital channel and having customers that are increasingly digital. In the case of Colombia, where cash is still the main means of payment to have ATMs and offices, so many offices are often stronger. What clients have to do digitally, they're finding it in these channels, but when they require cash, they also have it at hand in many places. It becomes a competitive edge that Bancolombia has today versus other platforms in the market which don't have so many physical offices.
We see it because many of the clients that are arriving, asking us to participate with our financial services in their platforms, one of the values they find at Bancolombia are the many physical offices that we have. Why? Clients in Colombia still want to use cash. Today, the strength when it comes to its distribution channels turns into a competitive advantage in the market because of the number, the coverage and the variety of channels. I would end by saying that we are not followers, but instead leaders. We have a challenge, and it's that Bancolombia competes in every segment. That's a challenge for us because to have the competitiveness and leadership and to be ahead in every segment is a challenge. There probably we will have to make concessions. Clearly today we consider that we're not followers, we're leaders.
I believe that the figures show this, the reality of what I'm saying when it comes to the platforms, the use of Bancolombia. The app today is growing Bancolombia A la Mano as a platform. We have Nequi. Not only that, we've got segments of the mid-size corporates who are gaining a lot of market share because of the strategy used. With SMEs, Bancolombia today is a clear leader and will deepen this adding services. When it comes to corporates, we have the highest market share of all of our segments. Clearly I would dare to say that we are leaders and not followers.
Thank you very much for your question, Alonso. Next question is by Daniel Mora from Credicorp and then Catherine Ortiz from Corredores Davivienda will take the next question.
Hello everyone in the Bancolombia team. Thank you very much for the presentation as well as all the info you gave us in your slides. I have two questions. Number one, I wanna ask about the commissions line. Specifically, I would like to know what you're thinking of the fees line, taking into account the entire ecosystem. I mean, Banking as a Service, different marketplace for different initiatives. I would like to understand where the biggest fee growth would come from, because at the same time, a lot of these products are free. What could we expect regarding fee growth in the coming years, as well as a fee indicator on operational income?
That would be my first question. My second question is regarding open banking. At the beginning of your presentation, there were several comments where you mentioned you are in conversations with the regulator to find out what the best way would be to implement that in the country. I would like you to elaborate on progress made on this front.
What's your opinion of the banking environment regarding open banking? Do you see it as a big industry change, and how is Bancolombia getting ready for it?
Thank you, Daniel. The first question, let me give you some comments, and Cristina can complement. The second question on open banking, I'll give you an overview, and Jaime will back me up. Fees. Fees are interesting, an interesting topic and lead to a lot of questions. We've been building strength when it comes to revenue from different products, but banking insurance is an important revenue for us. Fiduciaries, businesses, every time our investments are contributing more. Fees are not specifically particularly related to this. We have a base there, but indeed, we'll see developments. We understand when it comes to credit cards, there could be a shift in the composition of the commissions related to that product because of the competitors coming, and we're prepared for that.
Precisely that topic of commissions leads us for some time now to see how we could diversify the source of revenue of the bank in products related to financial and non-financial products. When we talk about ecosystems, which Cristina describes, and when it comes to mobility and payments is something very important that replaces a good part and has the potential to grow, and it still does beyond the credit cards. Housing, mortgage, how the commissions, when we join forces with builders and clients, we have created very interesting dynamics. Mobility, understood as the mobility of public mobility and mobility related to sustainable topics like electrical. We start to see consolidations, and the ecosystems are designed to grow significantly. Now let's listen to Cristina's answer to move on to open banking.
I would like to add, because I think you've been clear, that although credit cards are important in commissions for us, we've been working in different fronts to diversify. Many of the commissions through those services that we're incorporating throughout the ecosystem, for instance, in 360 purchases, through that, we will have different commissions. That's an example for many of Click Ofertas and Marketplace, mobility, mortgage. All of these are topics which not only sell a product or service, but they come with other products and services for needs. It's incorporating new services where we'll be replacing the fees.
Something that we already did on purpose was a Bancolombia QR 0, but because people said, "If you're a leader in acquisitions in Colombia, how can you provide a service that's different?" We wanted to support the SMEs, but we're evolving now to 2.0, which does provide commissions, because it has value-added values, because small businesses, for them, the reporting, the reconciliation, and other services related are important. When it comes to the attributes of products where there's value for clients is something that we're developing more, trying to understand what's valuable for a client and what the client is willing to pay for. That gives us a view of how we can replace those revenues, and we know that commissions will change as well. Okay, the second question is related to open banking.
I would like to underscore first, it's not open banking, it's open finance. Because what we promote is access to financial information for people, and it doesn't matter where they are. The concept is not only, it's more of open finance, and we think it's strong. We're preparing for it and working as of now. We're making initiatives with... Before the law is enacted, we have a bill now that's aligned with open finance, which lead to an exchange. We see optimistic that bill that will be discussed first in the industry and will set clear roles for everyone. I think will create opportunities to connect and to be able to join capabilities to better serve our clients. Jaime, do you have something else that you'd like to add?
Yes, thank you. Daniel, thank you for your question.
The government is making a major effort to understand open banking, open data, open finance that is rising in different markets. The desks, the teams that are created have led the government to the conclusion that Juan Carlos mentioned, it's more not open banking, it's open finance. We see that's a reality. Firstly, we can't close our eyes and we're preparing for that. What's our share specifically in those teams? When it comes to the business, we have privacy. I already talked about data privacy. We are convinced that data privacy is a competitive edge that Bancolombia has. Today, customers trust us because we really guard their resources, and we need them to have the same trust when it comes to how we handle information, because information isn't ours, it's theirs.
There we're working strongly and we're preparing inside to have privacy by design, so our processes and technological processes implicitly embed privacy. Technically, we're trying to seek to have a technical homologation regarding standards. This could be complicated for everyone if there are no standards to exchange information among different players. We're trying to help the government to determine the standards, keeping in mind the advances made. Today, we're using standards with different third parties, but we want to use them throughout the country, and it's cheaper for everyone, of course.
Thank you very much, Daniel, for your question. The next and last question of the event will be by Katherine Ortiz . Go ahead, Katherine.
Hello, everyone. Good morning. Thank you very much for this space. I have several questions. First one is, I would like you. My question is related with the Nequi funding structure. We're citing the figures you introduced us to this morning. Nequi has been profiting its customer base, and I would like to know if Bancolombia's strategy in terms of funding, specifically Nequi, has it changed? That's one thing, and my second question is related with Central America. How is it that Bancolombia is planning to translate this digital strategy to Central America? How are you planning on moving and replicating the same results with the digital strategies in Central America?
Is everything you told us this morning geared towards also replicating operations and results in Central America, the same thing you had in Latin America? Third, what is the customer acquisition cost? Especially I'm asking because if you review some internal platforms, let me just give you an example, Nubank. You mentioned that their customer acquisition cost is around $5. When you look at Bancolombia, the figure is considerably lower. I would like to understand why. I would like to understand what sort of costs you are including in that calculation, and are you taking into account the services that Bancolombia is providing Nequi? I would like to understand why there's such a big difference between Bancolombia and Nubank when it comes to customer acquisition cost. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Katherine. Let me answer the first two questions and the last one for Cipriano. Funding at Nequi has surprised us positively. Today, we're reaching COP 1 trillion in deposits in Nequi. The average of active user is COP 140,000, which is quite positive. Cipriano already mentioned this. It's not only a transactional platform, it's for savings, and it was designed like that initially. When we made the process that Cipriano already talked about, of talking with people and how they handle money, they had their income, and they would separate it in different envelopes, placing in each envelope money to pay for public utilities, the lease, etc. It's been positive. Today, clearly, Nequi is a surplus in fundings. Its deposits are higher than the accounts receivable because the placement of accounts receivable is just beginning.
It's leveraged the funding of Bancolombia. Still in a proportion, it's quite small because of the size of Bancolombia, but it has helped the cost of funding and the diversification of the cost, so we see it positive. It is a source of revenue for Nequi since that funding has an interesting value when it comes to. It's a funding with accessible cost. Second question, Central America. Clearly, we leverage the countries of Central America with all of these developments that we're making in Colombia. Colombia as a market, economically and digitally and in regulations and in competition, is much more advanced than the other three countries where we operate. So we are ahead, yes, but that allows us to share what we're doing in different countries.
In different levels, one thing is Panama, the other is Guatemala, and the other one is El Salvador. El Salvador is the one that leads, and its technical adoption, they're doing well. The app is very dynamic in El Salvador. The digital services, what we're doing in payments. Guatemala has shortened its distance, its gap, and the idea is that in Guatemala, we will be a leader when it comes to digital transactions. The idea is to enhance and increase our retail composition. In Panama, there's Nequi, and it's a clear way of saying how we're experimenting in other countries. Nequi not only has the potential and it's a multicurrency, multicountry. It's in Colombia and in Panama now. That helps us to share these capabilities.
We've been incorporating this in other countries, so clearly, yes. On the other hand, developments that can take place, the adoption of Bitcoin in El Salvador helps us a lot to learn about cryptocurrencies. That would be an interesting exchange. Cipriano will answer your last question. Thank you, Juan, and thank you, Katherine, for your question.
Aligned with the first answer that Juan Carlos gave regarding our leverage, we see a universe that's quite potential of loan clients or loan users, 400-500,000 users in the next year, which represents COP 900 billion. Today, we feel very comfortable with our Nequi strategy, and it's a significant source of income. A big challenge is that those that receive their money in Nequi cannot change that to cash. There's a challenge because Colombia is still a country that uses a lot of cash.
A lot of people make cash outs, and that's bad because we're not digitalizing the cash. The other is because our network is expensive, so we have to close that cycle and keep that money digitalized to be able to have a good base. With regards to the balance, average balance a month, we're talking about $40-$50 a month per user. Because of the pandemic, it grew, 'cause the people have the digitalized money and didn't make the cash out. Secondly, I think your question is great, and let me answer it. Answer those COP 1,300. 40% is when you enroll, and we make a verification of the identity. That's 40% of that cost.
30% of that cost is all the technology that's behind it, authentication, visual and voice for our safety and enrollment systems. Third is what sets us apart from the competition is our marketing. The cost of bringing clients through marketing is low. Surely, this will change as there is more competition, 'cause many of these clients are arriving to us or enrolling because of word of mouth.
Okay, this ends our Investor Day, Bancolombia.
We wrap up our Investor Day at Bancolombia.
I'd like to thank you all.
I would like to thank all of you for your presence here.
for joining us today for your interest in Bancolombia.
For your interest in Bancolombia.
We've covered our strategy.
We've covered our strategy.
We've developed deeply.
We've developed in a very deep way.
What we're doing with specific events and figures and showing you.
What we're doing, we've explained to you what we're doing and with a lot of detail and with a lot of figures and a lot of very specific realities.
That we're making a task, which we know we have to improve, especially our digital capabilities.
We've told you what's going on. It is clear for us that when you-
It's a process, and the results are there. I hope you've received enough information, but if you need more information of something in particular, please contact our head of investor relations. I would like to close this conference saying that we understand that there's more competition, that we are prepared to face that increased competition, that we are evolving in what we have to evolve, that we understand that speed is fundamental. We have to move fast, and we'll be advancing in our process. Today, we've got good figures aligned with this. I'd like to close by saying that we're optimistic closing the year of 2021.
We expect a fourth quarter with positive results, with an ROI of about 11% or even a bit higher. We understand that we have a task with expenses, and as I said to Yuri, it's a balance. We cannot focus only on decreasing dramatically expenses on a short-term basis. We're in a transition. We need the balance. We'll be seeing efficiency results while the digital processes advance, while our capabilities consolidate in advance. There, we know we have a lot to do. We'll be finding that balance, understanding that we must have a good competitive edge, but we have to develop our capabilities to compete in a setting that's changing. Bancolombia is evolving, it's changing. It's present dynamically in the market. We know our challenges, and we're addressing them. 2023 is a year in which we'll be consolidating what we're talking about today.
These capabilities that we described that are evolving, that are here today, will develop their true potential in 2023, and that's where we will have results, which I hope are even better than those that we've shown you or will show you in 2021. Truly, I would hope that our next meeting of Investor Day will be physical, that we can shake your hand, that we can talk not through this digital world, but instead personally. We hope the analysts and everyone to see you and talk with you through our teleconference of results of 2021. Thank you all. I hope you do well, and thank you for joining us in this conference today.