Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. It's a great privilege to bring you the February 2022 results of Capitec. I think if you look at the year, it's unfair that you need to look at over a two-year period. If I look at those two years, since actually COVID has started, I think these six blocks actually stands out for what we've done. If I look at the first one, agility, the ability to manage through the whole COVID side and then also through the whole unrest, I think we as Capitec has done extremely well. I still remember with COVID when it broke out.
For four-five months, we had to say, "How do we handle it?" We actually said, "How do we gonna grow, and how are we gonna capture market share in that period?" The result of that all of that is that our earnings growth has been 16% since February 2020. I think that is a tremendous achievement. To be able to say you grew through COVID and through the unrest with 16%, I think that is a remarkable achievement. We've added 4.3 million new clients, and that shows you the trust in the brand and how strong our brand is performing out there.
The one that we're extremely proud of is our best digital brand that we've achieved, and with 3.4 million new digital clients that actually joined us. We've got now 10 million clients that's on our digital platform. That is for the app and USSD. I think through this whole period, the credit performance has been exceptional. The way we've made adjustments to our exposures to our credit policies, opening up, closing down. I think that helped us to achieve what we have achieved. The most important for me is our focus on our people. You don't achieve these results if you don't focus on our people, if we don't develop our people, we don't spend time on leadership, and we don't spend time on culture.
I would like to share a short video for you on actually that summarize the whole year for us in a very short period.
Since the start of COVID two years ago, we were brutally confronted with VUCA, volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity. It challenged the way we work, socialize, learn, and connect. In some cases, it took the ultimate toll here at Capitec, as we had to say goodbye to 14 of our friends and colleagues. As a country, we also had to survive an unrest with disastrous economic consequences. Imagine the distress our Capitec colleagues went through when 80 of our branches were destroyed. Once again, our resilience was called upon. Our clients did not have a branch to go to, no ATMs to withdraw money from, and the home away from home for our service consultants did not exist anymore. We rallied together to support our fellow team members.
Our ops people were redeployed to other positions and branches, while our properties division had to work day and night to restore our branches. We also had to care for our clients and communities that were disrupted by the economic disaster. The entire organization got involved in the rebuilding through initiatives like the feeding schemes and cleaning operations, as enabled through our employee volunteer program. In among these major disruptions, the show had to go on. It was not business as usual. Something changed over the past two years. Not our commitment to our clients, not our energy and passion for what we do, not our drive to show up and own up. No, a much deeper sense has become part of our emotional makeup, a sense of Ubuntu. Despite the pandemic and unrest, we are grateful and proud that not a single job was lost.
On the contrary, we are still creating job opportunities, with more than 2,000 new people having joined our company in the past two years. We are grateful to our service consultants and relationship managers who are the faces of Capitec and delivered exceptional service, our support teams at our campuses for working tirelessly behind the scenes to make this possible, and our leadership for living our values and putting our people and our clients first. Together, we are Capitec. How do we as Capitec keep building this great company? The answer is simple: staying true to our purpose, our reason for coming together, our why. To help clients bank better so they may live better. At Capitec, it will always be client first. All the solutions we launched over the past two years were designed to help clients bank better so they can live better.
This includes our revamped Home Loans, purpose lending solutions, opening accounts on our app, WhatsApp banking, Scan to Pay, Virtual Card, card delivery, new merchant solutions, Live Better benefits, financial education solutions, and numerous enhancements to our Business Banking offering. The focus on moving clients to our digital platforms to make banking easier and more accessible for them is also part of the strategy to make it easier for our service consultants. If they do not have to spend time on transactions that could be done on the app or the SSTs, they will have more time to have quality interactions with the client, ensuring the personalized service experience that differentiates us from our competitors. Thanks to this philosophy, our clients continue to grow.
Now over 18 million, and these clients are doing significantly more digital payments, more app transactions, and are making more use of our credit, save, and insure solutions. They are now also getting more back with our Live Better Rewards program. This philosophy helped us to build the second strongest banking brand in the world according to the Brand Finance 2022 banking report, and one of the fastest growing brands in South Africa according to the Kantar Brand study. A brand that captured the hearts of South Africans because it stood up for the neglected market 20 years ago by asking why, and that continues to challenge the status quo today. Here we are on the doorstep of yet another year of madness, excitement, stress, learning, challenging ourselves to go above and beyond. Always showing up and owning up. We are Capitec. For us, it's about client first.
It's about helping our clients bank better, save better, and live better. We are building a bank for everyone. With over 18 million clients, about the population of New York, it is clear we are thinking differently about banking, challenging convention, and building a movement that is striving to become the best bank in the world. We are Capitec.
Yeah, I think we are proud about the two years that's gone past. I was last week in the Natal branches and just to experience what is happening in Natal with the unrest. I must say, it's humbling to see how our consultants and our branch managers and our people has actually gone that extra mile to help support our clients and make certain that they get the most, the best possible service that there is. I think if you look at the financial overview, yes, we have got headline earnings growth of 84%. But I think more importantly, if you look at a five-year period, a 17% growth, and if you look at a 10-year period, it's a 23% growth.
We had a very strong growth period over this last 10 or five years, and I think that's reflected in these figures. I think what is positive, the 16% through COVID, the ability to grow with 16% on February 2020, and then to still achieve a ROE of 26%. I think the dividend, the full dividend for the full year is ZAR 51, and then a special ordinary dividend, given our capital adequacy that we paid out to our shareholders. I think our shareholders must be extremely pleased with our results and then also the dividends that we're paying out to them. If I look at what is driving our results, I think the first one is our loan sales.
In the second half of last year, we've opened up the loan sales, and I will unpack that in detail, but you can see our sales going up from ZAR 29 billion to ZAR 44 billion. Very strong sales that's coming through. We've also seen that in Business Banking, where in the last six months we had very strong demand for credit and supplying those, that particular credit. I think the second slide is then on our other income between net transactional income to our operating expenses. You've all seen in our operating expenses there's an abnormal bonus that was paid out to our staff. There's also the BEE deal. If you take that in consideration, that ratio is plus minus about 100%.
Again, we're covering basically all our OPEX with our transactional income and our other income streams that we've got. You can see in our provisionings slide, if you look at our total provisioning to our stage three and two coverage, we're at 100%, 103% in line with previous years. It's just February 2018 to 2019, which is slow, which looks odd, but that's purely the difference between or moving to IFRS 9. Capital adequacy, I've spoken about it previously, but we're sitting with a very strong capital adequacy of 36%. I think overall strong results, and that actually gives you the indication where the growth is coming from.
If we unpack it further, net lending income and investment and insurance, or credit income is up 13%, transactional income 21%. Funeral, the product is still doing exceptionally well, and I'll unpack that 39%. Our income from operations up 17%. Credit impairment charge, we've dropped that charge with ZAR 4.3 billion, and that's purely the COVID side that's been released. That gives you a net income growth of 55%. On operating expenses, we're up 33%. I'll unpack that further. But if you take out the bonuses plus the share appreciation plus the BEE scheme, that operating expenses is only growing with 11%. I think a very strong performance and then 84% growth on headline earnings.
We're gonna unpack all components of that so that you fully can understand where the growth is coming from. The first one is if I look at our interest income. Our interest income actually declined with 1% to ZAR 13.2 billion. The big drive there is actually the change in interest rates. As you all know, the repo rate was dropped with 2.75%. There's a bigger component of flexible interest rates in our book. There's a big swing from term loans to the access facility as well as the credit card. Then we've brought in Business Banking as well. We see that change taking place. You must remember, if you look at the NCR rates, the term loan max rate is 25%, a facility is 18%.
That gives you an indication. It's purely a factor of the interest rates that has dropped and then also the swing in the book. That will. I think we'll see the benefits of a capital advance growth that will come through in the next couple of years. On our investment portfolio, strong growth of over ZAR 1 billion, 34% up. I think the first point is if you look at that dotted line to the right, you'll see our core savings and fixed term savings has grown still very strongly. That shows you the trust in the brand. Also, funding slightly down, but it's in line with our philosophy.
We'll be in the market the whole time, but we've got very strong growth in our savings side and then our investment side and our investment portfolio. That's the component that we're actually investing. You see strong growth, but there's also a switch that's been taken. We've taken a decision in October 2021 to go into government bonds because your yield is much better there. You're about a 9.6%-9.7% versus Treasury bills at about 5%. So we've invested an extra ZAR 12 billion. We've invested in government bonds, and that's where you see the kicker in our investment income. I think the one that's performed exceptionally well is Credit Life. Just taking you back into history, when COVID happened, we were very uncertain what's gonna happen with retrenchments. We're very uncertain what's gonna happen with death.
We increased our premiums to ZAR 4.50 for non-government and ZAR 4.04 for government. You could see the claims coming through, and then we've reduced it again in August 2021. We've already reduced to ZAR 4 and ZAR 3. I think given the performance that we're seeing here, we're busy currently sitting and saying how should we reduce our prices even further. I think very strong performance with on the credit side, but retrenchment's coming down and death claims also coming down. I think what is important is that from May 2021, we basically self-insured. Credit insurance contribution is ZAR 1.5 billion to the book. Funeral. The funeral book has grown from about 1.3 million policies to 1.7 million policies.
We've issued 1.2 million new policies. The contribution of funeral is ZAR 900 million or close to ZAR 1 billion. Yeah, I think overall, the funeral policy has done exceptionally well. You can see the average premium is also up, and our collection rate is up, from 85% to 87%. I think just the important one is the persistency ratio. We always reflected the persistency ratio over the total book, and then it was around about 42%. We're now reflecting it to industry standards. We've reflected over the last 12 months, and you can see the performance there of 58% persistency over our funeral book. The transactional side. Yeah, we're still continuing very strong growth. If you can look over a five-year period, 21% growth.
ZAR 10.5 billion of our income is now coming in from the transactional side. That is fueled by very strong client growth. In the video, we've reflected on the 18 million clients. There's a very strong switch to digital. Our income and branch fee incomes is actually coming down because it's much lower cost to the client to actually go onto digital. I'll unpack pricing, but our pricing has been very lean and well below inflation. It's interesting, if you look at the net transactional income per client, it was ZAR 43 in February 2018, and it's now ZAR 48. We are getting more and more transactions coming through from our clients, and that's also a reflection of the better quality clients that is coming onto book.
If we look at bad debts or our provisions, I think no surprise, we've released ZAR 4.2 billion on it, so the ZAR 7.8 billion has dropped to ZAR 3.5 billion. What we've kept is our economic forward-looking, we've kept at ZAR 3 billion. It was ZAR 3.2 billion. The ZAR 3 billion is purely the uncertainty that we still see in the market. There's the whole impact on oil, inflation, food prices. There's the whole supply chain. We see what is happening in China, given their lockdown and very strict lockdowns. We've kept our economic forward-looking provisions at ZAR 3 billion.
If we unpack that further, just to show the way we provide, I think if you look at your expected credit loss ratio on the total book, you can see on retail, That's the light blue line. It used to be around about 20%. It's gone up with COVID to 27% or 26.9%. You can see it's dropped now back to 23%, 23.6%. That shows you that we are still prudent in our provisioning models. Then with business banking, you're seeing us move from 5.9% to 6.1%, and that's probably more driven by our book that's swinging slightly now to unsecured lending in that space.
Overall, the group in totality have dropped from 23.8% to 20.9%, but still higher than the February 2020 figures. If I look at what we're seeing in the credit space, I think this is quite an important slide. If you look at our people that's earning more than ZAR 15,000 per month on net inflow, so that's after tax. That is actually the salary that is falling into his bank account. It's after all deductions. You can see the contribution to our gross loans and advances was 29% in February 2018. It's now 52%. More importantly, people earning more than ZAR 25,000 has moved from 5%-19%. Very strong growth in people earning more than ZAR 25,000.
Remember the average salary in South Africa before tax, before deductions is around about ZAR 22,000- ZAR 23,000 . That gives you a sense of what the population looks like. I think overall, 52% of our book is now, or our cut-off that we're giving is now above 25,000 ZAR. If we look at what is the quality, what are we. What is the stress levels we're seeing, and maybe just to explain this slide, is that we're looking at cash stress. That is after a person's salary has come out, after all his deductions, all his electronic outflows, what is left for the person to live. And we say 20% is a stress level. If it's below 20%, we reflect it on the slide.
If I look at government and if I look at February 2022, 7% of our government people has got a cash stress of more than or has got less than 20% left. What you can actually see here is government has actually been stable through COVID. We all know everyone has kept their jobs. Salary increases were lower than what they expected. Then mining, given what's happening with resource prices, has gone up. You can see the levels there stayed the same. Where there's been improvement is especially on travel and leisure. It's gone up from 29%-28% to 11%. Then manufacturing, 12%-9%. We're actually seeing a bit of cash stress level in our client base.
I think what is important also is just to understand the way we manage credit, another word, agility. We've made 431 credit changes last year. So it gives you about three- four. No, it's probably about five-six per month that we've made. With the unrest taking place, we've adjusted 6,300 employers, where we've first closed down and then opened up, and that's just the ability in our credit policies to open up and close as we see stress. I think this gives you a very good indication that the stress levels in our credit book is at a very acceptable levels. Interesting, mining and government is around about 50% of our book. Mining is about 10%, government is about 40%.
If we look at new credit clients, what is that looking like? I think what is very encouraging is in this year, we acquired close to 500,000 new clients. A new clients definition is totally new to Capitec, or he hasn't taken credit with us for at least for the last six months, and he's now taking up credit. I think very strong performance of 500,000 new clients. You can see the access facility, how that has acquired new clients. If you compare February 2020 to February 2022, that drop was purely because we climbed out of the one to six-month market. We're not giving any loans now between one and six months.
There's a big client base that I've excluded now in our client base, but I think overall it gives you a very strong quality performance in our book. If I look at the access facility, this product is doing exceptionally well for us. It's quite interesting, if you look at the access facility, the credit card, is that 44% of our loans now is being on a continuous basis, meaning that the client is not coming into the branch. They're picking it up. access facility, if you repay, you immediately got access to it again. If you look at the access facility, you can see the drive there in the above 25,000 as well as, let's call it, above 15,000, big client growth in that particular areas.
The loan has been increased from ZAR 250,000 to ZAR 500,000 because this has mainly been used in the building space, and that's 20% of the limits with the grant is between ZAR 250,000 and ZAR 500,000. We see very conservative behavior of our clients, only a utilization of 59%, and then 40% of our clients is actually deciding to choose is to settle this much quicker. I think what is important is the daily risk management on our office. We've got the ability to reduce the term or the ZAR value or actually close the facility in totality if we see credit performance of a client that is not in line with our credit policy.
12% of our clients, we've reduced the limit on the book. Operating expenses, I think the surprise to everyone is the cost to income ratio of 47%. Let me first start by saying our aim is 41%. Actually, if you look at the high incentives that have been paid out to our people. If you take the variable pay incentive, there was an extra ZAR 886 million that's been paid, as well as in the share price that's gone up from roughly about 1,000 to 2,000, so that's ZAR 248 million. That equates to about close to 4%. If you take that 8% of what the bonus has done, 4% of that is due to the bonuses to our staff.
Our BEE scheme that we're extremely proud of is extra 7%, so that's 3%. That actually brings that 8% back to about a 2%, which is the standard. Basically, the way you can also look at it, we've said to our staff is to say, if we look at bonuses, we look at over a two-year period. We've grown with 16% over a two-year period, and we've actually over that same period has paid actually what we would have paid normally if we've grown with 16%. Quite interesting. I said to you that I was in Natal last week, and it's interesting what the shares that we've given to our staff has done. They talking in the morning, we've got a stand-up meeting at 7:45 A.M. till 8:00 A.M.
We call it a shareholders meeting. The way they talk and the way they behave, they're talking the whole time of what is the best for the shareholders. It's quite interesting what we've created with the whole scheme. We're quite comfortable with the operating expenses. There's a big focus still on digital and IT people, and those are expensive people. Overall, I think our operating expenses are within our expectations. If I look at when we started the bank, we said that we want to bank 96%-97% of South Africans. We want to bank everyone.
I think if we look at the products that we've launched, the full product suite that we've got in our pricing, we definitely now can serve with the bank for everyone. I'm gonna unpack that in different components. I think the first one is client growth. It's quite scary to think about February 2017, we had 8 million clients. We nearly added 10 million new clients, 9.4 million clients that we've added over this period. In the last two years, we've added another 4 million. You can see that growth is going upwards. On the digital side, the area that we're extremely focusing on, we've moved from 6.7 million clients to 10.1 million clients, so very strong growth in that.
We're seeing a very strong growth in the clients above 15,000. If we look at our savings clients, that's clients that's got a fixed term saving with us or flexible saving with us, that's gone up from 5.9 million to 7 million clients. Our banking clients, and we call this quality banking clients. So the client must have an inflow of more than 3,000. The client must have debit orders, and the client must have a digital transaction that is performing. That's gone up from 4 million to 4.6 million. If we exclude the digital transactions, we're probably more in the region of 6.7-6.8 million banking clients. We need to drive the client behavior to a digital platform. Funeral, you can see, quite scary.
February 2019, we had 400,000 clients, and now we've got 1.7 million clients on funeral. Credit is for the first time gone above a million, and we now have 1.2 million clients. Again, that question or perception, everyone thinks the whole 18 million clients is getting credit from us, but it's only 1.2 million clients from us. I've spoken about the banking solution, and I just wanna unpack that you fully understand what we've added in the last couple of years. As you all know, with Global One, you open up a Global One account, and then you've got access to the four components, which is transact, save, credit, and insure. It's not that you actually apply for a product, you get everything under Global One.
If you look at Transact, I think the most important, a client can either have a credit card or a debit card, but he's getting interest from the first cent that he actually puts in his account. The current rate is 2.75%. What we've added is now you can actually sit at home, and you can open your account on the app. You immediately have got access to Transact because you immediately get a Virtual Card. You've got free delivery, free card delivery on your debit card and your credit card, that is available for yourself. That card gets delivered within two-three days to yourself. Then the two that I'll unpack later on that I'm excited about is the whole Scan to Pay and Pay Me.
The one that we don't talk a lot about is Track my Spend. On your app, as you're spending, it's tracking what you have spent to give you indication what you spend on, food, what you spend on housing, et cetera, et cetera. That puts the client, again, in control. Our savings plans. There's four savings plans. I said 2.75%. Sorry, it's actually 3%. That's the last adjustment that's gone through. But the client has got four savings accounts. He's got a tax-free savings account and then also a Live Better savings account. Now, the Live Better savings account attracts 1% higher interest rate, so they're getting 4% on that, encouraging our people to save. You can do...
You can create the savings plans on your app. We've got access to EasyEquities, where a person can do trades on equities. We've got about 250,000 to 270,000 clients that's making use of EasyEquities with strong growth on that particular side. On insurance, I think this is the space where we're gonna focus on quite a lot in the future. You can see what we've got is the Credit Life Insurance and Funeral Plan. I believe there's opportunities to grow that particular area. Credit. Credit has changed quite a lot. We're giving now credit up to ZAR 500,000. You've got a Capitec Home Loan. There's the purpose lending that's coming through. You've got the estimate.
It doesn't matter where you are, you can actually do a quick estimate and see that if you qualify and for what do you actually qualify. Then what we've launched in this year is Live Better, and that's the one that I'm very excited about, and I'll unpack that further. We've got partners with like Shell, Dis-Chem, and Bolt, et cetera, et cetera, where people are getting discounts when they're actually performing those particular transactions. There's sweep your savings into your savings account, and then there's a roundup that's coming through. That is actually cementing for me all four of those particular areas together to create value for our client.
I think what is important if we talk Live Better is we have taken the loyalty side and tried to say, don't make it, let's simplify it. There's no monthly fee to belong. Every Capitec client just needs to go on his app, and he switches it on. There's no fee on it. Every client gets exactly the same. Typical Capitec tradition. There's no differentiation. There is no tiers. Everyone gets exactly the same benefit if they transact on Live Better. This for me is an interesting slide. It's just the value that we've created. I think it's sometimes good to actually reflect back. If I look at, you can see basically right through our fees of February 2009, February 2018 to February 2022, you can see we've got a reduction in fees.
Even if you look at the cash fees, we've increased the cash fees with 14%. Inflation over this period is actually 26%. Overall, we've created tremendous value for our client by reducing the fees, but then also switching clients away from branch to a digital platform to make it much lower. How do we service our clients? Do we only service our clients through our branches? Do we only service our clients through our digital? I think there's four channels that we look at our client base. There's 18 million clients. I think on our physical channel, we've got 853 branches. There's 4.5 million clients that are still visiting the branches. I was in what we call red branches.
That's branches that's under severe pressure given their client base in KwaZulu-Natal. The message I come back with is we will definitely open up more branches in South Africa to attract our clients and give our consultants the ability to sell the full product range. Self-service transactions, that is the service station that we've got in the branch. Currently a branch has only got one. We're performing 21 million transactions a year on that. That is gonna be enhanced to three stations per branch. We're enhancing the type of transactions that you're doing it. What you will typically find, the front end of the branch will be self-help, and the back end will be where we will assist you, and the consultant will help you to sell Global One.
7,200 ATMs. Our call centers, there's 7.9 million calls that we're handling per month, or 34 million minutes that we're talking to our clients. We've got 1,200 call center agents that is working with our clients, making certain that they understand what is happening with them. The one that we actually don't talk a lot about is Capitec Direct. That's our call center which actually, if you don't, if you wanna apply for a loan and you don't wanna do it on the app, or you don't wanna do it in branch, you can phone. Capitec Direct bookings is about ZAR 4.2 billion. There's strong growth in that particular area, and it's also helping us with the whole conversion side.
If you wanna switch your debit order, they will assist you completely to switch your debit order from wherever you're banking to ourselves and keep you informed as those switches are taking place. Digital channels, the app. The app has got 6.6 million active users. That is where we're actually getting a financial income from those clients at 6.6 million. But the people that's actually using the app is over 7 million, and there's 4.5 million users on the platform. You can see the amount of digital transactions that we are performing. Our system currently can handle 12 million transactions per second, and we've gone up to about. The actual figures have gone up to about 6 million transactions per second.
You've got physical channels, you've got call centers, you've got the digital channels, but you need to engage with your client base. We've sent out 275 million SMSs, emails, social media posts, etc., etc., to educate our clients and to inform them on exactly where they are. A very strong focus on the accessibility of the client. What have we seen? We've seen a massive shift away from cash or you can see cash is quite constant. Basically, flat and then very strong growth in the card and digital side from 81% to 84%. So very strong growth, 26% on our transactional volumes. Especially the digital side, that's now over 1.3 million transactions that's taking place.
That is very encouraging. On the app itself, digital payments. Digital payments for me is a very big focus area, and I believe that's where the future is. The two exciting ones that we've added was Scan to Pay, which is interoperable with all major QR codes. So if you wanna pay on a QR code, you can just use Scan to Pay. You take a photo and you pay. It's my favorite way of paying these days. Pay Me, t hat is where every single person that has got the app has got his own QR code, so it's your personal public QR code. So if I wanna pay you, I'll just bring the phone close and take a photo of your QR code, and I can pay you.
From the end of April, we'll be able to send you the QR code, Capitec to Capitec. We'll send you the QR code, you click onto it, and you can pay. You're taking all the risk away of creating a beneficiary, wrong accounts, wrong amounts, et cetera, by sending it. Then from July onwards, it will be interoperable with all banks, and you will be able to send your QR code to somebody that banks with Standard Bank, FNB or whoever. Then the other one that for me is very strong is RTC. That's real-time payments. We've gone in pricing there from where the market is around ZAR 40. We've gone in this year, we're at ZAR 6.50 to make it easier for people to pay something.
If you wanna buy a car, you can immediately do a payment and immediately it reflects in the person's account on the other side. We've got now a market share of 40% in that particular area. Investing in people probably the most important in our lives. As you all know, our culture goes about client, people and delivery. We're driving our culture right through the organization. In very simple terms, culture is the way you operate, that you make decisions without really thinking because it's in your DNA. That DNA of what is it for the client, what is it for our people, and what is it for our delivery is entrenched in everything that we're doing.
What we've done in the year that's passed on each one of them, culture, people and delivery. We've unpacked five leadership traits that we expect every single person to perform and lead their people in a certain way to make very certain that people understand the why they're doing things and what is the strategy behind it. Autonomy and ownership is the whole CEO principle. That's where we believe every single person in the bank must be a CEO. They must operate like a small business owner. The C stands for Client, the E is Energy, and the O is Ownership. That's a very strong drive for us.
We've restructured our delivery teams with full autonomy, where they're taking accountability from a product from end to end, with a business owner and a product head to go through it. Talent acquisition and development, that is, I think, ongoing. We brought in over 1,000 IT and data science people in last year, and that will continue. So we're still growing. We had an EXCO meeting yesterday, and the biggest headache we're sitting with is how do we fill all the vacancies we've got for the budget so that we can deliver on our business plans? Hybrid working, I think, that's the new challenge in the world, is this flexibility to work from home, working from office.
Our philosophy is that you need to spend 60% of the time at the office, so we can create and encourage that whole teamwork. I think what is also interesting is that 80% of our 80 branches is supporting Capitec Direct. Capitec Direct, if we've got overcapacity at that particular area, those branches and the branches is underutilized, we can use those people to assist. While the unrest was taking place, a lot of consultants whose branches was not functional were able to work in our call centers and in different functions in the bank. That whole model is a big focus area for us to make certain we've got the flexibility going forward. I think, CSI, a big other area of ourselves.
I think those four blocks sum up what we do in CSI. The first one is our supporting our communities. The Capitec policy is that every person that is involved in the communities gets three additional days leave. For every ZAR that they collect, the company gives ZAR 2 . That's to make certain that our people are involved in the communities, they support the communities, and they help to make certain where there's a need that we can actually go in. We support disaster relief very strongly. Financial education has always been a big drive. We've got five courses to say, how do you improve your financial lives. Example, budgeting, how to buy a house, how to buy a car. The Capitec Foundation focus very strong on math in high school.
We've got 1,300 learners that we sponsor. No, sorry. We've got 3,000 students that we sponsor. We've got 1,000 teachers that we sponsor, and 33 headmasters to support our whole drive on math, because I think there's a big shortcoming in South Africa. Then we're very strongly involved in enterprise developing via Imvelo that we invest in startup companies. Business bank, the one that everyone talks about or ask about, when is what kind of tech place. We're very happy with the profitability of business bank. The headline earnings is up to ZAR 174 million.
If I take out the bonuses and I take out the BEE deal, then the headline earnings is ZAR 220 million, and that's from a loss of ZAR 1.5 million. Still very strong growth in client numbers. We're getting about 1,500 clients per month. That's with no advertising, no support. It's just purely word of mouth. Our big focus is on our client processes and client experience, and then rebuilding the bank. I'll talk about that when I'm talking about the future. You can see on the credit performance, we've seen very strong credit performance.
I think where everyone was quite scared about SMEs and what COVID and the unrest is gonna do to the SME side, we've actually seen that our SMEs has actually been very resilient and has actually stood up through these economic times. If I look at the future, and these are trends that we see as Capitec, but that's if you read things about where the future is going with banking, what is gonna happen. I think the first thing is banking as pure banking is gonna change to financial services. How do you offer financial services in totality? And then these are the four big areas that one needs to look at. I think in South Africa specifically, the war on talent.
It's quite interesting that what we're seeing, the banks, the retailers, everyone is suddenly looking for data and data science people. We're seeing a very strong shortage in talent. That is fueled also with people now saying they're working from overseas. Also what's happening now is it's quite easy to work in London, but you actually sit in South Africa and you work for a London company or Netherlands or wherever. I think there's gonna be quite a war on talent. The one that's very interesting for me is these side hustles and gig economy. It's interesting if you look at what that is people that's got a salary, then they've got other additional incomes or they focus on certain other businesses.
We've just done an exercise on 18 million of our clients, and two years ago, we had 100,000 clients that earn more than ZAR 3,000 per time 5x a month. Why we've used five is because our weekly people are getting paid on a weekly basis. What we're saying is if you earn more than ZAR 3,000 per time more than 5 x, that was about 100,000 clients, and that is now up to about 1 million clients. What we're seeing is a strong multi-income component that's coming through. If I look at connections, I think everyone knows everyone wants to be connected to everything. Social media, metaverse, et cetera, et cetera. I think that is gonna be a driver.
Omni-channel, the ability to engage with all brands or that brands can engage on all platforms, with our client base and with all people. E-commerce, the whole drive on payments, wearables, APIs, digital currencies, cryptocurrencies. We've seen what has happened there. I think the one that we're very excited about is the ability to create platforms, ecosystem, and super apps. We're seeing quite a lot of opportunities, especially in the ecosystem side we're seeing. I don't need to talk about data. Everyone says data is the new oil. We personally believe or Capitec believes very strongly on it. AI is a big focus for us.
I think what is gonna come in there, and we've seen what has happened lately, is the whole cybersecurity side that is getting more and more traction and more and more focus in those particular areas. This is just some of the key trends that we're seeing worldwide. What are we gonna focus on for this year? I think the first one is the Live Better. We have launched from the first of March a 0.5% kickback on all debit card transactions. That is if you, what we call, one, three , and five. You must have one product of Capitec, you must have three recurring payments, and you need to do five app transactions per month.
You'll get 0.5% back on your debit card and 1.5% back on your credit card. Interesting, what has happened is we had 4.6 million clients on Live Better by the end of February. Since we've driven this whole process or the new launch of this, our client base has grown over 1 million on Live Better. We've set ourselves our objective of 8 million clients by the end of the year, but I think we can surpass that level. I think there are two big focus areas that we wanna achieve here. The first one is the uptake of the full product range of Capitec. For me, the most important is that first wallet.
That whenever every person has got two or three bank accounts, but that your Capitec card is the first one that's coming out of the wallet. I think what is also interesting is that the Live Better Day and we've seen in social media on Sunday a very big positive response of our client base that is happy with the fact that the payout is on the tenth. We're making the tenth of every month the Capitec Pay Date or Live Better Day. The reason for that is exactly in the middle of the month, and suddenly you're getting incentive on that particular date. I'm very excited about this product and what that is gonna do.
If I look at what we're focusing on for the next couple of this year and probably for the next 5 years, is data. We now in the process of moving everything to the cloud. In April 2023, we need to be 100% in the cloud. That will give us increased capabilities on machine learning and understanding our models and understanding our clients. Make certain that we engage better with our clients to optimize our client base. I'll give you an example. Our provisioning model was used to run on the old platforms between four-five days. On the cloud, it's now between three-four hours. So it gives the capability of our staff to actually spend more time on the quality and analyzing the figures than just running the numbers.
Credit, I think a big switch that you will see in going forward is where we've always looked at, the guy must have a salary slip to be provided credit. We're starting now to non-salary and multiple income earners. That is a big focus for us. It's also in line with what we're doing on Business Banking, where we believe that you need to be able to provide credit to people, and you just look at the turnover. On the credit, on the Business Banking side, a big focus on other income as a market. Then also, we've seen with COVID how we reward people for certain behaviors, and we will enhance that particular area. Digital commerce payments, you can see what we've done on the QR slide.
It's in the beginning, a very strong focus to take people away from cash and to drive people to either using card or using the app. Lastly, on Business Banking of the future, I said we will relaunch in October. We wanna have all our systems and process, et cetera, et cetera, ready by October, November. We wanna test, and then early in the new year, we wanna launch or rebrand to Capitec Business Banking. If I look at the future, I'm extremely optimistic. There's quite a lot of new products, a lot of new innovations that we're working on. I'm excited about the next years. From my side, thank you very much.
On a last point, this is also André's last financial results that he has presented to yourself. Just from my side and the whole ExCo, thank you very much for your 22 years of contribution. I think he's done an exceptionally good job and well done for the future. I'll open up now for questions. Okay. We haven't received any questions. We'll probably address questions in our sessions with all the different asset managers and the media today. Thank you very much from our side. Thank you.