Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. On behalf of PT Bank Negara Indonesia (Persero) Tbk, I would like to extend a warm welcome to each of you. We are thrilled to have such a distinguished group of partners and colleagues joining us today on BNI's earnings call for the third quarter of 2024. It is a real pleasure to have valued analysts and shareholders here as we gather to reflect on BNI's progress, share some exciting and wonderful updates, and discuss the outlook together. We got a lot of important information to share with you, insights into our strategy, financial performance, and future plans. We hope that you will find today both informative and also engaging. Please feel free to ask questions or share your thoughts throughout the call. Just simply type your questions into the Q&A box on your Zoom app.
We have a translator, so when or if our director answers your question in Bahasa Indonesia, you can still listen to English. Now, I would like to introduce our Board of Directors who are here with us. First, our President Director, our CEO, Bapak Royke Tumilaar. Deputy President Director, Bapak Putrama Wahju Setyawan. Bapak Hussein Paolo Kartadjoemena, Digital and Integrated Transaction Banking Director. Ibu Corina Leyla Karnalies, Retail Banking Director. Ibu Novita Widya Anggraini, Finance Director. Bapak David Pirzada, Risk Management Director. And the rest of our BOD joining us as well. If you would like to see our most recent corporate presentation, you may do so by downloading it from the chat room or by visiting our website, www.bni.co.id and click the investor relations icon. You can also find financial statement and other official publications.
If you have any technical issues, please reach out to our team on email address ir@bni.co.id or into the Q&A box. Our CEO, Pak Royke, will begin the sharing session by discussing our management highlights, and then continued by Pak Paolo with some wonderful news and our latest digital initiatives. After that, Bu Corina will highlight BNI Xpora performance. Bu Novita will proceed with our financial performance highlights, and Pak David will conclude the session by sharing our ESG implementation and asset quality update. Now to kick things off, please, Pak Royke, the floor is yours.
Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining our third quarter earning call. I will start today's session by sharing how BNI sees the new administration and its impact on our business, which is probably also one of your big questions this month. President Prabowo Subianto is a nationalist with ambitious vision for the country. He has been campaigning his vision to bring Indonesia GDP growth to 8%, achieve zero poverty rate, and bring the country to be developed economies by 2045. Out of the numerous government policies that often being communicated, we want to highlight several areas that economic priorities that are relevant to our business. The new administration wants to focus more on the areas such as food self-sufficiency, infrastructure, energy security, creative economy, downstream industry, include agriculture and fishery, and affordable housing and MSME empowerment.
To deliver these goals timely and effectively, the government is expanding the number of ministries that will improve their focus on delivering economic agenda. This includes Coordinating Ministry for Food Affairs, Coordinating Ministry for Infrastructure and Regional Development, Ministry of Creative Economy, Ministry of MSME, Ministry of Tourism, Ministry of Social Affairs, and Ministry of Housing and Settlement Areas. All of these are strong signal that government, that people welfare is their main priority. For a lot of corporation in real sector, there will be ample new business opportunities. For consumers, their purchasing power will gradually improve and enable them to access banking services. We believe the outlook for banking sector in terms of loan demand is quite prospective. Since our last earning call 3 months ago, operating environment have been becoming more positive. Loan growth was 9.5% year-on-year.
Note that this growth rate was understated by the impact of currency translation as IDR strengthened during third quarter and about 20% of our loan book is in USD. We continue to optimize our LDR at elevated level, 95% by September, taking advantage of Bank Indonesia incentive on reserve requirement. CASA amount grew by 5.5% year-on-year, out of which the biggest growth came from the saving account at 7.4% year-on-year. Out of all key financial indicators, NIM ratio is the one that improved the most during quarter three. The previous earning calls we mentioned that we aim to achieve around 4.2% NIM in semester 2. So far, in quarter three alone, we managed to deliver NIM ratio at 4.4%, slightly better than our initial expectation. With Loan at Risk continue to come off, now stands at 11.8% of total loan book.
Our credit cost remains low, at only 1% level. Rebound in the top line revenue, coupled with the consistently low credit costs, have allowed BNI to deliver IDR 16.3 trillion net profit, which is in line the consensus expectation. I intentionally skipped PPOP discussion in previous slide, because I want to elaborate more in this slide. Our third quarter PPOP, IDR 8.8 trillion, has rebounded well compared the previous quarter. Now our PPOP has almost back to last year all-time high. Back then was IDR 8.9 trillion on the third quarter last year, right when our NIM was peaking at 4.8% on the quarter alone. Strong quarterly PPOP came from the both net interest income and non-interest income. Our NIM ratio on third quarter was 4.4%, or 40 basis point higher than quarter-on-quarter.
Higher NIM was supported by both loan yield improvement of 36 basis point quarter-on-quarter, as well as lower cost of funds by 12 basis point quarter-on-quarter. Non-interest income grew by 8% quarter-on-quarter, driven by loan recovery income as well as banking activities fee income mainly from trade finance and bill payment done through new mobile banking apps, wondr by BNI. Starting on this year, for you who follow us closely, you may often heard about our new transformation focused on funding structure improvement. We want to have better funding sources diversification. One of the metrics that we monitor is retail funding contribution to total third-party funds. Year to date, retail funding proportion has improved to 38%. Another indicator is by looking at daily average saving balance, which increased meaningfully by 9.5% year to date.
We will discuss more detail around our initiative related to the saving account and current account in the next slides. Paolo, Director of Digital and Integrated Transaction Banking, will elaborate this. Please continue, Paolo.
Thank you, Royke. Ladies and gentlemen, our funding structure transformation focuses on building a stronger retail savings account franchise, as it has the lowest cost of funds among all type of funding. Out of many strategic initiatives that we will implement in phases, I want to highlight on two initiatives that we are starting this year. The first one involves branch transformation. There are numerous initiatives related to branch transformation that will, in phases, be implemented over the next several years. One of the initiatives that we are starting this year is changing the role of branches from transaction and services into sales. We have migrated more than 70% of our frontliners, mostly customer service as well as tellers, into generalist sales force. The second initiative was the launching of our new mobile banking application, wondr by BNI, in July this year.
Since its launching, wondr by BNI has shown good progress that we have tracked through several indicators, such as the number of new customer acquisitions and the number of transaction frequency. Both indicators have shown good momentum every month since the launching of wondr last July. I would also like to highlight that year-to-date growth of our savings accounts have reached 3.1%. This is the highest level of savings growth in the past four years. Since the launching of new application, wondr by BNI, the pace of acquisition of new savings accounts opening has accelerated. During the first and second quarter, on average, we opened around 600,000 new savings accounts per quarter. Last quarter, we managed to record almost a 50% increase. If we dissect our year-to-date savings growth by customer type, savings from retail customers grew by 6.5% year-to-date.
While savings from wealth management customers decreased by 4.7% year-to-date. This is part of our strategy to improve our funding diversification into more retail customers. Looking further into the IDR 10 trillion growth in retail customer savings, 77% of it came from new-to-bank customers, a testament to BNI's competitive in building a new customer base. Another area to improve in funding structure is on the transactional current accounts from our wholesale clients. BNIDirect is our main channel for cash management and transaction banking services. It is a key service that brings together all our transactional current accounts. As of September, the number of users for BNI cash management grew by 8% year-on-year, reaching 161,000 customers. Meanwhile, transaction volume grew by 29% year-on-year. Impact on P&L can be seen from the fee income line from the collection API and cash pooling, which has more than doubled year-on-year.
Today, around 90% of our current accounts at BNI comes from cash management clients. Hence, we believe the revamp in BNIDirect could strategically position ourselves to grab an even bigger market share in transactional current accounts. Recently, we did a rebranding and launching of the new BNIDirect as an integrated corporate portal for our wholesale solutions. The new BNIDirect uses a single access to do various transactions that were previously split into five different portals, namely cash management, supply chain, trade, foreign exchange, and virtual accounts. With this, our corporate clients will be able to access a 360-degree view of the financial dashboard, in addition to more reliable and stable system with an enhanced IT security. As with the wondr by BNI initiative, the revamp of BNIDirect will be done in stages.
Going forward, we are going to focus on adding new features as well as customization of services to cater to different client needs. Ibu Corina will continue the presentation with the update on Xpora. Please, Bu Corina.
Thank you, Pak Paolo. Focusing on SMEs with potential to go global, we launched Xpora in September 2021, which offer a comprehensive solution for SME exporters beyond lending, including business matching, business advisory, global market access, and also payment solution. We offer bundled financial products with attractive discount for LC discounting LC collection and remittance. Even the loan application process is simplified. Beside business matching features, Xpora also provide other features that can be accessed by Xpora members, such as training, financial solution, and other features related to export. Three years afterwards, we want to provide an update of the Xpora at BNI. As of September 2024, total loan for export-oriented reached IDR 31 trillion, which grew by 19.2% CAGR, with trade volume at IDR 74.8 trillion and 44,000 SME debtors.
BNI Xpora has gathered total CASA worth IDR 5.2 trillion, grew 22% CAGR compared to the end of 2021. While all of our branches are able to provide assistance for the Xpora, currently, we have seven physical hub and Xpora portal to support this initiative spread across Indonesia. To support Indonesian entrepreneurs to expand their business overseas and to capture business opportunities in Australian market potential, we inaugurate BNI Sydney representative office in September 2024. With this outstanding performance, we believe BNI Xpora will be one of our future growth engines and will strengthen BNI strategic positioning as a global bank and could increase our sustainable SME portfolio in the future. As a system national bank, we always aim to provide a more comprehensive and unique service to fulfill customer needs to do their business. Next, Bu Novita will continue the presentation with our financial performance highlight. Please, Bu Novita.
Thank you, Bu Corina. Ladies and gentlemen, this year, our balanced strategic management team has been focusing on delivering moderate growth on the asset side while optimizing our funding composition. Our loan growth was 9.5% year-on-year, while third-party funds growth was 3%. The divergence in growth rate between our asset and liabilities was enabled by RRR incentive from Bank Indonesia effective on July this year. Slower growth on third-party fund was part of our effort to technically improve our NIM through LDR and cost of funds optimization. On cost of funds optimization, we use extra liquidity from RRR incentive to manage out expensive funding, mainly time deposit. As a result, our time deposit was contracting by 2.6% year-on-year, while CASA growth was stronger at 5.5% year-on-year. On P&L, we see meaningful improvement in revenues driven by NIM expansion and strong fee income realization.
Our quarterly NIM on third quarter was 4.4%, or 40 basis points higher than our NIM in the first semester of this year. Non-interest income grew by 15% year-on-year, driven by 50% growth in trading income from bonds and currency, as well as 31% growth in cash recovery income. Other than these two items, we also experience major growth in fee income, coming from loan syndication, growing by 25% year-on-year, as well as from bill payment through wondr application, growing by 29% year-on-year. Operating expense grew by 7.4% year-on-year. It was mainly driven by our investment in transaction banking platform, wondr and BNIDirect, including their promotional budget and IT specialist hiring. As we speed up our digitalization process, we also invest a significant amount of budget into cybersecurity that covers not only technology but also its organizational design.
Our PPOP for nine months 2024 was still contracting by 3.6% year-on-year due to weak NIM on the first semester. With recent improvement in operating environment, our quarterly PPOP was almost back into its all-time high. With stable credit costs at 1% level, we managed to deliver 3.5% growth in earning after tax. Now we are going to deep dive into our loan growth and yield by segment. Corporate segment remain our major growth contributor, expanding by 15% year-on-year. The quarterly growth rate at 1.5% seems low because of currency translation impact of around IDR 11.7 trillion during third quarter. Excluding this, the corporate segment growth would have been around 4.4% Q- on- Q, while bank-wide loan growth at around 2.7% Q- on- Q. Consumer segment was our second growth engine, growing by 15% year-on-year with balanced contribution from mortgage and payroll loan.
As we communicate earlier this year, we continue to be disciplined in transforming our SME segment. KUR portfolio by design decreased by 22% year-on-year and recently still contracting by 7% Q- on- Q. On the other hand, as a result of end-to-end credit process improving relying on new credit scoring, our SME non-KUR has stopped its contraction. The only thing that put constraint on its growth trajectory is elevated write-off from legacy portfolio, which is expected to be completed by first half of next year. Loan yield start to pick up after three consecutive quarter on pressure. Quarter three loan yield was at 7.7%, or 30 basis points higher Q- on- Q, driven by corporate loan repricing mainly on USD book. Funding cost improvement on last quarter came from a combination of funding mix changes as well as lower pricing.
On funding mix, we carefully managing out expensive funding such as time deposits, which declined by 2.6% year-on-year. Current account only grew by 4% year-on-year, as we reduce the proportion of special rate account. All this could come true thanks to saving account growth at 7.4% year-on-year, a growth rate we rarely seen in BNI in the past few years. Except for the pandemic 2020, funding growth in BNI in the past three years had been driven mainly by time deposit or special rate current account. Pricing on rate sensitive funding also came down. Time deposit cost declined by 32 basis point Q- on- Q, bringing overall cost of third-party fund to improve by 12 basis point Q- on- Q, now stand at 2.6%. Pak David, our Risk Management Director, will proceed with our ESG and asset quality update. Please, Pak David.
Thank you, Bu Novita. Ladies and gentlemen, beyond financials, we want to highlight our commitment to push ourself in the transition towards sustainability, where our dedication to green financing continues to show remarkable results. As of September 2024, we have extended IDR 71 trillion green loans, which is approximately $4.6 billion to our debtors in green sectors such as renewable energy, green building, and pollution prevention. This milestone represents 26% CAGR since 2020, underscoring our leadership in sustainable investment. We also encourage our borrowers to use sustainability-linked loan, atau SLL, program. We give pricing sweetener as an incentive for the borrowers to improve their ESG metric in a pre-agreed timeframe. As of September, we disbursed $363 million of sustainability-linked loans towards top-tier players in different industry.
Additionally, we initiated the first IDR Green Bond issuance in 2022, amounted to IDR 5 trillion, which has been distributed almost 90% of proceeds towards eligible green projects. In the longer term, we want to scale up those initiatives in order to be the bank with the best ESG practice in the country. Leading the way to the transition, we also actively hold socialization of transition towards our clients. Recently, BNI hosted an ESG event focusing on energy sectors foresight to encounter Indonesian sustainable finance taxonomy. The event brought together key stakeholders, including regulator, environment, and energy-related ministries, as well as BNI clients in energy sector, discussing on the evolving sustainable finance taxonomy, the importance of taxonomy, and its role in guiding business practices towards sustainability.
Not only actively supporting business to adopt sustainable practice, we are also driving the transition by focusing on risk assessment, one of which is related to cybersecurity that becomes a crucial factor nowadays. We put our concern on the increasingly cybersecurity threats within the past few years, and we have been initiating cybersecurity best practices in BNI, in line with our shareholders' focus on encouraging business and management practices that support sustainable practices. We are also strengthening our cybersecurity aligned with global standard practices and have established a dedicated team for data privacy and cybersecurity in BNI. We also have been regularly evaluated by the National Cyber and Crypto Agency. Our maturity level of cybersecurity is at 4.81 out of 5 in 2024, which is reflecting our system readiness and resilience to counter evolving cyber threats. In general, our asset quality trend continued to improve in BNI.
Loan-at-risk ratio was 11.8%, which is a decline by 110 basis point year-to-date. The improvement mainly came from reduction in current restructured loan by 90 basis point year-to-date, while the SML and NPL decreased by 10 basis point each on year-to-date basis. We are proactively reviewing our restructured loan debtors, and if we find out the debtor situation is not improving, we will not delay the cleanup process. As a result of this comprehensive review, total write-off also increased. During nine months of this year, we wrote off IDR 14.2 trillion, which is equals to 41% year-on-year increase. You may remember that this chart that we shared in previous earnings call, now with the updated figures, around 70%-80% of NPL formation and write-off are coming from loans origination before 2021.
Since then, we rarely see downgrade of new loan disbursement, and if that happens, usually it is because of external factors. Aligned with consistent improvement in asset quality and discipline underwriting on new loan portfolio, we gradually lower our coverage ratio, but still keeping it at a very healthy level. LAR coverage now is at 47% versus pre-pandemic three-year average of 34%. Similarly, NPL coverage at 284% versus pre-pandemic three-year average of 145%. I will stop here and give it back to the moderator for Q&A session. Thank you.
Thank you, Bapak David.