The sustainability of our business and the care for our environment. We are conscious of the impacts of our actions, and we make an effort so that they are always positive and that they fulfill the objective of stimulating the social and economic development of the country, and it has been like this for 97 years of history. Itaú is an institution that has over 60 million clients and 500,000 direct shareholders. Now, to open this meeting, we will have the special presence of our co-presidents of the board, the director, Pedro Moreira Salles, and Roberto Setubal, that will share with us their perspectives on the financial industry and that is transforming substantially over the last few years.
Thereafter, we will have, for the first time, the participation of all the members of the executive board, starting with Milton, our new CEO, which will share his priorities and how we are leading in this great transformation from Itaú Unibanco. At the end of the morning, around 11:15 A.M., we will also have the Q&A. Please direct at any time your questions through the specific function of WhatsApp. If you're watching through the YouTube channel, please also use the WhatsApp number or the QR code that is appearing in your screen. If you don't get to have your questions answered live, then our investor relations team will answer thereafter. And now we'll leave you with Pedro and Roberto, and we'll see each other later. Pedro and Roberto, welcome to Itaú. The floor is yours.
Thank you, Renato. Have a wonderful morning.
Roberto, let's complete now 13 years since the merger of Itaú Unibanco. It is a long story, and you were there as the CEO, and I've been there. Well, you've been there for eight years in that effort to actually join these companies in a single business that would make sense so you could react to the market conditions and everything. What changed in that period? What have you seen? What is different here
From when, since 2008, we did that wonderful business together? Well, first of all, I would like to tell you, Pedro, that we had an enormous efficiency in that merger and that integration. I think that we integrated both banks very well. We joined the cultures, and we really took over the market, and really, it was a great success, and we knew what had to be done at the time.
Since that time, since that moment, 13 years ago, everything is very different. I think specifically, we have a very important, enormous impact in technology. A lot of things change in that sense. I believe that today, one of the big competitive differentials that we had at that time is we had agencies and a very broad knowledge of our business and our broader clients. I think that all of that changed with the new technologies, and I believe that now the number of branches decreased its importance. I think that data and availability also changed a lot, and this made all the challenges ever more challenging, ever bigger. Looking up ahead in the future, how do you see the competition with the fintechs and this new world that we are discussing up ahead?
In fact, it's a new world, but if we look to the past, the bank is going to be 100 years old soon, and we have obstacles, and we had risks, which every country, every company actually has to go through periods of good and bad. We had new challenges. We always had to face challenges, and we shouldn't decrease the degree of concern with what is happening with the pandemic, of course. A lot of things that were proprietary, that were built all throughout the time, today probably are less proprietary than they were in the past. I think that the network of branches, as you said, it loses a little bit of its importance, even though the capacity to combine remote service with physical service. Today the terminology omnichannel is a very big differential that we have.
The competition, they are trying to find access purely digital, and we are hoping for the success here. And I think that everybody that can transform their physical service, making it more working with, well, working better with the clients, understanding our role better, then we can compile these things. Well, I think that there are a few advantages here. There is that we still have a lot of clients, customers. We have a quality and a portfolio of services that is very differentiated, and I think that these are differentials that we need to explore. And now you should see that we are doing a transformation from the bank, going to the digital channels. That is spectacular. The speed with which we are changing is very big, and we are all moving to the cloud, which is essential microservices.
I believe that this change, technological change, will give us the level of competition, of competitiveness, actually, that we need in the digital world. I'm very optimistic in regards to that. We can see that the board of directors is really working out this change very well. How do you see Milton working as a CEO and the new executive board?
I believe that Milton can impress, can implement a rhythm, like you say, to the bank in a very short time that we realize we can see the degree of enthusiasm really from the organization. As you said, we are gathering extraordinary conditions, the brand talent, the client, the customer bases. What we need is to react. We need to react to the times in our position and ours as we have been the leaders.
And now, as the leaders, we not only have the competition, traditional competition that we've been facing, but we have new competition. In the end, this new competition has a new business model, and this makes us become the target. And as we become the target, you have a target of providing market share, talent, customers, margins. And at the first time, you need to defend your market share because you don't have the tools to leave the defensive that is backing you against the ropes. And then we can move to an attack moment. I think that we're preparing the bank for some years for that. As you said, we are working with the cloud. This is a project that we've worked for over two years. And at the end of the year, 50% of the bank will be processing cloud.
I think that the focus on the client, the introduction of NPS has changed the perception and the importance of focus on the client, on the customer. That needs to improve. I am certain, I am certain that the bank is, well, Milton will get to a point that he will be the captain of this comeback to the market with a more aggressive tone in the sense of growth than what it was over the last few years. In fact, we are trying to react, and this is not a good reaction. I think that we need to do things in the correct way. All of this goes through a profound cultural change. The business model changes, and you have a lot of changes that you need to change: internal processes, technology, and last but not least, the culture.
I believe that Milton is the right leadership, and the team that he brought to be part of the Board of Directors is ready. Everybody will be at this new, we are seeking the new growth cycle for Itaú Unibanco. I am very excited. I am very motivated. Not only the Executive Board, I see that all the teams, all the business units are very motivated, and Milton has taken over the bank for a very short while, and he has a lot of knowledge of the bank. He knows also he has gone through risk in several areas in the bank, so he has a very good basis, and he has a capacity to motivate people and a good leadership, so we are very optimistic, and I see that he formed an Executive Board that is very competitive, very competent.
We have the best thinking minds of the bank with him, and it's a young board of directors. He's a young guy, and he's open to changes. And this is the moment that we are living right now in the world where the changes are taking place in a very quick, with a lot of speed. So having a board of directors that is open to changes and a young leadership that is open to changes, and I think that you and I are giving incentive to these changes because we know that the bank needs to change, and we are changing. Therefore, all of this is part of the culture that is arriving to the digital world, and it has to be more open. It has to be more informal.
I think that Milton is the right person to implement this and to bring this very presently to the bank. I see these changes that are happening very well in the way that things are unfolding, agility, the speed with which the decisions are being taken, really. I believe that this change, the average age of our board of directors, and if you add the knowledge of that team, the entire team is very positive. I believe that all of this is working out very well. The culture that we have here in the bank, the changes in the bank are really moving on to the right direction. The bank continues to be very attractive. For youth, we've just won yet again awards saying that the bank is one of the more attractive starts for their careers.
The lead team for the third year in a row, they've won, well, one of the best places to work, and we have the executive overview, and in the end, maybe we have more capacity to attract talents and youth, and this change, this internal change in the bank will allow us to continue to be a big pull of attraction for talents. At the same time, we know that we are a fishbowl where all of these new, well, all of the new competition is trying to find talents, and what we need to do is to continue attracting extraordinary people, giving them opportunities, and we hope that they express themselves so they can be, so it can be good.
I think that the entirety of the bank, so we can gather all the intrinsic qualities, and we can use all the qualities of the richness of data that this organization has. We need to use this better so our capacity really to focus on the client and understand their needs and servicing them at the right time because it opens a sea of opportunities, and I believe that this new team is fully conscious of this, and we will try to find these additional details, and you mentioned talents. You mentioned that this is fundamental, and specifically in the cultural change that we will bring new people that will change, that will help in the cultural transformation, and these people need to think about the youth, and we are thinking about fintechs and the technology companies that navigate in the world, and they are our new competition.
We have very big challenges to face. Now you see that our capacity to face them, how do you see that?
We have the capacity to attract still an extraordinary amount of people. He said that they are aspirational to work. We see that there is a lot of research that we get a lot of information from the market. Obviously, the story of the new competition is a story that is very sellable.
It's a story that will allow for a lot of success, especially because of the perception that the competition has. They don't have the structure that we have. We need to change things that have brought us this far, but that may become or have become little snags at this point. Those who have joined the market more recently, they don't have the track record that we have.
The market will fund them without such high expectations on return rates because they are startups or starting. And new companies give the story of a dream that may be coming true soon, and you'll be part of that story. So there's a bit of an imbalance when it comes to the rules that are applied to us, the incumbents and the newcomers. There is a regulatory isonomy. And investors notice that there is an incentive way to incentivize the growth of these companies. And we have this market share market cap war, as I like to call it. But this has to do with this perception of the lack of balance between what we have to follow and what they follow as far as rules are concerned.
The way regulatory agencies handle or treat newcomers, the fintechs, giving them advantages that we don't get when it comes to capital, liquidity, money laundering, other things. There are a number of points that we have to comply with, and these companies don't have to comply with yet. There are a number of things, a number of bureaucratic things that we need to comply with that they don't, and at first, that can be looked at as an incentive for these companies to be created, create new companies with more competition, and that makes the market more efficient, and I believe these incentives will be reduced in the course of time because as these companies grow, they will have systemic risks, and then regulatory agencies will have to act.
If there is no systemic risk, then there is no reason why we should have to comply with all of those regulations, and then they could be reduced. And regulation should be equal for everyone. Everyone who works in a specific segment should have similar rules applied to them. So there should not be so much asymmetry between the rules applied to us and them. And these advantages will go away, I believe. And the capital markets will make that happen at the right time. So this is how I see it. This is a concern, and we need to raise this point with regulatory agencies, show the distortions that may lead to, and we have to have egalitarian treatment, right? And we have to accept reality as it is, but work towards making reality different, right?
Despite all of the differences there are, we have to provide the same level of service, the same quality to customers and clients. As far as quality and agility are concerned, and one in every four reais in the economy goes through Itaú. We have 70 petabytes of data, so if we learn how to use this, well, our ability or our possibilities to continue to grow substantially is great. We need to understand what the customers' and clients' needs are and provide them with what they need, and there is a world of opportunities. I think the whole team has grasped that, not only the executive committee, but the whole bank. The use of data goes through technology. Without being cloud-based, you can't have the amount of data that we aspire to have.
We wouldn't be able to use it, or we wouldn't know how to use it if we were not cloud-based. When we are cloud-based, then we'll probably have that as a competitive edge in the future, and not too distant future, mind you. This is probably going to be in a year or two. The business system is going to be very powerful. We spoke a lot about changes, and society is changing. This is something that has been another change that's coming up. A higher level of expectation that companies should be involved in society. ESG has become a new front for companies to work on, forcing them to be more sustainable.
With more society, and it's more integrated here, and we can see the surrounding of the company. I believe that Itaú always had a presence, and it's very intense all around it.
And we always took part on several activities, and we are always present, and we are always focusing on sustainability, not only our results, but also everything that we took part, and we have a long-term look, and we are always concerned about that. And more recently, during the pandemic, we've seen a more intense work alongside with society, and we understand that this is a very difficult moment for Brazil. And somehow, a company such as ours, with this presence in Brazil, we understood that we needed to have a stronger presence. I wanted you to talk a little bit about that. Well, in fact, this is a theme that is becoming ever more present, but I believe that it's important, as you've said, to remember that the organization follows this, has been following on that before, a long time before.
The Dow Jones Sustainability Index was created at the end of the 1990s. I believe it was 1999. And since its first edition, we've been there, since the inception. And we are the only company from Brazil that has been there since the beginning in the composition of this, which is a sign of how we take this very seriously since its origin, beyond the role of looking at society. And we have our institutes, our foundations, and I am certain that Itaú Unibanco is a reference in this world. Now, more than ever, recently, we have been providing answers that are very important. For two to three years ago, we signed the United Nations, the 10 commitments for the PNU that has been allocated for the important leaderships of the organization and its role as to implement these 10 commitments for sustainability.
This is going to be implemented in the day-to-day of the bank. This is not just a side work, side job. This has been integrated into the day-to-day of the bank, really, of the day-to-day business. We have really focused on diversity and gender and race. I believe that the organization is paying attention to all of these points. As you've remembered, last year, we were all caught by surprise the arrival of the pandemic and the coronavirus. At the end of March, the bank thought about creating somehow a structure of governance, and we will allocate resources that are good for this governance so we can try and help with the facing of this pandemic. We are really focused on healthcare.
We have banks, and we have the bank and the institute, and we raised over BRL 1.3 billion to be able to help with the facing, really, of this pandemic. As you've known, towards the end of the year, we announced, along with two other institutions, we are showing our concern that we had since before with the environmental issues. The bank has, not because it's something fashionable, but because we believe that this is important in and on itself, we've tried to go beyond its day-to-day functions. Today, we are really investing on sustainability, diversity. This is not new for us, and we have a very strong footprint in this world. I specifically am very proud of everything that we do with the bank and everything that we built with what we have been working with society alongside society.
Looking ahead in our executive committee, we can see that the board of directors. Well, we are very proud, and we have a lot of trustworthiness in what we are doing. So I would like to give now the floor to Milton and the executive board that will continue with today's session. I'm going to present, well, they're going to present a lot of things to you, the actions that we are doing to build the bank of the future. Milton, the floor is yours, and, as well, the floor is for the executive committee.
Thank you. Good morning. Good afternoon to many of you that are connected here. Thank you very much for your availability. It is a great pleasure to share the strategy, and we can have this talk with you today.
And also, I wanted to thank Pedro and Roberto for the message, for the words, for the trust. And this only increases our responsibility as a group. And I would like to tell you that all of these positive notes, this means 10% more budget at the end of the year. Jokes aside. Now, this is a great pride and joy to be the leader of this institution, be a part of the leadership. And I would like to present myself, Milton Maluhy. Since February 2021, I'm the CEO of Itaú Unibanco. And as it was mentioned by Renato at the beginning of this presentation, our objective today is to bring you a little bit of what we are doing to transform the bank. This is a transformation that should take place on several aspects. And this operation, more than ever, it has to be a transformation that is cultural.
I am anticipating myself. Before we talk about the future, I would also like to describe very briefly the bank that we have faced in the first months of management, in the first months of my tenure. We are always focused on people, and we have a very committed team, very qualified team. I reinforce that conviction every time that I talk to the team. More than that, the ownership posture of every one of our collaborators is historically well-known, and it generates a lot of trust in everything that we do. Now, we have an operation that is very broad. The biggest financial portfolio in the market to service millions of customers and all of their needs, our businesses.
We are talking about free digital bank accounts for natural persons until very complex financial operations for the main economic groups that are operating in Latin America. All throughout the 100 years of our history, we've transformed and reinvented ourselves, facing several challenges through this period. We've overcome the hyperinflation periods, and we've got new competition into the financial Brazilian system, and we are adding value to our main stakeholders, our customers, our shareholders, society, and collaborators. Nonetheless, we are conscious that all of the other challenges and the expectations that are now laying upon us are very different from what we have done before, and as I told you, because since I became the CEO, I talk daily with our customers, and I've learned a lot with them.
This wonderful experience has given us the clarity that we need to really do a profound and deep transformation of our organization. The consumer has had access to innovative experiences, and I'm not just mentioning to the financial sector. The use of technology, and here I'm using that word in a very broad sense, has improved and simplified our experience in the most mundane things, which is watching a series or watching a movie or requesting food or any online purchasing. Our customers expect the same experience when they look at the relationship that they have with our bank. The regulation of the sector is also evolving.
We are becoming ever more dynamic and competitive in the arrival of new arrangements, for example, Pix at the end of the year, and the perspective of the O pen Banking, which is bringing new challenges, but also great opportunities to offer a better service for our customers. The immense possibilities that technology has brought to improve the possibilities, the experiences, alike to all the different business models that we've observed all throughout the world, has provided a wonderful learning opportunity, and Itaú continues to be the leader in our sector, and the technology is the great we make this technology allows for the improvement of services for our customers, and in that sense, to increase the capacity of the bank, we subcontracted over the last 12 months. We hired actually 4,000 collaborators for our IT pole.
We have one of the biggest IT poles in Brazil, as if we were an IT company. Now, we start with a base of 60 million customers that interact through us, through our different channels. We have over 4,000 physical branches, apps with great evaluations from the 24 million digital customers and WhatsApp and so on and so forth. I have told you that we have all the tools that we need, and that's why the transformation has to be cultural. We need to build a bank that is more efficient, that is simpler, and more agile. This principle is working ever more for the customer and hearing the customer and learning with the criticism and be humble enough to understand their mistakes. At the same time, we shouldn't be afraid of making mistakes.
Now, the good news is that this transformation has started. We need to give it intensity and speed. As soon as I took over, we restructured our high board. We reduced one level of our structure, and we eliminated the jobs such as executive vice presidents, directors, executive directors. We are all directors. Some of us are members of the board of directors. The board of directors is broader, with more autonomy and closer to the teams, with more capacity and speed to the decision-making process. I have everyone that is here to talk about the initiatives that are part of this cultural transformation. We have a broad program of efficiency that will allow us to become ever more competitive and more agile. Growth is the priority thing in our businesses, and you will hear about that, and even in those where we have the very relevant participation.
Besides that, the reformulation of commercial models that we've been doing in some areas, which is the case of investment products, for example, should provide us with better learning opportunities and creating a better perception of value and intensifying the relationship with our customers. All throughout this presentation, you will see for this talk, we will talk that in the wholesale world, we are offering a completely different experience to our customers, regardless of the channel that they use to access us. We are a very relevant player in payments, but we need to evolve ever more. We have an enormous potential to use data to deepen into the understanding and the behavior of the customers. Of course, we will do the correct offerings. We changed our positions, and we innovated in several products.
Just to mention one case, in real estate financing, for example, we just launched new products, and we reduced our rates, increasing the turnover of our operation, and as you know, real estate credit is a very important product for our customers, probably one of the financial decisions that is the most relevant that a person or a family will take, and this makes it one of the biggest products for increasing the relationship, one of the best products to increase the relationship with our customers, and we are also becoming the leaders in the banking sector. We are providing credits to the agribusiness, and this has been growing very relevant. We have a very robust pipeline for the operations for investment banking, and we are also evolving into the offering and automation of our treasury products.
It is clear that the culture that we are seeking is much more digital, and this is not just simply using the best technology that is available. Here at Itaú, being digital is not just interacting with the customers in a very remote way or virtual way. Being digital goes beyond that. Being digital is to essentially have a focus, absolute focus into the real pains and demands of our customers. Companies that are completely digital have cultural and operational characteristics that differentiate them from the competition. To us, to be digital means to be able to service our customers when, where, when, and how they want to be serviced.
For some, this means taking care of all the needs, banking needs, through our super app, but also for some others, this means having a very specific service with a financial consultant that will help the customers to make the best decisions with the offering of the best products and services of the market. With that objective, several aspects are essential for the digital transformation of the company. Of course, the first one is the intensive use of technology in all the areas of the operation. This is a simple automation and also the new creation of new ways to interact with the customers. The application of technology has increased and the capacity to create new products and experiences that are really differentiated. Secondly, innovation has to be a part of the day-to-day of everyone inside of the bank and not just the task of a team or a group.
Thirdly, we need to have more agility in the development and implementation of new solutions. Therefore, decreasing the launch into the market, time to market, adjusting the timing to the customer whenever needed. And fourth, we need to organize ourselves into multidisciplinary teams using new ways of working, which is the integrated communities. As a part of that, we have to have obsession for efficiency, as I mentioned before, using technology to leverage our commercial potentials and increasing our capacity to offer products and solutions that are more competitive for our customers. We are trying to build a very diverse team to gain more autonomy and service our customers better. We know that we have a few challenges because of structural issues, but this is also a priority agenda, and we've advanced in a very important way.
To solve the problems of the customers is a mission of all the collaborators of the bank without exception. And we have a long and broad way up ahead. We want to grow, and for that, we want to be sustainable, establishing relationships that are healthy and on the long term with our customers, managing our risks, our core activity of everything that we do, and generating positive impacts for the environment and society. Now, my colleagues from the board of directors will do a deep dive in all the themes that I mentioned. And I believe specifically that, in group, we will face all the challenges that we have up ahead, specifically cultural transformation. I'm very happy that the board of directors is a very qualified team, very qualified group, very trained. They have great capabilities, and it's great that you get to know every one of them.
They have enthusiasm, and it is this group that will allow me to conduct the bank all throughout our journey with the 90,000 collaborators. Everybody is responsible for this transformation. Before I give the floor to Broedel to talk about the financial expectations and our efficiency program, I would like to show you our new marketing campaign that is bringing a new change from one word that displays our position in the market and makes a difference and shows a new moment of the bank. You will see that this word starts with everything that I mentioned up until now, but more than that, it brings a lot of humility to the way that we should face our challenges. Thank you very much, and I will come back to close the event and take part in the Q&A session. See you in a little bit.
[Foreign language]
I think my specialist in investments from Itaú has gone crazy. [Foreign language]. You see, it is recommended investments from Itaú, but also from other institutions. Itaú has over 1,000 investment products from Itaú and from other institutions as well. I would love to invest my money in one of these technology companies, you know? Well, I didn't know it, but Itaú did know it. Itaú has some technology investments. How did Itaú know about that? You know those foreign technology companies? Itaú has a number of funds that invest in them. Itaú was made for you. Let's see what we told.
I don't feel good about giving my credit card number on the internet. Well, you can generate a different card on Itaú just for that specific purpose, a digital card. Where does Itaú find these great ideas? Well, they find these great ideas from the clients because the clients give them these ideas. I don't know how the clients come up with those things. That's so Itaú, you know?
Thank you, Milton, and good morning, everyone. I am Alexandre Broedel, and I am the CFO of Itaú Unibanco. And to start my presentation, I'd like just to briefly talk about our expectations for 2021. As you know, our guidance was published at the start of the year, and a lot has changed since then. We believe that the economic effects caused by the pandemic are going to be overcome as the vaccination rollout improves.
We need to understand how the current scenario has impacted our expectations for the year. Our guidance still has the best expectations for the bank. Starting off with the credit portfolio, in our most recent and our latest earnings call, we saw a 4.2% growth. This was supported not only by the individual credit portfolio but also corporate credit portfolio, and that was a pleasant surprise. This performance in wholesale has to do with the activities in the capital market, especially in the issuance of debts, and that created a good opportunity for our credit operations. In the coming quarters, we expect growth to continue, boosted by the individual credit portfolio, especially real estate loans and vehicle loans. Also, because we expect credit to go back in credit account as well. Our expectation already thought of a slower growth at the start of the year.
That was based off of not only the negative impacts and the seasonality of the period, but also on the slower uptake for credit loans and credit. And our results in the first quarter were in line with our expectations. For the coming quarters, we expect our financial margin to be accelerated not only because of the credit portfolio's growth, but also because of the specific individual credit lines that we expect to grow as well. In the second quarter, we already see a growth in these lines, and that underscores our expectation for the rest of the year. Our financial margin with the market went from BRL 4.9 billion to BRL 6.4 billion. We were really well positioned, and that allowed us to navigate well through the greatest volatility we had in this period. Now, when you look at credit costs, we saw a 31.9% reduction in the quarter.
That is an impact of the credit quality we have in our portfolio. Delinquency over 90 days is a good reference. We have had our best figures ever, despite the challenging economic scenario. We can see that it is reasonable to expect that we're going to be very close to our credit cost guidance. As for our fees and insurance results, we expected a weaker first quarter, especially due to the slacker economic activity we have had in the first quarter in comparison to the fourth quarter last year, and performance this quarter was close to what we expected, but with a different composition. These results were boosted by the pandemic effects, especially the credit card and debit card chains. They were offset by the investment banking and brokerage lines due to the strong activities in the capital markets.
As for our expenses, now coming from interest, we see a 6.6% drop in the quarter in spite of growing investments in our businesses and technologies. This is even slightly better than what we expected for operations in Brazil. Performance was more positive than we expected, and not only due to the negative effects caused by the effects of the dollar versus real impact. That put more pressure on our expenses in the region and an impact on our performance in the quarter. Now, I'll talk a little bit about a more technical point. Our income tax rate was extraordinarily higher this quarter because of the lower credits that we had. That naturally is not to be repeated in the coming quarters when we'll probably have an income tax rate that is going to be lower and better normalized in line with our expectations.
I'd like to change topics and talk about an important pillar for the bank as our strategy is concerned, which is efficiency. We have always focused on cost efficiency. Other subjects that have been mentioned by Milton are going to be explained throughout this event. It's clear now that what has brought us this far is no longer enough to keep on sustaining us from now on. We have to go beyond what we have already achieved. To do that, we need to strengthen our efficiency culture on every level of our organization. We need to constantly question what we do and look at possibilities to automate workflows and processes. This is not a beginning, middle, and end activity. This is a new way to conduct business and to make choices. This is now part of our everyday life.
We currently have 16 work streams for efficiency, each of which is sponsored by a senior executive. We have meetings periodically to monitor how they have been progressing. This is a careful process and work that is already presenting good results. We already have 1,200 initiatives planned, over 400 already being rolled out. These initiatives can be minor activities to reduce waste, as well as major restructuring projects. As you've probably seen, we have a non-recurring allowance that was made for this first quarter relating to our service models and the retail bank. This is to be carried out in the coming two years. This is going to yield great results in quality and efficiency. In the first quarter of 2021, our initiatives for our initiative program already led to a BRL 500 million drop in expenses quarter on quarter.
All of these changes in our approach regarding efficiency have one single objective, which is to better service our clients while also keeping us more competitive with our products and more agile in performing our projects with simplification and digitalization of our processes. I am adamant that with all of the changes that we are bringing about, we are on the right path to achieve our objective, which is to reduce sequentially and nominally our operating costs in the coming three years. And now I'll turn the floor back over to André Rodrigues for him to go into the details around the transformations that are being carried out in the Retail Banking segment. Thank you.
Hello, I am André Rodrigues. I'm the head for Retail Banking, and I'm also in charge of products, digital channels, and CRM.
So we just heard about our efforts in seeking more efficiency, and that is directly related to customer service. As the bank simplifies its structures, it becomes lighter and more agile, focusing on what really matters. For that reason, to be able to be part of the new competitive scenario and to meet the needs of our clients, we are developing very much in Retail Banking, reorganizing all of our operations. We have iVarejo 2030, so iRetail. We are reorganizing our businesses. There is an integrated business approach, which was based on customer feedback and analysis that we carried out, a multidisciplinary organization of the organization without any fear of questioning the status quo. And we have launched the iVarejo 2030, and this is already being rolled out and implemented. This is a very challenging journey of transformation, and we have prepared in a very special way.
We created the transformation office with dozens of our best people, 100% focus on iVarejo 2030. We have trained dozens of people in tools for them to focus on, or hundreds of people rather, for them to be the multipliers, and at the end of this year, we're going to have about 75% of the project already rolled out and implemented, and the rest of it will be completed in 2022. We believe that to keep our strategy up to date and in tune with what clients need and what the market requires, it's crucial that the transformation office becomes a permanent department so that we can continue to continuously improve and change. I'll highlight two points caused by the project: the phygital initiative and the omnichannel strategy, and then the e-commerce project through which digital channels are going to be bolstered with our digital sales capacity being multiplied.
And at the end, I'm going to share with you a real case, a concrete case that shows you how powerful this transformation can be as the iVarejo 2030 looks. This is the SMEs project with Itaú Unibanco. The first one has to do with how we service our clients, being phygital and omnichannel. Being phygital means that the client can choose how they want to interact with us. We're going to offer them a bank that is 100% digital with the convenience of the physical branches, the brick-and-mortar branches. So we'll have not only the digital channels, but they'll have their managers available at extended hours on whatever media they choose, so WhatsApp, email, telephone, and they can go to an Itaú branch whenever they choose to. We believe in the complementary aspects of digital and physical worlds, and we believe in the ability to address clients' needs.
We're orchestrating our new channels with clients, creating an omnichannel strategy that is quite practical and pragmatic. With that, we can create new points of contact and have conversations that are well in context with our clients using all the technology and data the bank has. So say a client is using one of the channels of the bank, say the ATM, and they want to simulate the acquisition of a product. That information is going to be used. That data is going to be used to generate context for other channels. It could be a push on their app or a physical activity, maybe a manager calling them, so that that can give clients better support and increase conversion rates in comparison to cold calling, for example.
This type of approach will increase conversion by three to four times, sometimes even more, and that will make the clients much more interested and much more comfortable in comparison to other traditional approaches. And our clients can already request support from a specialist or a manager online on our digital media. We call it Click to Human. That has already been increasing our sales conversion two to three-fold, and that should continue to grow in the course of time, especially with products that call for more specialization, be it credit or insurance, for example. This online-offline connection has led to an increase in BRL 2 billion in new products. This stresses how good the phygital strategy is, phygital and omnichannel, of course. And our Itaú app is to become a very powerful e-commerce platform.
We are wherever our clients are, and we know that our clients want to do banking on the phone. So the phone is the preferred channel of our clients, so it has to be our priority. We have been increasing investments on the Itaú app so that it will become a one-stop shop, giving the client all of the products they may need. This digital journey includes co-creation with clients, a test-and-learn culture, and best-in-class solutions with an end-to-end view. And clients can already recognize this change. Our NPS of our app is 78 points, and it is our mission to quadruple our sales on digital channels so that they will account for approximately 50% of the bank's revenue. Also, to support that, we created the Live program.
The idea is to change and transform how we offer products in a new operation model with new analytic solutions, smart tagging, and ad tag technologies. And this is just a quick summary of the initiatives that we are developing with our iVarejo 2030 project. And this is certainly going to lead us to a fundamentally different Retail Banking structure than we have today. And we're client-centered, and not only saying that as a fad, but it really reflects our business model that it is developed based on client needs with the expectation to generate value in the long run, seeking to create new bonds and to make them ever more faithful and ever more loyal clients.
This is the iVarejo 2030 initiative, and I think it would be interesting to talk about another very important business that may be in a more advanced stage of evolution with very important achievements, but still with a lot of opportunities to be seized, which is our SME operations. Our operation has doubled in size in the past four years. With that, we went from an uncomfortable third-place ranking position to leaders in SMEs. And we've created that with a great credit portfolio, being resilient in moments of crisis, and with a lot of selective products in the process. That was not a simple process. It didn't happen by chance, and it really focused on establishing a business model that would be or should be sustainable in the long term and driven by client needs that arose from the reorganization of our organization.
Some of the elements related to that are the smoothness journey on everyday activities with channels that interact well with each other. Then credit from a client perspective, not products only, with regional teams being retrained and the commercial front being the first item in line. Customization on scale, but with more autonomy for our staff, and lastly, consulting services for our customers whenever they need to make the most important changes in subjects that are not so everyday sometimes. This value requires a great change in our culture. We're going from a mass approach, so delivering products in a mass perspective, but now with structured data. We understand the needs of our clients, and we propose the best solutions for each case. This new model has risen the satisfaction levels in comparison to the competition, and we now have a competitive edge in the market as well.
You can't grow sustainably without customer satisfaction. This journey has now come to an end. We're improving and enhancing this model for the whole SME clients, especially smaller companies. And last but not least, we're creating an ecosystem for partnerships to also offer non-financial solutions and increasing the number of interactions and points of contact with our clients, creating more engagement and more contribution from the bank and partners to the client's journey. We still have a lot of opportunities to work with and in different markets, and this will allow us to experience high rates of growth all throughout the next years. And our perception is that we want to broaden the leadership in the market, and we want to be the first choice for our customers.
Talking about growth, we have my colleagues that will talk about payments that will have a very relevant vector of growth for the customers of the bank. Now we are incorporating a series of capabilities that are differentiated for the bank.
Thank you, André. Good morning. I'm also André Sapoznik. I am responsible for payments, operations, and marketing. Now, from this moment on of 2021, we started to work with the payments area here in Itaú Unibanco, and this structure has our businesses of debit and credit cards, our Rede network, our cash management, and iti, our digital portfolio. Now, this is a fundamental group of discussions so we can best service our customers since 90% of all the interactions of the customer with the bank involve some sort of payment.
Therefore, solutions for payment are essential to establish with our customers a very close relationship that is based on frequency, recurrence, and relevance. This relationship allows us to have very important information on the activity of the operations of the customers. And from this operation, we position ourselves to offer adequate services for the financial lives of people and companies, whether it's credit, investments, insurance, and so on and so forth. Now, this payment area has 44 million customers. We're talking about natural persons and companies. And in the end of 2020, we've processed BRL 10 trillion of several transactions. This is the equivalent of BRL 320,000 per second in every second of the year. Currently, out of every four BRL that go through Brazil, one BRL goes through Itaú. And our mission is we want to see the origin and the differential destination for payments here in Brazil.
And now we have a few principles. The first principle is talking about the development of an impeccable experience: simple, quick, intuitive. And this is an experience where the customer is not exposed to problems, but if they should happen, they have to be resolved very quickly. Secondly, we have to talk about the utilization of information to understand the behavior of customers, and therefore we can position ourselves to offer credit, differentiated credit solutions, and for investments as well. And we have to understand technology as a competitive advantage. Therefore, the platform that is in constant update and that can address us continuously to see the pains of our customers in a more productive way. And the fourth principle is always trying to find the leadership, and this is how we will always offer competitive advantage and offerings.
Our agenda is for growth, for the growth of the customer base, for the intensity with which the customers have a relationship with us, and the growth of opportunities that the customers provide us in proposing the financial solutions. In the credit card world, we are the leaders who are the market share, and we are trying to find in 2021, we are trying to grow significantly the basis of customers, whether if it's leveraging the growth of the bank where we offer the debit and credit cards, or because of our own brands: Itauc ard, Credicard, Hipercard, or even we are using several partnerships with several operations: wholesale and industry. For example, Magalu, Pão de Açúcar , Extra, Assaí, Ponto, BIG, Carrefour, Ipiranga, CVC, Polishop, Latam, Azul, Vivo, Fiat, Volkswagen, Ford, Samsung, Mitsubishi. We have a lot of partnerships.
Besides that, besides the growth, we are promoting a very important renovation of our technology platform of cards that will bring more velocity and efficiency. Now, in the operation of the Rede, the objective is to help the companies that are our customers to sell more. We are developing an operation with a culture of services and technology for wholesale. This is an operation that is agile, innovative, light, open, integrated, and very good to work with. Digitalization of the customers and their connection with our several solutions will be one of the competitive strengths of Itaú. The acquisition and several other financial services inside of the bank, this will lead to the customer more options so they can really focus in their business and they can focus in their cash flow. We are going to help retail and wholesale to sell more and better.
iti as a digital portfolio, and now it's becoming an offering for a digital bank. It's a proposal that is for the public that wants to solve everything via cell phone. And this really coincides with youth, and it was launched in November of 2019 with a proposal value proposition in the simplification of payments and the movement of money through a simple account. Now, iti, besides being a full account, offers credit cards, personal credit, and other financial services so that the customers can use iti as a bank that is ever more complete in their day-to-day operations. And we continue to work intensely so that the new evolutions of the proposal of iti are available all throughout the next weeks and months. And well, how have the customers received this?
We are very satisfied with the evolution of iti, and we've managed to achieve over 7 million customers, and we are working to gain the trust of 1 million new customers every month. These customers have brought their main banking operations, and they have registered even their key, their Pix keys with us, and this makes iti their main interaction channel, and iti also has a valuable contribution for Itaú Unibanco from the standpoint of technology. This is because iti has been developed in a technological matrix that is absolutely renewable, completely built in microservices that work with cloud computing and a modern philosophy for composable banking.
This allows for different modules of businesses and financial services that can be added in an orchestrated way so we can service our customers, and this generates more speed, more speed of growth for our operations, and it allows us to be in synchronicity not only with what the customer needs today, but also with what they are going to need tomorrow. This modularity and flexibility is very important for us so that iti is a solution of long-term relationship, and some of our customers sometimes do one transaction with us, and they don't keep contact. Now, this first transaction can generate a long-lasting relationship, and that is complete. For example, the customer that will work with us, credit or buying a vehicle, iti can become an excellent relationship platform for these customers. Isn't it, Zancani? Now you can talk.
You're right, André. Thank you very much.
Good morning, everyone. It is a great pleasure to be here with you. I am Alexandre Zancani. I have been for one year and a half in Itaú. I'm responsible for the financing and credit for wholesale and retail for the lever of digital acquisition of customers. And since the beginning of the year, I just took over the responsibility for credit for the natural persons and the recovery of assets business. I would like to talk about how has the journey for the evolution of the finance business and for the guarantee of wholesale and retail credit, a business where Itaú was the market leader, but where we had the growth much lower than the average of growth between 2015 and 2019, and we were overpaying. Our main competition from the private banking has surpassed us, have surpassed us.
Since these are businesses with low cost of credit, they bring stability to the portfolio and they release a potential for growth in other businesses that have more spread and volatility, which didn't happen. These are businesses that are still very little. They're not really exposed to digital competition, and they have a broad space for growth when we compare it to other markets. We have businesses with high relevance in the lives of the customers. They generate a connection, a long-term connection. These are businesses that open for the possibility of new customers. Once we take part into the journey of the customer as a whole, and a great deal of the origination starts in non-banking channels, therefore, sea of opportunities. The big news is that the changing of the game started in 2020.
We are managing to achieve a growth that is very good in these businesses, whether we're talking production, 80% of growth between 2018 and 2019, 2021, sorry, and also in the portfolio of results in growth with 40%. And this is the result not only of the evolution of these markets in and on itself, but also the strong gain in competitiveness for Itaú. To give you two examples, more in the change of performance in vehicles, the market share of production left from 11%-15% all throughout the next 12 months. And in real estate, our market share for production, well, has left from 19%-30%.
We are trustworthy that this trajectory will intensify in the next quarters, and remembering that this share is observed in the origination, but it takes some time for it to really become a portfolio market share and mainly in the generation of results. Therefore, whether we're talking about the inertial result of the portfolio, but the trends of the evolution of the market movements are very positive, and they have the potential for more than doubling the generation of value for these businesses all throughout the next four years, and this is the objective that we're pursuing, and we are very confident that we will reach, but what makes us so confident in this continuous growth? Well, first of all, the credit market has behaved in a very surprisingly good way all throughout the pandemic.
We managed to deal with the liquidity challenges that really affected many of our portfolios with solutions that are creative, effective, and pro-customer. But the most important reason for trust is because of the business strategy that we adopted that has become, has shown itself very correct and will generate, will bear a lot of fruit. To understand our strategy, we have to understand in a very simple and didactic way the metrics that together result in the evaluation of the competitiveness in our markets. We have three metrics. The first metric is visibility, which represents how much of the credit demand in the market we have, and we've managed to visualize, and at least have an opportunity to take part here in vehicles. We've had an evolution of visibility from 40% to 59%.
And in the business of real estate, we had real estate credit from 44%-57%, which are very relevant gains. Second metric is the approval, which represents how much of that demand we actually managed to see. We also made it viable with the offering of credit that is good for the customer, but profitable for the bank. And here we have jumps between 10%-50% depending on the channel and the product. And all of that with the maintenance of bad debt at very good, healthy levels, and also conversion, which really represents our capacity to be the final choice of the customer. And these are the metrics that the team is starting to evolve. And more than actually metrics for conversion and marginal conversions, these are very structuring pillars that we've really invested to achieve these transformations.
The first pillar is the digital transformation and cultural transformation. The credit for retail or the business is one of the businesses that really was one of the first ones to migrate to the integrated communities. This is a radical way in which the businesses are, new way in which the businesses are operating, new areas, product, technology, design, operations, credit, marketing. They are all integrated into the business. The silos are broken down, and the multidisciplinary teams are organized by squads with the objectives that are very clear all throughout the entire value chain of the customer. We are starting to operate in a more in the way of a tech company. The investments in our platforms, they started to be phased as something priority and strategic, and the results are very exciting.
Now, with only 25% of the modernization journey of the platforms that has been completed, a new model has brought gains such as the increase in the capacity for deploy of new functionalities, 194%, a reduction in the lead time, 77%, and an increase in productivity of 87%. But these numbers that can really bring your attention, they are only metrics for the path, and they're only a means to an end, and not the end. The changes are cultural because more than producing more and in a more efficient way, the focus, the total focus of each of the teams starts to be generating value for the customers. Productivity is what in fact changes the behavior and solves the pains, concrete pains and specific pains of our customers.
This has been very nice to observe the evolution of the motivations of the team with products with clear purposes and an overview of customer products that are very aspirational, working with a big dream and with a logic of achievement where the result speaks louder, louder than plans, than projects, and even louder than deliveries and more so. This is a team that has a passion to face our problems up ahead and the relevant pains of our customers. There is a trend to decrease the weight of the cultural aspect of the business, but I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt that this has been one of the main factors, critical factors for success, for a journey of transformation. The second pillar, the evolution of the platforms, data platforms and decisioning of the bank.
I am certain that we are building one of the decisioning platforms that are one of the most modern in the market. Everything is working in the cloud and with the treatment of streaming of data in real time with integrated data of pricing, CRM, and all of that with the strong possibility for digital permutation, giving a high possibility for personalization, and the rollout of this platform has been initiated, but we are still going to have a sea of opportunities up ahead, and here, once again, the importance of the cultural change, which is very relevant, which yes, we have analytic and technical teams, but they have to work not only in the control and optimization, but also with a focus in the viabilization of what we still cannot provide, which is still not viable. The third pillar is the evolution of the business models.
Now we have more and more clear that in the journey of financing, we have to take part in a very integrated way in the journey, broader journey for the acquisition of the customers. Now, eventually, we need to be more transparent. We need to stop being a pain in the process of acquisition to become, in fact, a solution here. One of the differentials that we have explored in a very aggressive way is the anticipation of the agenda of Open Banking with a lever of digital acquisition that is externalizing our APIs with a strong expansion in the non-banking channel and with a model of partnership and the working with partnerships, whether if it's on-site or in environments that are completely remote and digital. We practically do not talk about making business not only with customers Itaú.
Itaú has to want to embrace Brazil, and our products and channels start to be worked and being developed to solve the needs of every single Brazilian. And we want more. We are working so that the solutions of a specific pain can be only the entry-level door for the participation in the financial solutions for all of our customers. And if this is an inexorable fact that trend for a bundle of financial solutions, we're working to make viable the possibility of a rebundle through an offering of products that is very specific, yes, but with a login that is unique and universal and working in an integrated way with the relationship with the platform relationship with the customers that has a potential for complementary options. And as I told you, we have good reasons and my enthusiasm with the evolution of the credit portfolio of the bank.
And we are managing to, in a very structured way, very fundamental way, and at the same time, very quick and very agile, to be able to leverage what the bank has, which is best in data, brand, and customers, with an agenda to build competitiveness in digital solutions completely directed to solve the pains of our customers. And the results have pointed that we are on the right path. Now, last but not least, I focus my presentation on the credit business with guarantees because this is where we really evolved in a very clear way with the integrated committees with technological credits and in the review of business models that we have. Now we have to highlight that we started the same agenda for evolution in the management of clean credit of the bank as a whole.
Now, here we are going to be more cautious given that the point of market share from the inception is higher and the complexity for change is higher, and the agenda for the management of credit during the pandemic has demanded more focus in the management of the portfolio that has already been implemented than was already existing. Now, what we adopted. We have a new plan during the pandemic. We want to restart the agenda for the expansion of the credit through a portfolio that is very healthy. And this added to the learnings of the transformational agenda, the digital transformational agenda, and the pipeline of the agenda already in place with the credit platforms. This opens a great avenue for growth right from the second quarter of 2021, and this is what I wanted to share with you.
And now I give the floor to Carlos Constantini, who will talk a little bit about the evolution in WMS.
Thank you, Zancani. My name is Carlos Constantini, in charge of wealth management services at WMS. Wealth Management and Services. Here we look after the whole journey of our clients. And to do that as best as we can, we're structured in a few pillars. So we have resource management. It could be direct management through Itaú Asset or with third parties with Itaú Fund of Funds. The second has to do with distribution. It has different models and services, different segments from private banking to retail. And the third has to do with offers and consulting and the experience of investing, also the digital investing experience.
The fourth block is the infrastructure for all of that. It is the department for products and services for investors where we also have institutions in Brazil. The first message I'd like to convey here has to do with growth. We are market leaders in basically all of the fronts of these four pillars I've mentioned. Our market share has been stable, but our objective is undoubtedly to continue to grow and gain market share, for which reason we are investing and repositioning WMS constantly and all the time. We have to evolve and develop to meet clients' needs. Our value proposition was put together with them based on trust, simplicity, and sophistication. Trust will be seen in the unbiased recommendation. Our specialists are in line with what customers want, and we have open architecture, what we've been doing for over 20 years in WMS.
Simplicity is what we seek to have all the time. We're here to make their lives easier. We understand that investments are not an end in themselves, but a means to an end. That's why we are working on íon, íon in Portuguese, and we're looking for inspirations everywhere in the financial market in Brazil and abroad. íon is being soft launched. It has its soft launch now, and it's going to be growing quite fast, also because we're hiring specialists all over Brazil. Soon enough, all segments, even those who are not Itaú clients, will have a chance to use that tool. Sophistication, the third part in our value proposition, has to do with good return rates, alternative forms of investments, the use of algorithms to have a well-balanced portfolio, the use of data to customize offers that are made to each client.
It has to do with democratization as well. We believe that information must be given to every one of our clients. That's why products like Carteira Itaú will allow clients to invest as little as BRL 1 in a number of assets. That was put together based on clients' pain points who don't understand or who don't like to keep up with all of the asset classes or clients who don't have a minimum ticket to make these allocations. Here, they actually can do that through us using BRL 1 only, for example. This is a very successful product. It's the greatest asset allocation product in Brazil, even though it was launched only in 2020, and it already has over BRL 31 billion under management. We have that through beta funds, through passive funds, and ETFs amount to over BRL 80 billion under management.
The last one we launched, and that offers exposure to 10 international Big Techs. In just a few days, it already had millions or rather thousands of investors. We worked very hard with Itaú Asset, and in two years, we have managers that put together 15 different strategies for Brazil and the international market with a lot of diversification for our clients. We had a BRL 40 billion increase, BRL 61 billion reais, all of that based on performance fees. We became leaders in this market in only two years. Innovation wasn't only about the model itself, but also in choices. We have Quantamental, for example, and Quantamental has a team that is composed of eight robots and humans, and they work together to work out the best strategies. We have beta with ETFs. We have alpha with multi-managers, and we can see our commitment to growth.
From the first to the second quarter, we have consolidated our presence in the largest platforms in the market. The Itaú Asset products can be bought on any of these platforms. Speaking of open platforms, what we've been doing for over 20 years in WMS is fund of funds. We have over BRL 270 billion under management. It's had a 46% CAGR in the past five years. We have dozens of managers managing over 1,300 funds, and there are multi-management funds as well. Through that, investors can have access to a selected group of funds. So multi-funds, the greatest product in the industry has over 100,000 investors already, and they can invest as little as BRL 100. We are very large, and we know that the commitment we have to the market, the influence we can have in responsible investment.
The products we offer to our clients also have ESG filters. All of them have it. So every company, every investment that Itaú Asset makes takes ESG into account. We have been PRI signatories since 2008. We had the ALAS Prize awarded to us in 2020, and that's a commitment of Itaú Unibanco. The asset management is a better part of WMS. Distribution offers and consulting are also part of this journey. And we're also making changes on those fronts so that we can continue to be market leaders on private banking and Retail Banking. We're the largest private bank in Brazil with BRL 650 billion under management and over 450 specialists. And WMS has a more technical front to support clients, and we work with private banking with exclusive funds, as I mentioned.
We work with Itaú BBA as well so that we can more and more see our clients, individuals, and corporations in a holistic way, and we have Itaú Unibanco also servicing private banking. Private banking products that are exclusive, and we work closely with the client, and the client can choose what they want to do with or when they want to have humans helping them or robots helping them, so physical or digital services. We are market leaders, and íon is going to get to, or íon is yet to get to private banking as well. So íon , or íon , what is that? It's a new investment experience that we're going to be offering our clients, whatever segment they're in, and soon enough, whether or not they have a current account with Itaú.
That's something that is new not only for Itaú and for Itaú clients, but for the whole market. It was created as an app, and it soon evolved into a full journey with four points: communication, transactions, monitoring, and consulting and support, and all of that was thought of based on a human and automated process. We revolutionized architecture, and we use technology using the cloud and using APIs and modernizing our brokerage as well. In many cases, we had a double jump in these evolutions. MVP is already working. We already have a few thousand clients who have been giving us feedback and allowing us to improve our products. You have daily return rates, daily yields, and you can navigate your products as if you were browsing through Netflix for a series.
News items will be seen by clients as Instagram stories, something that everyone is familiar with, and all of the transactions are based on e-commerce platforms, so you don't have that feeling that you're going to go from one app to another to be able to trade. And there's a lot more to come, and I would like to invite you to keep your eyes peeled for the new items coming. We're going to have the investment aggregator soon, which will show you investment possibilities inside and outside the bank. We'll have a window, so to speak, as well for us to see orders and the investment consultancy, which I believe is a great opportunity as well, and the app comes along with a great number of specialists being hired all over Brazil. We have 22 offices that were open already this year.
We expect to open 90 by the end of this year and 130 in 2022, and that will give opportunities to the bank and íon to have the best experience with human and digital services, and there's another message I want to convey here, which is alongside clients, we're creating a new model to grow, which we believe is the investment model of the future. We carefully analyze the pain points our clients showed, and we created íon and using data, we are creating offers for clients, whatever their level, whatever their possibilities of investments, and together, we're going to have consulting going for clients, leading them to better results thanks to this joint effort.
This experience is going to be ideal for larger and smaller investors, and this will have support from specialists all over the country, and their compensation is very transparent as well as in line with clients' interests. And this is our objective, and growth is going to be a consequence of that. The market will continue to be wholeheartedly transformed, and I'm very excited about these changes. I'm now turning the floor over to Flávio Souza, who will now tell us what's going on in Itaú BBA. Thank you, or Itaú BBA, rather.
Hello, thank you, Constantini. I am Flávio Souza. I am the CEO of Itaú BBA. I'd like to start off by setting the stage about our activities. Itaú BBA is the business area of Itaú Unibanco and responsible for the relationship with the 20,000 largest companies in Brazil.
We, based on a value proposition which rests on the following pillars, focus on long-term relationships with our clients. We offer a thorough product and service portfolio that will meet all of the needs of our clients, from more basic to more sophisticated needs, and we do that through a very specialized type of service provided, which is carried out by a team that is recognized and acknowledged by their technical and ethical experience and supported by the solidity of Itaú Unibanco. Itaú BBA, through the relationship with medium-sized and large-sized companies, accounted for about 15% of total revenues of Unibanco and Itaú Unibanco, and that is composed of a mix that really represents who we are. Approximately 55% comes from credit products. In the past two years, our credit portfolio grew by 48%, and it surpassed the BRL 310 billion mark.
The other 45% of our revenue comes from a diverse spectrum of services we offer our clients, so investment banking, cash management, FX, and investments. We have teams in Brazil and abroad that are dedicated and specialized in servicing larger companies, those whose revenue surpasses BRL 50 million or rather BRL 500 million, and they have specialized services for 16,000 mid-sized companies that have over BRL 30 million income a year. We have specialized segments for agribusiness and real estate and T echnology, as well, so that we can monitor them and support them in hard times as well. Another highlight is our investment bank and our distribution department. Consistently, in the past decade, we have ranked in the top positions in M&A, capital markets, and also for the distribution of fixed income, be it in the amount of transactions and as well as the financial volume involved.
This performance is really a reason for us to be proud. Our clients recognize our capacity and expertise to be on their side in the most important moments of their story. We have a research team that covers over 230 companies in Latin America, which is a reference for the main institutional investors in Brazil and abroad, and we have strategic intelligence per sector for our clients as well. Itaú BBA also works with payment methods. This is a market that has been radically transformed recently. Now I've let you know a little bit about Itaú BBA and our activities, and now I'd like to talk about the future. Even though we have a relevant or important role in many activities, we're still positive. There is a lot of room for growth.
I'd like to start off speaking about our mission and whatever we're doing to achieve it. Our mission is quite straightforward. We want to consolidate and expand our position as a leader in the wholesale banking segment. We don't want to only be ranking first in many categories, but we want this position to also reflect our ability to offer the best value proposition to each and every one of our clients. For that to be truer, by the day, we have a strategic agenda that is composed of some leverages. The first one, of course, is client satisfaction. Itaú BBA is an operation whose DNA always has a focus on the clients, where we're always client-centered. We want to have good solutions for everyday needs and for strategic decisions. Our NPS is already close to 75.
That's a very good level, but we are adamant that it can improve even further. And our agenda is really one that aims to charm our clients, want them to feel charmed, feel enchanted by whatever we have to offer them. And we have been focusing on reviewing and enhancing our journeys from a client perspective. The second leverage, the second lever behind me, is the leadership in investment. We have consistently been a leader in all of the rankings around this activity. We still believe there is room for growth and for doing things even better. We're working with the asset management department so that we can improve our distribution and management abilities with private and Retail Banking. We're going to invest in specialized teams that know how to distribute and research for these audiences.
We're also going to revisit our brokerage position, and we are going to invest, aiming to expand our product offers and expanding our business lines' offers. We have had the first investments in the reformulation and reorganization of our broker firm. Agribusiness and leadership in agribusiness. Agribusiness represents 20% of our GDP, and it's a segment where Brazil stands out all over the world. All over the world, Brazil stands out all over the world. We have a very ambitious process ongoing already. Last year, we created a segment that brings together all of the agribusiness stakeholders. We have inputs, companies, all of the agents, and the whole production chain with cooperatives and growers and small, medium-sized, and large-sized companies that will market products as well. We have really expanded our geographic coverage to really get close to our customers.
We are in 28 locations that are important for agribusiness, cities like Tangará da Serra in Mato Grosso, Dourados in Mato Grosso do Sul, and Rio Verde in Goiás. We have been expanding our team very fast, and we're going to hire another 100 people this year, and we'll then have a 300-person team focusing on agribusiness only, not to mention all of the other support staff with trading desks and credit desks and so on and so forth. And this team will aim to understand the market and clients better and get closer and closer to them. And this team is composed by professionals with a very diverse background. We have hired a lot of people from the market, and they come not only from the bank, but also from trading companies, cooperatives, and inputs companies.
90% are agronomy engineers by education, so they really know our clients and they speak their language. We're producing content, and we're producing results already with the first CPR in dollar, and we've really become a reference for the agribusiness. We have more variability in this area that we will announce briefly. The results show that we are down a really nice path. The last two years, the credit portfolio has increased in 50%, and we reached over BRL 46 billion. Now, our fourth lever is also very ambitious. We want to be the biggest operation of Middle Market in Brazil. The results that we've obtained in these markets for the last couple of years show that our value proposition and the model for management has been very much successful. We've grown in the rhythm of over 20% a year over the last few years.
Even more so, we see a lot of opportunities in that segment. The macro scenario of low interest rates has created the conditions for a democratization of the capital market for smaller companies that up until now did not have access to the debt and shares market and liabilities and shares market. We are trying to service these customers not only in the credit and finance basic operations, but also help them in the strategic transactions. For this, at the beginning of last year, we decided to extend the value proposition of Itaú BBA for the 16,000 market customers of the Middle Market. For the incorporation of that extension, this means the commitment of delivering a value proposition that is much more complete and much more customized. It has become a reality for many companies.
Just so you know, over the last two years, we've done over 250 transactions in the liabilities and equity market for Middle Market here in Brazil, and we have a pipeline with over 350 companies that are evaluating the alternatives to reach this capital market. And still within the segment of servicing the Middle Market, there is the tech niche, and it has risen because of the identification of the specific needs of the companies of this sector. We realize that the technology companies, even though, well, they are as any company, the inception is small, their lifecycle and their needs are very specific. Since their inception, they start to discuss the rounds for the capture of resources with investors, sometimes without even having revenue, still in the development of their business plan phase, and they didn't find, not even the correct interaction or the customized value proposition.
Now, today, we mapped over 10,000 technology companies, out of which we are having talks with 2,000 of them with a value proposition that includes their basic needs, such as credit cards, corporate credit cards, credit limits for a company that doesn't have a cash flow that has been consolidated, and we evolve alongside with them for their lifecycle up until when their needs are, for example, the help to issue shares, to open capital, and so on and so forth in Brazil and abroad, and another growth lever is related to the revolution for which the payment industry is undergoing, and we want to consolidate ourselves in this position of leadership leading this transformation, and here, we have several initiatives.
Since an intense education of our customers in regards to the Pix, which we have a team of specialists to support them in adopting Pix for their business, and we also have a very guided work to get to know the activities and needs of our customers in operating their financial cycle from their several stages. There are many, such as selling, issuing the fiscal invoices, while doing the payments, managing cash flow, the management of suppliers, the workforce, and taxes, and from the deep understanding of these activities, we started to have the building of a business logic with the objective of evolving from a service provider to providing a modular and complete platform to service the many needs of our customers, and this will be a great journey, long journey, but briefly, we will start to deliver the first solutions in this direction.
I hope that you've noticed that the issues that I've mentioned the most here are two, customers and growth. They walk hand in hand. To summarize, this has been the agenda of Itaú BBA, to do an agenda of growth that has a fundamental commitment with the obsession in supporting in a very relevant way our customers in all of their needs. With that, we have a very complete offering and ever more digital of a team that is developed every day and with the strength of Itaú Unibanco. Regardless of what is happening in the most favorable moments and more challenging moments of the market, we will be present alongside with our customers. While talking about the market, now I give the floor to Pedro Lorenzini. He is responsible for this area.
Thank you. Hello, everyone. Thank you, Flávio. I am Pedro Lorenzini.
My team is responsible for the management of treasury products, customers, macroeconomics, and for the operations of the bank in Latin America. Let's talk about the Latin American operations. While we have a bank, we have different moments. So I would divide this between the Southern Cone and the Itaú Corp Banca. The Southern Cone, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Argentina, these are very profitable operations and very healthy, and they're advancing with very strategic objectives that are very close to the operations in Brazil, with a focus in growth and digital culture. Here, I highlight the launching of our broker in Paraguay and the digital accounts that we are launching in Uruguay and Argentina. The last one will be moved 100% via WhatsApp, and it should capture 200,000 customers just in 2021.
We also have a partnership with Personal, the biggest telecom company in Paraguay, and it will allow us to access one million customers. The Itaú Corp Banca, which operates in Chile and Colombia, we are increasing the operational resilience, and we have that evolving the governance, the appetite to risk, and integrating the technological infrastructure and strengthening this with a sustainable opinion, and we have the digital businesses, and we have very important challenges to the operation. The main one is increasing the retail, and we have several initiatives, which is a partnership with Rappi, which will allow us to offer services to more customers, whether we are talking about natural people, natural persons, or companies in Chile. Now, our Super App is in the first place as a customer experience in the country, Chile, and we just launched our digital portfolio, our investment open platform, which was launched.
Now talking about treasury, we have several roles, which include the differentiated products for our customers, very sophisticated ones, and up until the management of which is a bank of our. Well, we have the liabilities here. This aligned with the mismatch will allow us to be a very important player in the risk factors that we negotiate in all the markets. Now, our liabilities management is very robust and very well structured that can service the needs of our customers and can also bring sustainable return on investment for our businesses. We have a big diversification of the financial positions, and we are broadening this. In the second semester of 2021, we should start to bear the fruit in the investments that we have in trading and energy.
Now, I would like to invest some time talking a little bit about how we service our customers and GMT. We have customized and quick service, which makes us have the leadership in derivatives for over a decade. We have innovative products for risks, and we have a sophisticated portfolio that can provide all the risk factors that can service all the needs, including commodities, the foreign exchange, the interest rates, local and international inflation, and even derivatives that are more personalized for specific situations. Now, our strength is also through the Forex, for example, spot forwards, where we position ourselves as the biggest provider for the management of foreign exchange.
Our mission is to grow ever more with the capacity to service the customers, to provide more an improvement in the experience, in efficiency, digitalization, and automation of the processes with more commodity products and the implementation of structured products so we can make it more personalized, so we can make the bank more competitive, and it can be the number one choice for all the customers, for all the treasury businesses. For this, we have a very experienced team with a physical presence in the main Latin American company markets where we invest continuously. This team can maximize the opportunities and can mitigate the risks that are not desirable for our books, generating an additional value for the bank.
And here I include the macroeconomics team where we have one of the best professionals in the country and that can support the bank and the customers for the reading of the financial market. Now, having new technologies and the new transactional models such as Pix and the Exchange PL will bring new challenges to the bank, but at the same time, will also bring a lot of opportunities. The biggest opening for the capital market, internal and external, our strategic positioning and the evolution and modernization, regulatory modernization are one of the main opportunities for the growth in our business volume. To be ready, we have to be part of the transformation that the bank is living.
We have many opportunities in regards to digitalization, and we're working with this so we can make the way that we service our customers revolutionary, creating negotiation platforms, algorithms, journeys of risk management in the market, and payment cross-border that want to create value for our customers, bringing agility and efficiency all throughout the process. We are migrating to a culture that is more digital, and we are evolving the way that we are working for formats in the Agile methodology. But here, I will let the specialist talk about this. Guerra, you can continue.
Thank you, Pedro. Hello, everyone. I hope that everyone is well. I am Ricardo Guerra. I am responsible for technology here at Itaú Unibanco, as Pedro has said. We are migrating to a culture that is more digital, and we are evolving very strongly in the way that we're working.
We're going to talk a little bit about that today. Now, for us to be digital in essence is to have a core centrality, what we have to focus on the customer so we can bring value and we can create, we can solve their problems very quickly. For this, we need to implement that transformation, digital transformation that we all talk about. But let's do a deep dive and understand what this means. There is a series of initiatives that are necessary so we can build a bank that is focused on the customer. And for this, we can provide solutions that are more interesting from the standpoint of the consumer.
To create these solutions requires not only the delivery of a very important business foundation, technological foundation for the businesses, but it imposes into the IT professionals to live the reality of the business, living the pains of the customers and doing more for the customers. This is the way that we will contribute so that through technology, we can create this value. To give you better detail on this transformation, I can talk about three pillars that are considered that are fundamental so we can be a more digital company and more customer-centric. The first biggest pillar has to do with the working methodology. When we look inside of the operation, the biggest translation so we can deliver this core here with the customer is speed. We need to identify and solve the pains of the customers in a very quick way.
To answer this in a very quick way is what will make us different. This is done through a structured methodology where we have talks with the customers, we create hypotheses to address their pains, and we have the ability to test that very quickly, getting to the conclusion alongside the customer about what is the type of solution that is the most interesting. It is an iterative creation of products, experiences, and solutions where we can find more, we can add more value to the customer. Now, to do this, we need to have, first of all, autonomy with the teams. The teams need to work empowered so we can hear the customer. We can create hypotheses, and we can test them. For this to happen with speed, you need to bring everyone close to the customer.
When I say everybody, I am talking about those that have the knowledge to do this cycle of experimentation. These are people from products, customer experience, technology, operations. Everybody, professionals that work with the journey of the customer, and that all added up, they can deliver good solutions. This empowerment is granted once we join these people and we can align them along common objectives. So we can observe the same problem and have an end-to-end vision of the customer and not just the part that competes to them. Now, to address this and to bring agile and scale, we created the communities, which are the integrated communities. Now, we have a lot of people working with this integrated model, and the expectation is to have 100% of everyone working in these integrated communities, 21,000 people. We see that in practice at iti.
When you open an account at iti and you use it on the day-to-day, you realize that the solution is much quicker, much online, and it has to do more. It's more aligned with the needs of the customers of iti. Second pillar is technology in and of itself. Still talking about speed, to improve the experience of the customer, we need to have cutting-edge technology. If we have a monolithic structure, which is a lot of codes, the legacy codes, we create a line so everybody is just at the same bottleneck. The architecture has to be compartmentalized. We have to have microservices so we can have scalability and working with things in parallel, creating the hypotheses and creating and testing very quickly, always using the best technology available so we can provide the best experiences.
To be able to reach this, we have a journey of migration and creation of digital platforms in a very large scale. And cloud is the infrastructure that is better adequate for this infrastructure. And that's why we are doing the migration to cloud and rebuilding our platform. We have a series of initiatives that were already built this way. Pix of Itaú Unibanco was conceived completely in the cloud. It operates on the cloud, and it brings speed. Credit card, we are also working with this technology. And then in integrated communities as well. To accelerate this journey, we closed a contract with AWS announced last year, and we have the objective until 2022 to deliver 50% of the bank in cloud. Third biggest pillar is regarding to data. None of this will work if we don't have the information.
If we cannot read the pains and the needs of the customer to create hypotheses and to really measure if the solutions created are working and are being used by the customer and improving their lives, then if we don't measure that, it's of no use to do all this. We have 56 million customers, and if we don't have a lot of automation and using scalability on data, we cannot deliver the value that we want. Therefore, the data for us is fundamental because this is what will allow us to operate in this business model in a more competitive way and centered on the customer. When we are talking about data, we are talking about two different pathways. One is the building of the foundation of data, which involves technology and infrastructure. The other one is the utilization of these data.
Itaú Unibanco has a unique volume of data. You can see 70 petabytes, and we have to use this and if we use this data correctly, this brings a lot of competitiveness to the operation. This summarizes our journey of transformation, and we have to talk about the evolution in technology all throughout this change. From 2018 onwards, our team was twice as productive, and they delivered new functionalities 43% quicker and besides that, we decreased the critical incidents, and we increased the resilience of our operations. More than 99% of our customers did not have problems, or they suffered. They didn't have problems doing the transactions through the digital channels, but I would like to finish saying that the determinant factor for this transformation is focused on people.
At the end of the day, to learn in a more agile way to work with more empowerment and more autonomy and decentralized decisions on what product you should build and what are the pains of the customer that you should solve, it demands more entrepreneurship and more knowledge of technology from each professional, and all of this change only happens with collaboration. You cannot have multidisciplinary teams of different professions if they are not aligned in the same objective, therefore working to solve the same problem. Now, the basis of this whole change and this whole building of new models, the base of this is people, and for this, the cultural change is fundamental, and we need to have a different culture so we can operate with a different model.
To promote this cultural change, we need to have a profound understanding of what we want, what we expect, and what is the overview of the bank. And therefore, guaranteeing a structured process from A to Z that can help to transform the mentality of all of our collaborators. To talk about that, I'm going to talk about the specialist on this subject, Sergio Fajerman, that is building this cultural change, and he will talk to you now.
Thank you, Guerra. Good morning, everyone. My name is Sergio Fajerman. I'm in charge of the People Department. And I'll talk to you about cultural transformation. Our culture has brought us this far. We know it's not going to be the same that's going to guide us from now on. And based on that belief, we're promoting a true cultural transformation. Our client is the absolute priority.
We're going to see what their problems are, and we're going to generate innovative solutions. We understand we need to make progress with the simplification agenda, and we want to give more autonomy and simplify our teams. Digital transformation is pivotal in this cultural change. But in the year, we'll have about 15,000 people working in the agile methodology, and we'll continue to be evolving. The challenge now is to develop a digital mindset. The structures are already at hand. Now we really need to work on the cultural change. The changes in the market have increased exponentially opportunities in the job market. We're learning a lot about remote work, and we'll soon be experimenting with flexible hybrid models, increasing satisfaction levels among our staff, and increasing productivity while reducing costs.
We're very optimistic about this new flexible model, and we're very attentive to what impacts that we're going to have on our culture and on the staff's mental health. This change is crucial for our activity. We have been ranking first as a company to work in, also comparing to regions outside São Paulo and having people from other regions work with us. We're also making important headway with our diversity agenda. We currently have a majority of women working in our company, and 52% of managing positions are women's positions. We want to increase that in the high levels of administration now, and we are working on the race front as well. When you look at the trainee group, 50% of them are black this year.
Now I'll turn it over to you, Leila, so that you can tell us how we're going to be acting for a sustainable future. Leila, over to you.
Thank you, Sergio. Good morning, everyone. My name is Leila Melo, and I'm in charge of the Legal Department as well as Sustainability and Corporate Matters in Itaú Unibanco. Diversity in the workplace has become more and more important in society and in companies. It's not only the right thing to do, and that would be enough, but fostering diversity is also a premise for sustainable performance. When you think about diversity, be it for clients, customers, or providers, that's part of a broader agenda for the bank, which is a sustainability agenda, which has now become termed ESG by the market. We understand that a company has to go beyond delivering good services and products.
Investors don't expect only to reap dividends. The ESG agenda had been growing after the Economic Forum in 2019, and it became even more important during the pandemic. The current scenario made it clear how important it is that we have a positive agenda on the side of companies. From a business perspective, it's clear that there are a number of pressures in the corporate world. More and more people believe or take into account sustainability points in their choices. Talents choose to work for companies that adhere and comply with this agenda. Companies that are not in line with these guidelines will struggle more to have access to capital, and investors have also been weighing the risks and possibilities with companies that comply well with ESG norms, and there's a need to comply with these norms.
Sustainability has been a priority subject for Itaú for decades, and it's high time, I mean, or offsetting debits is past, and now we have to generate credit, so we want to cause positive impact on society, and in 2019, we structured our ESG strategy through commitments to generate positive impact with metrics that are in line with our different business lines, as well as with the Sustainable Development Goals by the UN. There are 46 goals that are closely monitored by the executives of the bank. Our strategy is also monitored periodically by a governance team that is integrated to our businesses with reports to the managing board and to the board of directors and to the executive board. Over a month ago, we launched the ESG report for 2020. That's the main tool to report on environmental, social, and governance indicators.
The objective is to give more accessibility and transparency around our businesses and around sustainability. An ESG attitude will come through internal practices first, and Itaú has been a reference in the three pillars: environment, social, and governance, and we have the ASG acronym in Portuguese, comparing to the ESG acronym in English. We want to have positive impact not only through our institutional actions by the company, but also through our different businesses. Itaú Asset Management has launched a number of investment products focused on Brazilian and international markets. The objective is to make investment opportunities available for investments that will contribute to the capital market in a more transparent and efficient manner. In Itaú BBA, our wholesale bank, we have also had important progress.
We made good progress on directing resources to important sectors of the economy, like renewable energy, healthcare, education, as well as supporting our clients in transitioning their business models through specialized consulting services, what we call the ESG operations, with sustainability-linked bonds and green bonds. Itaú was also the first Brazilian company to issue a sustainable bond in the foreign market that goes for renewable energy, clean transport, SMEs that are spearheaded by women, and others. Our Retail Banking has been working on supporting and on the inclusion for Brazilian entrepreneurs, especially during this difficult moment with high unemployment rates. We're focusing on financial and non-financial solutions. For Itaú, to incorporate ESG practices into our activities is already part of our culture. Innovation has been part of what we've done so far, and we're going to go even beyond that.
We're going to make progress in finding business opportunities related to the ESG agenda. Initiatives that have a positive impact for Brazil, like Plano Amazônia or Todos pela Saúde. These are examples of how willing we are to generate value for society. We're also constantly enhancing and perfecting internal practices and creating mechanisms that will support clients in getting to a more clean, inclusive, and sustainable economy. With the ESG pillars integrated with our business strategy, we will continue to progress towards sustainable performance. But to reach this goal, we need to understand that the market is transformed constantly and that our risk assessment and analysis models need to change as well. Matias Granata, our CRO, is going to talk about this item now.
Thank you, Leila. Good morning, everyone. My name is Matias Granata, and I'm in charge of the Risk Department at Itaú Unibanco.
Risk appetite and risk management have been crucial pillars for our performance, allowing us to be able to weather crises successfully. During the pandemic, our risk appetite made sure that we could perform well with capital markets as far as liquidity is concerned and looking at our portfolios as well. We were able to look at a crisis with a mid-term perspective, not only a short-term or long-term, and we were able to look at all of the opportunities and challenges. During the crisis, we have kept comfortable liquidity levels, and we have been recomposing our capital, showing the resilience of Itaú Unibanco. We have also embraced accelerated digitalization with our clients and customers, and we have 50,000 staff working from home without letting go of all of the performance that we already have.
For individual and corporate clients, we have increased limits for digital transactions, and we have brought in new biometric technologies to keep fraud to minimum levels. And looking ahead, risk management will play a crucial role in the bank. If we're client-centered, we need to constantly develop new products and platforms and grant credit and to make sure that clients have their privacy in their digital journey. Let's talk about a few examples of what we're doing. When you develop digital products, you need to have an environment that will allow customers to try things out so that they can learn and find out with agility. We are reviewing our product governance, and we're creating new rooms and spaces for tests with security and also taking product risk into account.
Respecting the way that clients want to interact with the bank also calls for a need that we take client experience into account. We're reinforcing our investment in cybersecurity, and in that way, clients can have a fully digital experience that is absolutely secure and safe. One million clients a month will no longer need to go to a branch or to an ATM for authentication, for example. Should they need to recover their credit card PIN or change their mobile number? We're replicating our controls on-premise onto the cloud, and being on the cloud, we can have a much better level of scalability. We have client data and technology that allows our engineers to create products with the agility and creativity necessary. And lastly, we need to have the best use of data that is available, of course, respecting privacy and proprietary information.
We'll continue to develop our models and credit policies. The average time for our credit card clients is seven years, the average time of relationship. So we already have the data around their consumption habits, their preferences, and social class. So with that, we can have a better analysis of when and how to interact with them. And at the end of that, we will have reshaped all of our models for individuals and corporations, and we'll have a unified vision of the client for whatever they need to do with the bank. And in a nutshell, we'll have a risk management that is flexible enough to take into account these new needs without letting go of the robust structure that we have always had. And that is a catalyst for digital transformation in the bank and making sure that we keep up with new times.
And now I'll turn the floor over to my colleague. Thank you.
Thank you very much, everyone. I'd like to say that what we've heard from all of our colleagues here makes clear to me that the transformation is clear and that the quality of the executives is absolutely pivotal. We have open debates, we're pragmatic, we are client-centered, and we have the objective of growing, of course. Each one of these initiatives is very important for our future, and we're working towards becoming faster and more agile at every moment. We're becoming a more horizontal bank with less hierarchy, and we wouldn't be, and we're not going to be a digital bank without branches, but we're going to have a digital mindset. We want to service clients the way they want to be serviced, also in person if they should choose to do so.
I am very happy to be talking to all of you today, and I'm really here hoping that the message has been clear, that this is a unique moment, and we are adamant that client satisfaction is going to be a key competitive edge that we'll have against the competition. Now we're going to start the Q&A. Thank you very much for joining us.
Thank you, Milton. We'll now start the Q&A session. I'd like to remind you that you can send us your questions using the Itaú Day WhatsApp. If you're watching this video on YouTube, you can use the QR code or the WhatsApp number that you can see on the screen right now. Before we start with the first question, I'd like to invite Lucy Sousa for a quick message. Lucy, please.
Thank you, Renato. Thank you, Milton.
We have APIMEC Brasil, the Association for Professional Investors and the Capital Market in Brazil. Here we have 26 years that we have been meeting with the analysts and professional investors and the bank. These meetings are an opportunity for us to exchange for you, with the IR Department, and for us with the analysis and management department. You have the Emerald Award now, or the Emerald Category now for these 26 years.
Thank you very much, Lucy. It is an honor for us, and I'd like to thank APIMEC Brasil on behalf of Itaú for this long-standing partnership. So, Lucy, the first question should be yours, I believe. Lucy?
Oh, thank you. Thank you for giving me the first question. There is a question that I have been hearing from analysts, and we heard about that today too.
So what do you believe to be a priority in competing against fintechs?
Milton, would you like to take that one?
Of course. Lucy, it's an honor for me to answer your question. Thank you for the Emerald Category brand, and it is an honor for us. But just before I answer your question, I'd like to thank you all. Thank you all for being here with us, for listening to us. We have over 20,000 people connected to this live streaming session now, and that, of course, increases our challenges and our responsibility here to really deliver and show you everything that we have seen during our conversation today. Lucy, this question around competition with fintechs is really important. Competition goes far beyond fintechs.
I think competition, if you think of the broad meaning of the word, when you think of competing with more traditional players and with new companies, companies that are more focused on technology, well, I think what we've discussed here today shows how we're going to be positioning ourselves to compete. There's a key point here, which is being obsessed with our clients, and that's how we have been guiding all of our decisions. That's how we have been organizing ourselves internally, and this is why we have started going through this important digital transformation. That's why we have to intensify a cultural transformation, and I talked about that earlier today. But these are the factors that will make this journey possible: cultural transformation, the efficiency agenda with a lot of focus, and being client-centered above all else.
So we are absolutely adamant that we are able to compete on all fronts, and we're going to intensify this journey with a lot of energy, with a lot of effort, and again, being client-centered, our motto: doing it with you, for you, is a clear message, I believe, and Pedro and Roberto mentioned this earlier today when they were having their conversation, so the isonomy or the asymmetry that we see in the regulatory sphere is very important. We have been monitoring that closely. We don't want to have any advantages, but we don't want to have any disadvantages either. Regulatory agencies are aware of that, and I think it's crucial that we have an egalitarian regulatory environment. We are, of course, in favor of competition. That will lead to benefits for clients at the end of the day.
Thank you, Milton.
It's always worth mentioning that we all have been tested here, and we're also keeping to the protocols. We're doing social distancing, and we're looking after ourselves here during Itaú Day. I'm getting here hundreds of questions. As you said, we have over 20,000 people connected watching us. So I'm going to be consolidating a few questions so that we can cover the main points people would like to hear about. So the first question is a question from Mateus and from some other investors. And the question is, how is the bank positioned regarding Open Banking? Is Itaú preparing itself to use client data smartly?
So Open Banking is a priority that we have in the bank, be it for the purpose of developing the infrastructure necessary or doing everything that we need to be competitive in this agenda. And I'll invite André Sapoznik to talk to us.
André, can you let us know how we are equipping ourselves for Open Banking?
Thank you, Milton. Thank you, Matias. Really, the agenda of Open Banking is very important for us. We have the entire bank modernized, and we are getting ready for the implementation of the several phases of Open Banking. We had the first phase for commercial data in November, and next week, we will have a very important stage, which is the opening of the receivables for the credit card. In June, we're going to have the opening of the data for the transactions of our customers. All the areas of the bank are very mobilized to ensure a very coherent strategy on how we provide services for our customers. Here, we're talking about all the customers' managers, the payments, the wholesale bank, the retail bank.
What is very important is once we acquire the data of the customers, that once they provide us with the trust and allow us to access the information of the customer from other institutions, we have to effectively treat the data. It's not only important to acquire the data, but we have to treat and work with this data through sophisticated models. Since we have 70 petabytes of data here in the bank, we have developed very important, very sophisticated algorithms. So we can develop two types of strategies. One is an attack strategy, and one is a defense.
The attack strategy is offering to the customers the customers that have, well, maybe they're not customers of the bank, but we can provide the opportunity for them to start having a relationship with us so we can provide an offering that is correct at the right time for the right customer. This defense strategy, we are also going to try and strengthen the relationship with our best customers, with all customers, always offering comfortable conditions so that they continue to have a relationship with us as their main bank. Now, another comment that I would like to tell you is that we have a tradition here of taking care of the money of our customers and also the data of our customers. It's what we call the fiduciary, and we really talk about the trust that the customers have to have once they trust their data here with us.
We are the trustees of these data, and this is part of the preparation of everything that we're doing. Now, Renato, the floor is yours. Thank you very much, André. Thank you, Milton.
Now, technology is reappearing, and now I have a very specific question about infrastructure and here we have cloud. What does the bank expect with the benefits for the migration of the services to the cloud and a question about this theme. What will the customer do with its legacy systems?
Well, Gustavo, it's a great question, and I would just like to, before I give the floor to the specialist in technology, I would like to show you a point that is fundamental.
You should have heard all throughout our talk today that the digital transformation is a word that you probably heard all throughout the presentations.
Now, a digital transformation is not a transformation that is done by technology. It's something that is done all throughout all the businesses of the bank. All the businesses are responsible for the digital transformation. This is a culturally important transformation that the technology area is not only the provider of solutions, but it's part, in fact, integrated in the journey to understand the pains of the customer alongside with the business end-to-end and delivering solutions with more speed, and from then, we have the idea of working in a community and the idea to transform our legacy system. This is very important. The idea of going to the cloud and the technical microservices, well, this is part of the agenda, but this is an agenda from everyone. This is not just an agenda on Ricardo Guerra because he's from technology, but he's a fundamental part of this transformation.
Guerra, now the floor is yours. If you can tell us a little bit more about the migration to the cloud, and you can tell us a little bit more about how we are planning to deactivate and what are we going to do with our legacy systems in the future?
Right, Milton, thank you very much. Well, the question is very important, and I would like to first highlight that point of Milton that I am responding to this question, but anybody can answer this question because technology is something that everyone looks at day to day. And the reason why we're migrating to the cloud has a lot to do with the obsession with the customer-centric.
We have to have a technology platform that is much more quicker, with an architecture that allows for the building of products and solutions in a very quick way so we can deliver the needs of the customers and we can solve the problems of the pains of the customers. This is the reason why we're migrating to the cloud. Of course, we are also bringing a very important efficiency because once we have the standardized architecture and all of it within a single platform, we can therefore operate the bank in a very efficient way. Now, in regards to legacy per se, we will live with the legacy for a long time, but this is not a pain necessarily. The big objective to migrate to the cloud is to bring more benefits for the customers.
It's actually to enable the bank to build solutions that are better, more competitive. Having said that, it's not all the technologies that need this migration, as I mentioned, and we have several platforms that have no impact directly in the generation of data or building solutions. These platforms, legacy platforms, they have less priority in terms of migration to the cloud than products and services and so on and so forth and solutions that the customers use or that generate important data for the bank, so in that sense, we start to migrate everything that has value, as we call it, and in time, we will evaluate what we're going to do with the legacy that is still there, that has less competitive advantage [and] will probably become cloud in time because of an issue that is connected to efficiency because we can have that standardized platform.
We are going to decide this up in time. But the big priority of this program, which we want to get all the bank in the cloud by 2022, is the ability to build products and services with more speed to deliver better solutions for the customers.
Wonderful, Guerra. Thank you very much. And the project is very important. Now, let's do the next one. Milton, you mentioned that during your presentation that growth is one of the main objectives of the bank. Of course, technology, as Guerra has said, is one of the enablers of this growth. Now, I have a question from Giovanna, and here is a question. Since we're talking about growth a lot, how will the profitability situation be? We are willing to forgo profitability to stimulate a faster, quicker growth of the bank over the next few years. Well, great, Giovanna.
Here, this is a very important, relevant question. First of all, this is our biggest objective in any business, whether we are talking about a mature business or a business where we have less relevance. In fact, we need to rescue and try to find with a lot of emphasis this discussion on growth. Naturally, the bank, if you take a look at the several businesses, we have businesses that take more credit. They consume more capital and services and insurance. Then these are businesses that bring revenue without the capital allocation. Now, what we always try to do in the bank is to make this mix very balanced between credits and services so we can create above all value and for our shareholders, of course and what is our main objective?
Our main objective is to be able to make the bank grow alongside with the customers, understanding their pains and working diligently in making the bank grow alongside the customers, and we understand that this is going to bring a natural convergence of increasing the relationships, improving the relationships, improving the amount of businesses that we make with every customer of the bank, increasing the base of customers for the bank. This is super important, and also increasing the time of relationship that we have with our customers. This is the main objective. As we always say, the bank will be of the size that our customers want. This is our greatest objective, and this is completely convergent with our agenda for creation of value, satisfied customers that are doing transactions with the bank every day. This means creating more value for everyone.
This is the core objective, naturally, in a scenario of macroeconomics that we will accompany the evolutions with all due care. The word here that we need to use is growth.
Thank you, Milton. Let's ask the next question. Now, the next question is from a participant who didn't really identify themselves, but it's about ESG, specifically the business of asset management. How is Itaú dealing with climate change in its process for selection and indication of investments?
As we have mentioned before, Pedro has mentioned this and Roberto as well. ESG is not something that is in vogue. It's not an agenda that started yesterday. No, this has been in our businesses for many, many years.
Now, many of us, when we have a decision-making process, when we are thinking about the next step of strategy, we have these principles that really guide us, guide the governance of the bank. As you have seen and you have followed the big evolutions last year during the pandemic, it was Todos pela Saúde, the Amazon Plan, Plano Amazônia, which we mentioned, and we have an agenda that is very complete in that sense for environment. Now, specifically talking about investments, and I'm going to talk about, well, I'm going to invite Constantini, and he is responsible for investments, just so we can talk about the ESG agenda and investments, how did they talk to each other?
Well, thank you very much, Milton, and thank you for the question.
And to allow me to talk about a very important theme, as I mentioned very quickly, that we offer products for our customers that have ESG, that have an ESG focus, and we use ESG filters in the analysis of 100% of the decision-making process in investment and assets. Therefore, this means that the products that have a focus in ESG, they make the decision-making process, having ESG as a priority since the inception. So they choose shares, they choose allocations, always looking at the issues that are ESG, including environmental issues, including here the climate change issue. Of course, these are a series of products to the customers that can opt to buy them or not. But what do we do with the rest?
With the rest of the products that are not necessarily mandates of ESG, how can we, using our strength, our size, influence other companies in the market to improve in that sense? And that's where we get the ESG filters. The filters ESG, in a very practical way, they are basically the veto power. We have a team inside of Itaú Asset that analyzes every operation that we want to buy, that we want to invest in, and they have a veto power should some ESG issues are not, we don't have to, they haven't met the requirements of ESG. It can be climate change, but it might be a profitable operation, but we are not going to do it if we force the companies and the market to walk in a direction that we think that is very important, that is part of our commitment for the positive impact.
It's important to mention that this, in our opinion, is not, it's not really eating up the profitability. We are convinced that a good choice that will lead into consideration the ESG issues will contribute to the value creation because now we are measuring risks that might be intangible, but will be materialized in the future. It's a big conviction of Itaú Asset, and we are certain that we will reach 100% since last year of our operations with this ESG filter. Thank you very much for the question.
Constantini, thank you very much, and spectacular to have this ESG agenda completely integrated in the core business of the bank. We believe that this is the way that we are going to work with the bank from now on. Now, a question from Alexandre via WhatsApp, and it's about iti, the bank.
Itaú will have a more aggressive posture in terms of iti and its new functionalities. Nowadays, we see very little marketing, and a lot of people still have an overview of the app when it was launched and not as a digital bank.
Well, thank you very much for the question, Alexandre. In fact, we are positioning iti in a very intense way, as you have seen André during his presentation. He commented the very relevant numbers of growth of the base of functionalities, of quality NPS, which is the Net Promoter Score for the customers, how the customer evaluates ourselves. Today, we can have a platform that is very good with technology and with a great value proposition for our customers, a platform that is evolving. To talk more about iti, I'm going to invite André.
He is the one responsible for this issue in the bank. Now, André, if you can tell us a little bit more how you have seen the evolution of iti?
Thank you, Milton. Thank you, Alexandre. In fact, we are very satisfied, and we are very excited with what we are seeing in the development of iti. Iti started as a digital portfolio. It was launched in November of 2019, and we have done a series of improvements, making the iti platform a very advanced platform with a composable banking. It's very advanced technology that allows us to work with the business components and business components so we can offer the best journey to the customer as possible.
Today, we have an app that allows maybe one of the best onboardings, one of the best processes to start to become a client, a customer of iti, something that took about 10 minutes last year, and now it takes about four minutes, even biometrics. The customer will therefore become a customer of the digital portfolio, which is free, and in time, we are adding functionalities. We are adding offerings. We are adding possibilities to iti. First of all, the payments with the keys of Pix and with the recharge of the cell phone, payment of boletos, and also the personal credits, credit cards, and a series of new offerings that will be available all throughout the next weeks and months. Now, Alexandre asked more about the marketing, I believe, and our marketing is planned to be synchronized with the increase of the offering within iti.
So all throughout this year of 2021, progressively all throughout the second semester, we will see the very emphatic publicizing of iti. Today, we are sponsors of the No Limite program, and this has provided with a great exposure, brand exposure, but we will expose, we will increase the brand footprint all throughout the second semester.
Talking more of our brand is not just through marketing, but we have other digital actions, for example, that might not seem massive, but they are directed to the public that we want to talk to.
This is the way that we can have the intention of leaving the current 7 million customers that are now customers of iti, and we want to gain the trust of maybe 1 million new customers every month and getting to the goal of at the end of the year of something around 15 million customers in iti. This is the goal, and we are working diligently every day to achieve this goal. Renato, the floor is yours again.
Thank you very much, André. In fact, we are very excited, right, Milton, with the development of iti. Now you will hear about this. Let's change gears. A question from Antonio about efficiency. Now we talked about efficiency as one of the pillars of the bank. A question for you. How does the reduction of operational costs of Itaú will impact the relationship of the customers?
There is a perspective of reducing the tariffs. Efficiency, in fact, is an agenda that is fundamental. Alexandre Broedel talked about this. I commented about this. In fact, the bank needs to become more competitive given the new scenario, the reality. This is an agenda that we have. The bank has always had a lot of tradition in efficiency. We are doing a deep dive into this all throughout the next years. You've seen this. This is not a project. This is not an agenda that has a time to end. This is a continuous agenda where we have the obsession through working with a more simpler way, a more efficient way.
Now, to talk about efficiency, I'm going to let the new CFO, Broedel, if you can tell us a little bit more on how you can see the efficiency agenda and how do we become more competitive all throughout time in a scenario that might become ever more competitive with new competition and new business models. Please.
Thank you, Milton, for the wonderful question. And really, I think that this is a very important question in regards to efficiency and this time of iti. And I think that the efficiency program is not only cost, but we are also simplifying the bank and we are making the bank ever more agile. This in and of itself improves the experience of the customer. And we have a very important objective for the efficiency of our programs.
And the program of efficiency has the objectives of generating resources so we can invest in technology, new businesses, therefore improving the experience of the customer. For example, in the last quarter, the efficiency program generated BRL 500 million that was invested in technology and new businesses that the bank is developing. All of this will make the bank become more competitive, more competitive in experience, in the relationship with the customer, and more experience having our cost structure so we can transform this into a more competitive pricing structure. So I think that this is all interconnected and we have a very, we are connected to the strategies for the future of the bank and also the relationship and the experience of our customers. Very good. And now I give the floor to Renato.
Thank you very much, Alexandre.
I believe that we have two more questions before we close. Now the second to last question is Alexandre's. And it is about our operations, foreign operations. Now, today, since Itaú is one of the biggest banks in the Southern Hemisphere, what is the appetite for expansion of the bank in Latin America?
Well, Alexandre, the operations in Latin America for us, it complements our business given that we generate results and we are bringing new customers, new relationships in different geographies, which is not just Brazil. We have an operation that is very mature, as we mentioned in the Southern Cone, Argentina. We have a small operation, but it's very well managed and brings good results, Uruguay, Paraguay. And we have a challenge that we have mentioned for many times, which is the consolidation of Itaú Corpbanca, which operates in Chile and Colombia.
Our core here, the main objective is to assure that these operations will run at a standard of delivery for the experience of the customer, whether we are in the achievement of working with profitability for the bank at a different level than what we have observed in different countries. Our focus here is to improve the operations that we have. Of course, the bank is open to new opportunities. We are attentive, but there are a few asymmetries that we need to, every time that you decide to do an investment abroad, there is a fiscal issue that is very important and a capital allocation that is very important. Those are the two points that we always take into consideration, always with the logic of value generation for our shareholders at the end of the day. This is our agenda.
This is an agenda of continuous improvement of what we have, investing where we have relevant operations. Nonetheless, without having the big, well, we have the mission of growing the operation, and this is our strategy.
Thank you, Milton. One last question. Shall we? We needed to have a question about dividends, right, so I saved it for the end, so Eric asks here, what is the dividend payout going to be like? Is it going to be better in 2021?
We haven't changed our dividends policies. They are still the same. What the bank will always set is a minimal amount that is going to be paid out, and that's something that the board of directors will decide. We have a level one appetite that is not below 3.5, and we speak about return rates and capital, and depending on the scenario, there are different distributions.
We want to recompose a capital of 23.5. And the policy is that we're going to be distributing 25% dividends until we have recomposed the capital. Once we have a surplus in capital, whatever excess we have, that's going to be paid out as dividends as well. So the policy remains the same, and this is what we expect to see in 2021. We do have the expectation to recompose our capital in the course of this year so that in 2022, we can have different levels of dividends payout. But so far, this is what we have.
Thank you very much, Milton. Thank you, Sapoznik, Guerra, Constantini, who have joined us here to answer our questions live. And this is the end of our Itaú Day. Remember that if your questions weren't answered live, you're going to get an answer from our team through the investor relations channels.
I'd like to say goodbye to you. Thank you very much for joining. And I'll turn the floor over to Milton for his final remarks.
On behalf of Itaú, I'd like to thank you all for joining us for this session. We always want to be transparent and frank with you, show you all of the important data and relevant information so that we can really ensure you can feel comfortable with the trust you give us. So it's important that we could share not only my view, but the view of the executive committee. You could see they're full of energy. They're feeling very confident, and they are really ready to transform this fantastic institution that we work for. It was a pleasure. And I'll see you next year, maybe in a hybrid format, so some of us in person, some of us remotely.
But till then, take good care of yourselves, and I'll see you soon. Thank you very much. Have a great day.