Analysts, good afternoon. Welcome to our interim results announcement, the 2017 interim results announcement of China Construction Bank. Many of you are our old friends. We are familiar with one another, and you have a lot of interest in our bank. You are also familiar with our bank. Let me introduce to you our colleagues in attendance today. On my left is Mr. Yu Jingbo, Executive Vice President. Then we have Mr. Liao Lin, Chief Risk Officer. On my right is Mr. Xu Yiming, Chief Financial Officer. The arrangement for today is this. You have very in-depth understanding of CCB. You have done a lot of studies. We would like to give you more in-depth explanations to issues that you are concerned about. We will first invite Mr. Xu Yiming to make a brief presentation.
After that, we will take your questions. Because of time constraints, while many analysts have come today, we hope each analyst will ask one question. Before you speak, please state your name. We will be very honored and grateful. First, let's welcome Mr. Xu Yiming to make a brief presentation.
Just now we met with friends from the media, and I said I feel very honored to be able to present CCB's interim results. I have to thank Mr. Wang for giving me this opportunity. Why am I honored? Because our results exceeded expectation. There are many factors of revenue declines, though we are able to achieve leading results among our peers. Our results are achieved in the midst of stability. You are more professional than I am, so if you read our annual report, you can see many key indicators, and they are very well coordinated and balanced.
I must say that we have achieved very strong stability, and we are very confident in our future. We are all old friends already. You are familiar with our bank's operations. You also have hard copies of our PPT, so I won't go through them page by page. I will leave more time to answer your questions. I will just go through the key points of each slide. The first page, key financials. Here you can see the upward-pointing yellow arrows, and there is one decline. What ought to come down had come down, and what ought to rise has risen. Next page, growth in profitability. The yellow arrow head is very nice. It is increasing. On the right, you see this curve. I said to the media that if 2.2%, well, 2.2% is for the whole year of last year.
If in the fourth quarter it's 2.12%, then you can see 2.12%, 2.13%, 2.14%, then it keeps going up. Then it will look very nice. For growth in our revenue, why is it so good? Why did I say that is stable? Because with increase in net interest income and also increase in net fee and commission income, we achieved growth in revenue. For net interest income, it was up by 3.25% because last year we saw negative growth, and now it achieved a turnaround. This is worth some recognition. For commission income, CNY 68.1 billion. The growth rates, well, from January to April. Last year in May, the sales tax was changed to VAT, and this year the timeframe is different. If we take this into consideration, the growth is almost 9% here. Cost control is done quite well.
If you look at cost-to-income ratio, it is around 22%. In the first half of this year, 22.31%. For provision, it has increased by CNY 13.9 billion, and our provision coverage has gone up to 160%. Some media asked whether this will be higher. I think we are more or less at the right level. Some time ago, it was 150%, so based on our judgment, we want to be slightly higher than the regulatory requirement. We want to serve the real economy. Here you can look at these charts to understand our support. First, loans to infrastructure sectors. This accounts for more than 50% of our total loans and advances. The growth rate this year is good. We exceeded CNY 3.2 trillion already. Small and micro-enterprise customers, and Small and Micro Fast Loan is something that we are developing.
We have got an Inclusive Finance Division. Then personal mortgage loan. We are leading among peers in terms of personal mortgage loans business. All along, our performance has been good. Besides, we are also developing consumer loans for personal credit card, installment payment, and also sure credits personal loans. You can see that people can get loans very quickly. This business is developing very fast. The driving force of our economic development will be consumption, while the industrial system in China is very comprehensive. With consumption driving the growth of the economy, there will be new momentum to be released. We must seize the opportunity from consumer loan business. Internet finance or fintech. We attach a lot of importance to this. If you look at our data and businesses, here you can look at our phone banking and online banking.
The number of customers is on the rise. For mobile banking, we have more than 240 million customers. For online banking, we have more than 250 million customers. These numbers are huge. For our e-transaction related business, mobile banking plus online banking plus ATM together exceeded 98% already. Those transactions over the counter only accounted for 1-point-something percent. Our outlets transaction volume and time was smaller, and the tellers now focus more on communication and selling to customers. Overall service capability has risen. In terms of our comprehensive financial services first, if you look at our non-bank licensed organizations, basically we have around licenses. We have so many subsidiaries. Why? We want them to service the mother company, and they will make use of the mother company's channels to service our customers. Then we can offer comprehensive services.
In relation to non-traditional banking businesses like wealth management, assets under custody, all these are developing fast. Also bond sale, financial advisory service may become new growth drivers in the future. There is also debt-to-equity swap. We are leading the market in this regard. We are doing this debt-to-equity swap business based on marketization approach.
Now i n 29 countries and regions, we have over 200 networks. Our global deployment basically has been achieved. It is completed. The next step is how do we make use of this network to serve our global customers. We have already seen some very good results. For example, in China, international settlement for many years, maybe starting from the very beginning, BOC has been the leader. Now, CCB has become the largest, and also our London center has already become the largest RMB clearing bank outside of Asia. These are very good indicators of our international development. Our new generation core system, meaning using machineries and automation, IT support platform. We call that the new generation core banking system. At the beginning of this year, it has already been completed and is operational.
This new system has included all of the IT workflow, data management, operating. It is all on this platform. For example, a customer has credit card installments or other business with the bank. These may be separate departments, businesses, and they may be in silos, not knowing the business of the other departments. Say, the installment mortgage does not know about the other businesses that the customer has with the bank. With this platform, it is all transparent on the same IT support platform. This would enable us to know our customers better and be able to offer better services to them. As far as credit structure is concerned, we have been continuing to improve that, including our investment, our loans to infrastructure development, as well as the personal properties.
We would grow what we needed to grow and shrink what we needed to shrink. For those loans to industries with serious excess capacity issues, we definitely need to be more careful with the loan balance in these areas. Under such circumstances, our assets are more focused on the right areas. The asset quality. NPL has always been going down. If you look in better details, there are a lot of data that supports this very steady and stable improvement. Our NPL, our overdue loan ratio, as well as the special-mention loan ratio, has all been coming down. Originally, our overdue loan ratio has been higher than our NPL ratio, but this has reverted. By end of June, our NPL is lower than the overdue loan ratio by about CNY 3 billion. Originally, it was the reverse.
As far as liquidity management, if you look at our ROE, if you look at our CAR, capital adequacy ratio, we are the best among our peers. These are reverse correlated, because ROE would be a denominator of the capital, and CAR is the reverse. If one goes up, the other one goes down. How do you balance the two? Investors definitely would want to see a high ROE. However, regulators like to see a high CAR. So how do we balance the two? CCB basically has achieved that. In the last couple of years, our ROE has been high, our CAR has also been high. That goes to say about our high management standards and our good potential.
Now, for the future, I have been saying that I am very delighted to have this opportunity to be here today, because our bank has been working so hard, and we have a very excellent outlook. We believe that U.S.A., Japan, and Europe, it is coming back, especially Europe. China maintains a very large market with good consumption. With our efforts, and with the strong background that we have, I believe that also with your support, we definitely would be able to do even better. Thank you.
Thank you, CFO. Let me very briefly make a couple of points. Just now, Mr. Xu made a brief presentation, and I would like to go through with you some special points. First, CCB's asset quality. Our asset structure is improving. Over the past years, all along, we wanted to serve the real economy, so we have improved our asset structure. That is why we are able to achieve good business results. That is one foundation. Secondly, we have refined management, and as a result, all the indicators are well coordinated and also very consistently shifting towards the positive side. If you look at various indicators, you can see profit growth, provision coverage, risk control, and also ROA indicating quality, ROE indicating profitability, and also capital adequacy. All these are on leading levels. Besides, they are well coordinated and consistent.
This is a direct indication of our improved management standard. Besides, we are better able to control risk. We control risk so that it is at a rather low level. In this way, we are in a better shape. So we have effective and targeted risk control and management measures. More importantly, the risk control indicators and various risk control tiers are even one level higher than regulatory requirement. For example, for 60-day overdue loans, we strengthen management of it by placing it under non-performing loan. Concerning our IT system, there is new generation core system being used, and we are going to have new core competencies as a result. For the new IT system, after it is in place, we are better able to use big data, and we can improve customer experience. We will have better ability to service customers.
We will have better risk control capability, internal management, data application, operating efficiency improvement, and so on. These will all be seen. Besides, we can better innovate our businesses, and we will be more competitive in the smart business area.