Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. It's a great privilege for me to bring you the results for Capitec for half year. I think if I look at the last six months, a couple of things stands out. I think we had a very strong performance overall. I think the second word that comes out is the whole impact of digital, going digital. Our ability to be agile, I think with COVID as well as with unrest, we've been extremely agile. Enhancing the client experience, for all clients, was a big focus for ourself. I'll sum that up or I'll go into much more detail in the presentation on that. If any one of you want to send questions, there's the email address that you can send through, and André and myself will handle that after my presentation.
If I look at South Africa, I would like to start with the socioeconomic landscape, and maybe discuss that in detail. I think let's start with the positive things. I always believe one needs to be positive, and I think it's part of our success in Capitec, is that we're looking for those positive things and trying to get and look for opportunities. I think, if we look at the positive side, we had very strong commodity boom in South Africa in the last year. I think that had a big impact on the sales revenue that came in. It also shows you in the last week of what has happened in China, how volatile that could be and the pressure that it's suddenly putting onto commodities and then also onto our exchange rate.
If I look at the current account, we had a very positive current account, very low inflation. Interest rates are at its lowest ever for a very long period. I think everyone is talking, when is interest rates gonna go up and what is gonna happen with inflation? I think that had a very positive effect in South Africa. The one that excites me is, basically I believe about before COVID, government believed they can do everything themselves. In all our meetings lately, it's more about how can government and private sector work together. We've seen it, what has happened, in Transnet, in investments there. I think in the energy side, there's big movement. I think that is quite exciting if the private sector and government can work together to optimize South Africa.
I think the other one that stands out for me is the resilience of the South African companies. If you're gonna look at the results of companies in the last six months, actually, given COVID, I think everyone has done much better than what we anticipated. I think everyone, when COVID happened, everyone were talking about a 38%, 39% unemployment. Yes, it's at 34%, but it's much better than we anticipated. There is growth coming through. I think our individuals, the South African citizen, is a strong person that actually can withstand pressure and what's happening. I think we mustn't underestimate that. I think the one that stands out for me is actually during the civil unrest.
I never thought that I would actually be in a situation where you actually say thanks to the taxi owners because they saved quite a lot of buildings and shopping malls. How the community stood together and protected property, and how the community went out there and cleaned and operated. I think that just shows you about the South African culture and the way we can react if we work together. Uncertainty. Yeah, I think everyone talks about vaccinations. We're very pro vaccinations. We encourage people to take their vaccinations at Capitec. We've got a whole program to encourage our people to take up. At our head office, about 70% of our people has been vaccinated, and we're driving that.
The question is, the whole of South Africa, we need to get 3 million people as vaccinated, and we need to make certain that we don't have a next wave so that we can get back to normal. I think the exit and shortage of critical skills, I think that's a big area that we need to address. Young South Africans are leaving South Africa. They're worried about job opportunities. They're worried about unrest that's taking place. I think we need to give direction to them ourselves. There's also a big shortage on critical skills, and I really believe our education system really need to be looked at because our education system is not producing the people that we need for going forward in South Africa.
We need engineers, we need CAs, we need business science people, we need AI people, and our education system is not bringing that about. I think COVID, the inequality, that has just widened, and I think that could have a massive impact going forward. The one that I'm more worried about is this whole social grant culture versus a culture of entrepreneurship and ownership. Especially being an entrepreneur and being ownership, I really believe our government and ourselves must encourage our people to go out there and become entrepreneurs and ownership. Social grants is not a long-term solution. Government's role. I think the most important for government is to provide clarity, confidence. We can't have where one minister says this and the other minister says that. The important thing is to execute. Execute on strategies.
I've seen it in our business, rather have a strategy, execute it, and if it's wrong, correct it. We're just talking. We need that clarity and business confidence so that we can invest, and I'll show you later on what is happening on the savings side. There is money in South Africa to go and invest. The long-term impact of COVID, and the July unrest. It's interesting when I talk to overseas people. We all know about massive packages that's been made available in America, Europe, et cetera. The question I always ask is, how are you gonna repay this? What impact is that gonna have on our economy? I think there's positive sides and there's uncertainty. Our government has got a massive role to play to make certain that we've got that clarity and execution.
If I look at the unrest, I think we've never spoken about it. If you look at Capitec, 79 branches were impacted. Of that, 11 damage was fairly low, but 68 branches was destroyed completely. They were wiped out. We're rebuilding it. We should have about 80% of those branches rebuilt by November. Close to 300 of our ATMs were completely destroyed. Interesting, you never think about it, during that unrest period, our biggest challenge was how do you safeguard the cash and our ATMs? There was about 10 days to two weeks that we hadn't been able to go to those branches, and we've lost ZAR 36 million in cash during that period. Our damage to our infrastructure, about ZAR 300 million. The claim that's gone into Sasria is ZAR 300 million.
We haven't received anything, the expenses is coming through already in this half year results. Just coming back, what happened during that period, it was for us all about the safety of our clients and the safety of our people, our staff. Those branches were closed. We didn't trade for a long period. Interestingly, for the first time, we had to make certain that our staff, and even our clients, has got food, because supermarkets, et cetera, was closed. We distributed over 5,000 food parcel. A food parcel would be able to keep you with enough food for a week, to all our staff. It was quite a logistic challenge to get it out to KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng, but that was a big focus. There's close to 1,000 service consultants that we had to reallocate.
We reallocated some of them to our branches. About 300 or 400 were reallocated to branches. Our flexibility came out because these guys are sitting at home, but they're operating in our call centers on our direct lending environment. That multi-skilling coming out, the ability to actually use those people in different areas. I'm worried about the long-term business confidence in KwaZulu-Natal. What is that long-term impact is going to be? I think that's the economy. Just maybe a question that will come out, what is the impact on Capitec? On the credit side, I'll touch on it. The effect was less than 1%, and our KwaZulu-Natal branches is operating at normal capacity, less about 25%, so at about a 75% capacity. Gauteng is actually operating 100%.
If I look at our financial highlights, I think it's quite pleasing to go from, let's call it round figures, August 19, ZAR 2.9 billion, to close to ZAR 4 billion. I think to be able to sit and say that in a two-year period, we had growth of 35.5%. If you take it per year, it's a growth of 16% per year. I think that is extremely good performance. There's not a lot of companies that can say that. To go through COVID, handle COVID, and still show growth over a two-year period of 35% is extraordinary. We're paying out a dividend of ZAR 12. In a sense, we've said that the intention of the board is that we will do our dividend ratio to increase that from 40%- 50%. I think that is quite positive.
If I look at our results, our income statement, I think net lending income is up 7%. Our interest income is down 2%, that's predominantly because of the repo rate that dropped of 2.75%. A big switch from the term loans to the Access Facility. The Access Facility, on average, is about 5% lower price than the term loans, that is to acquire better quality clients. You had the effect. Last year, we pulled back quite a lot, you lost that credit income coming through in this year. Interest income, negative, we are quite confident, I'll go through it later on, that it will be a positive going forward. On the investment side, we managed to invest better in government bonds, et cetera, to have a better return on that side.
I think one that highlights is the transactional income, up 33%. That is, I believe, very strong to grow in a year's time with 33%. I'll just show you how strong it is. Are still amazing the amount of new clients that we're still acquiring. Funeral plan at 5% growth. It's purely a function of the clients and I'll impact that. Our income from operations is 17%. I think that probably the one that surprised everyone was the operating expenses. I don't think everyone expected the operating expenses to go through. Maybe just before I go through the operating expenses, there is that ZAR 71. That is, we've written on the assets that we've lost in KwaZulu-Natal. That's about ZAR 109 million. The ZAR 71 is after tax. Then there's ZAR 36 million in the OpEx about the cash, which I already referred to.
We had a massive increase in our share appreciation rights. Our share price went from ZAR 800- ZAR 1,900. That is about ZAR 230 million. You add bonuses. We didn't pay any bonuses in August last year. We've provided for the bonuses for half year already for this year. There also was investment in cloud and in machine learning, as well as the Mercantile people that's coming on board. Very much in line with our expectations. If you look at the half year results, that figure is actually below our budget. If I look at the income ratios, very strong income ratios. We basically covering all our OpEx through our net transactional income and funeral income. The one that stands out for me, if I look at our net transactional and funeral income to net income at 51%.
What we're basically saying is that our other income is starting to become bigger than our credit income, and that gives you opportunities to grow. The cost to income ratio, that is 44.6. If you look at the specific figure, if I take out the riots of ZAR 140 million, and I take out the Share Appreciation Rights, and certain of the other bonuses, it drops to about 42%. February we were 41%, and it's our aim to make certain that that ratio gets back to 40%. Capital Adequacy. I think you can see they're very strong capital. Gives us a lot of opportunities to grow the business. That growth from 30%-37% is basically a retained income. A 37% Capital Adequacy gives you a lot of confidence on how strong we are on our balance sheet. Drivers of those earnings. A couple of figures.
I think it's actually quite interesting if you look at our client growth. If you look at from August 2018 to 2019, it's 2 million. If you look from August 2019 to 2020, it's 2 million new clients. If you look at August 2020 to 2021, that's another 2 million clients. It's quite scary in how the brand has been accepted and how the brand is growing. Because to add 6 million clients over a four-year period, I think that's an incredible achievement. The very other strong one is our digital side. Our digital side increased with 1.6 million clients, from 7.3 million- 8.9 million clients. Our savings side is 5.5 million- 6.3 million. 6.3 million of our clients has got a fixed term or flexible savings product. Funeral, you can see that steady growth, 1.5 million active policies.
You can see on the credit side, there's an uptick of 100,000 clients, that is purely due to the Access Facility that is acquiring quite a lot of new clients. Interesting, again, everyone's perception is we're giving credit to everyone. Only 1.1 million clients of the 16 million has got credit with ourselves. Just to make certain that everyone got the perception on how strict we are on the credit side. If I look at digital, we've been voted the best digital bank in South Africa. We're very proud of it, and it's something we drive very strongly. I think if you look at, there's a strong shift also from behavior, also from USSD to app. Our app clients is now 6 million, up 46%. The one that COVID has got a big impact on is online shopping.
We've got over 1 million clients that's using the app to do online shopping. I think that figure is just going to grow as we're going forward. It's interesting if you look at the stats, the app logins. Basically all of these figures are greater than 100% growth. App logins, 840 million logins over six months period. It's over 120 million logins per month, people going into the app. The number of transactions, 600 million. You'll ask why the transactions is less than the logins. For the transactions, we only count transactions where we earn income. A balance inquiry, we don't count. That's why there's that difference. Then Tap to Pay is starting to grow very nicely with 34 million transactions, and I'll elaborate on that later on. Then RTC, real-time clearing.
We've got a 37% market share in the market, and that is growing very strongly. That is, for us, is our answer to moving people away from cash. Because our RTC is priced at R7.50 per transaction. Makes it very attractive to be able to pay a person, and that person have got that money immediately. On simplicity, affordability, and transparency, our fee structures I still believe is the most affordable and simplistic and transparent. I think you can see there that the transactions, that's for free. Electronic payments on the app, EFT transactions is R1, and then R7.50 to draw cash and do RTC. You've got a R5 monthly fee. That's your fee structure. Very simplistic, very transparent. There's a couple of nice things that we're looking at to even give more value to our clients going forward on the transactional fee income.
This is just how the transactions has moved, COVID, because I think it's interesting to look at that. I'm going to start off with February 2020. We did about 600 million transactions per month. You can see COVID, it's dropped down to about 500 million transactions. You can see August 2021, we had 750 million transactions. You can see what happened is the percentages maybe don't display it, but if you look at how big that blue bar is, you can see how big transactional, digital is. You can see how strong the card swaps, card payments is going through. I think a big driver of that is the ability just to tap your card and make a payment. Very strong growth from 35%-41%. Cash is coming down.
It's just interesting if you look at the August 2021 figure. On value, cash is still the highest at ZAR 1.9 billion. Digital at ZAR 1 billion, card at ZAR 800 million. That just gives you an implication of the value of transactions that's taking place. If I look at credit life insurance, the roadmap. Everyone ask us what is happening, a lot of things has changed with COVID. We were always using Guardrisk to help us with our insurance. Suddenly in May last year, we had no cover. Nobody wanted to take on the retrenchment risk as well as the death risk given COVID. We had to increase our premiums in May. We increased it for government, ZAR 4 per thousand, and non-government, ZAR 4.50 per thousand. We managed to get death risk renewed in August 2020. In May, that death risk expired.
On credit, we fully self-insured. In August, we reduced our prices on insurance because we are seeing a better performance coming through. Our rates are now ZAR 3 for government and ZAR 4 for non-government. What is interesting, you can see the retrenchments are spiked in November to 14,000 claims for that particular month, or 15,000 claims. You can see on the death side how it's climbed. Interesting, if you look at the August 2021 figure, which is not included there's still 2,000 claims that needs to be processed. That August, May figure, you actually need to increase by 4,000. You can see we're starting with retrenchments. We're starting to get back to normal levels, 4, 5, versus if you look at November 2019, February, around about 4. If you look at the death claims even, it's starting to get normal.
I think now with Level 3 that's going normal, we should see that returning to normal implications. If I look at the funeral income, still a very strong performance. Our profit up ZAR 360, and it looks like every six months we do a profit of ZAR 360, if you just go back in the history. We've sold more than 600,000 policies. It's interesting how the policies are still 600,000, but the average premium has increased from 18 months ago from about ZAR 190- ZAR 238. It's also a drive. We had a lot of questions from analysts on book persistency. What we're definitely seeing is in the beginning, our persistency, which is at about 40%, is pulled back because of lower-income clients. Their persistency rates are extremely low, around about 20%-25%.
We're working on, to some extent, making certain that we're selling the right policy to the right client. You can see the claims ratio with COVID. You can see how that is speaking. We're still very positive about the product. You can see it's gone through three waves, and we're still profitable over that. It's a big focus for area for us going forward. We're still the market leader with the highest cover and the lowest average premium. 18% of all new policies sold is done by Capitec. Saved. Yeah, I think that's the interesting one. We've been in COVID, and we've been in riots. If you look at the BA900, and you look at South African totality, we had saved in 2019, ZAR 2 trillion. That's gone up to ZAR 2.4 trillion, 18% growth. There's ZAR 400 billion that's been saved.
You would've thought, given COVID, and that we have to support everyone, that that money would have moved out. That's why I'm saying if the government can create confidence, clarity, this money can go back into the private sector and can go into the economy. There's a big opportunity. We've increased our market share with 1.4%, and I think it's just the strength of the brand. We're acquiring more and more people of the age of 55 and plus, and higher income clients. That is giving us that ability to grow that. We've paid ZAR 2.1 billion in interest out to clients. Still one of our big positioning statements is that from the first cent you put in that savings account, you are getting an interest from 2.25%- 8.15%. Credit. I think that's the one that I think we've managed extremely well.
If you look at the capital advanced, you can see that we're now back to pre-COVID levels. We advanced in August 2019, ZAR 18 billion. That's up to ZAR 20 billion in August. We're ZAR 2 billion higher. We've gone up from ZAR 12 billion to ZAR 18 billion. If you look at the provisions, you need to remember on that ZAR 8 billion, there's that upfront provisioning of between 5% and 8%, which is about a ZAR 500 million effect on those provisions. You see the strong growth on the book. I think on pricing, we still, on the clients that actually are not bank with us but who's got a Global One account, on pricing is about 17% lower than the opposition. We've made the brave step for our top-end clients to go to repo. Our top-end clients unsecured gets a rates of 7%.
I don't think there's a lot of people that says that their models are strong enough to go unsecured at 7%. If I look at reschedules, our book back to normal levels. You can see our reschedules before COVID was ZAR 2.5 billion, and it's gone up to over ZAR 10 billion. We're back at ZAR 3.3 billion. If you take off the ZAR 40 million of reschedules for the unrest, we're at ZAR 2.9 billion. It's very much in the same ballpark figure. I think the whole behavior incentive that we've done has worked out extremely well. We've paid out close to ZAR 200 million in the last six months. You can see a very strong performance from that side. Our arrears. In August 2021, we had industry problem on DebiCheck, which had effect of about ZAR 250 million on our arrears.
If I look at the September figures, it's back to normal. That's why I've got that dotted line there. You can see our arrears is basically 3.7 versus 3.6 in August 2019. Our arrears are actually back to normal levels, which I think is an extremely positive trend. If I look at the Access Facility, I think it's one of our better products, and we're very proud of it. It's gone now to 32% of our capital advance. Maybe just to unpack how that product is working. If you use it, you pay ZAR 60 per month on your monthly fee. If you don't use it, there's no monthly fees. On your application, your initiation fee is from ZAR 100- ZAR 300, maximum of ZAR 300. If you take a term loan, it's normally 10% of the lending amount, up to ZAR 1,000.
If I look at the pricing, the credit card is priced at 7%, from 7% up. Access Facility is priced from 12%. The ROE on the Access Facility is lower. We started a couple of years ago with the experiment of 20% ROEs, and to see what impact that has got on higher income clients. The Access Facility is priced at 20%, and that's why we're seeing a big drive in quality clients that's coming through. Interesting on the behavior, our people are using the Access Facility. Last year, we were at 59% of the Access Facility that's been used. Only 49% of the Access Facility has been used. You can see how conservative the people are using Access Facility. The interesting one, because everyone thinks we're just swapping the term loan to Access Facility.
The clients that's consolidated their term loan and switched to Access Facility is smaller than 11%. The majority of people are new credit clients or people that had credit with ourself, had a break for a period, are now coming in to take up the Access Facility. On risk management, only 27%, smaller than 27% of the applications are approved. Daily risk management, we've got the ability to look at your exposure on the Access Facility, and if we see risk, we can actually reduce the term or the rand value. 13% of our limits has been reduced, making certain that we can manage the risk of the Access Facility. What is happening with the clients? If I look at our performing book, you can clearly see what we're doing here is, maybe let me explain it.
This is our performing clients in our performing book. We're looking at cash stress. What we're saying, if you earn ZAR 100, and your commitments is more than ZAR 80, so you've got less than ZAR 20 left on your salary, we say you're in cash stress. It's a very good indicator if there's stress in the economy because those people that has only got less than 20% left on their income, somewhere they're going to fall short. What we're seeing a massive improvement on all industries. If you look at August 2020 last year and August 2021. The one that actually surprised me is if you look at travel and leisure, that has dropped from 37%- 13%. I think what also helped us here quite a lot is that pullback in the lower incomes because they were hurt the most.
We did that already in 2019, as well as small and tiny companies, we pulled back quite a lot. That is what you're seeing here. Our clients are actually performing much better than anticipated. The one that we're seeing now is Debt Review. It's interesting if you look at Debt Review, the number of clients of our book, it's below 0.3% of it. We're starting to see an increase in Debt Reviews, especially in government. That's normally where people are under stress. No alarming signs yet, but it's starting to creep up. We've already adjusted our credit policies to take that into consideration. We've got profiles of clients which we believe will go into Debt Review, and we've already pulled back in those particular area.
The one thing that I think gives us a bit of reality in South Africa, I'm going to first talk about household dependence. That's where, and it's predominantly young people, and this study was done by Old Mutual. That's where young people has got dependents, other people that they need to look after. What is interesting, that has grown from 35%- 51%. A big percent of our people in South Africa actually need to look after somebody else. We see it in our consultants. Young generation between the age of 20 and 30, and they've got dependents that they need to look after. When we look at our own staff and we look at their financial health, we actually seeing exactly the same. The one that I've never heard of, but you're never too old to learn, is the sandwich generation.
That's where you as a person needs to look at younger people and older people. You can see that increase from 34%- 43%. There's for sure still, if we don't get the economy growing, there is pressure on the South African household, and I think if you lose 1 million jobs, this is the result that you're going to get. If I look at our credit loss ratio on coverage of our provisions, you can see a very strong growth. We're basically back to about a ZAR 2 billion level. Remember, in that ZAR 2 billion level is that extra ZAR 8 billion that we've sold if you compare this year with last year. We back to normal level. If you look at your ECL ratio, you can see it's gone up to 28%, and we've brought it back to 26%.
In our sense, we're saying we're still holding back about ZAR 3.2 billion, for economic forward looking, that we need to have certainty before we will release that. That's basically the gap between the 26% and the 20%. I think overall, a very strong performance on the credit side. Business banking. The whole migration or integration of Mercantile is working 100% according to plan. We're still acquiring 1,300 new clients per month. We're now close to just over 100,000 clients. We had very strong transactional recovery, very strong performance out of the Forex division. There's higher OpEx, due to the building of the new bank. Loan growth has been very stable, but lately, we're starting to see appetite and opening up on the credit side. You can see the ECL coverage ratio.
We've actually increased it from 5.5- 6.1, and that's just being conservative given what's happening in the economy. The question I will always get is, are we on track? Yes, we're on track. I said quarter three next year to rebrand. We're positive. We actually had a discussion with the board yesterday, and we're optimistic that we're on track and we're bringing something unique to the market. Client strategy. Now talking about the value that we adding to clients. I think this is a big shift that has taken place in the last couple of months, adding more value to the client. I think if you look at this, we normally open up everything in a branch. The branch was everything. Now suddenly we've moved that on the digital side, on the app, you can do everything.
I'm showing you here, if you want to join Capitec, you could open up your account in five minutes. We take a facial biometric of yourself. We go to the Department of Home Affairs, FICA you, identify yourself, and open account in five minutes. You can get a free Virtual Card. You can start transacting because you've got a Virtual Card. You can do online shopping. Your physical card then gets delivered to you three days later. You activate Live Better, and I'll unpack Live Better now. You activate Live Better immediately. You can start doing digital payments. Scan to Pay is on the app. You can pay where you see Masterpass, SnapScan, and Zapper, by just taking your phone and show it to that QR code, and you can pay.
Interesting, if you look at our head office here, you can do no payments with cash or card. You must use our Scan to Pay. Shop online, you do it with card and QR payment, immediate RTC is also available on the card. The one that excites me, and I'll share it with you, is November, we're giving all 16. By that time, we will be at 17 million clients. We'll give each person a QR code. You'll have your own personal code, and if I then have to pay a card holder and he banks with Capitec Bank, I will snap his QR code, he will be paid. I'll feel sorry for them, because nobody of us is actually carrying cash anymore. If I look at credit, you can do the credit estimate on your app.
If you're happy with the estimate, you can let it go straight through to our Capitec Direct system. On WhatsApp, you load your payslip and your documentation that is necessary, any one of the products gets given to you. Even if you want credit, that credit card gets delivered to you within three days. A very slick process from that side. Then home loan application is with SA Home Loans, where you can register for a bond, and you can get a home loan. The last, save and insure, you know our partnership with EasyEquities. That's going extremely well. You can open up a fixed term and a flexi-term savings account, and you can set up your funeral plan. You can basically do anything that you can do in a branch, you can now do on our digital app.
You will have the support of the branches and client care. A strong focus is for us on the client engagement side. We're communicating on ±50 million interactions per month with clients to say to them, "How can you bank better? How can you Live Better to optimize the client experience?" The one on partnerships. I think that's the one strong message that's come out in this sense is partnerships and how important partnerships is for us. Capitec Home Loans with SA Home Loans has done extremely well, with over 1 million clients that has already got bonds or in the process. We've paid out ZAR 1.6 billion already. That has been accepted very well in the market. What is interesting is, if a person takes a Capitec Home Loan from ourself, he's taking a credit card or Access Facility as well.
Normally, if he had a bond with another bank, he would have taken a credit card at that particular bank. We're getting that business as well. On Purpose. I've spoken a couple of times of Purpose. We've launched actually Purpose in May. You can see what has happened. We've got WeBuyCars. CTM, we've launched in May. The Stadio Group on education. Stellenbosch University, also education, we're launching in October. With Mediclinic on the medical side. We see this as a big growth opportunity to start working on the Purpose side and provide value. We see that on Purpose, we will be about 2%-3% lower than a term loan or Access Facility, really giving that benefit to the client.
Maybe just the importance is, if you do a purpose, the only difference is it doesn't get paid out to yourself or to the individual, but it gets paid out to the third party. That gives us better scoring capabilities. There's quite a lot of new partners that's coming on board in the next couple of months. Live Better. Maybe just explain that. If you look at Global One, we've got five accounts. We've created a sixth account, and that's your Live Better account. Whenever you get a benefit, that benefit gets paid into your Live Better account, and you get a higher interest rate of 3.5% on it. What is also quite interesting, the benefits get paid to you on the 10th of each month. We're creating a Live Better day, creating excitement of the client.
What we're doing now is you've got two options on your app where you can actually move all your savings, your interest, and all that interest is going into your Live Better account, or you can do roundups. Every time you swipe, you can choose ZAR 2, ZAR 5, ZAR 10, and all of those roundups are actually going into it. In the old days, you had coins, you put it in a jar, and you save for something. That's basically the same concept, and it's quite interesting. We've acquired 2.2 million clients that's already joined. We're joining about 100,000 clients per week. The savings that's accumulated is ZAR 55 million. Shell, if you fill up, you get ZAR 0.20 per liter, and that currently is still going into the Virtual Card. From January onwards, it will also be paid in the Live Better account.
Then Dis-Chem is 2% on cashbacks. You can see some of the other partners that we also have partnered with. I see there's a big opportunity because you've got the power of 17 million clients that you can give value to. I think there's a nice opportunity for partnerships with retailers, et cetera. Lastly, the future. I think if you look at, for us, it's about scale and personal service. If I look at the people side, we still believe a branch is very important for ourself. For me, it's quite simple. A human being can strategize and can connect with somebody else. A computer can compute and work out algorithms. It's how do you actually put that together to get to the right answer? Cross-skill and remote service model is, for us, important.
I don't see in the next year or two years that Capitec people will be appointed in this particular position. They will be appointed in a cross-skill position so that you work, let's say, this month in this department or next month in another department. I think it creates excitement, it creates a better skill component, and I think that will give us that flexibility and agility to be much stronger in the market. You've seen we're still looking for people. It's quite scary. The current vacancies that we are looking for is 500 people. Of that, 200,000 is for the branches, and then another 300 is on the tech side, data side, et cetera. It links onto digital and data.
By the end of next year, we should be about 90% fully on cloud, and that gives us that ability to do machine learning and AI much quicker and faster. A very big focus on payments and e-commerce. I've spoken about the Capitec QR code. We've got a separate division that's just focusing on payments and e-commerce. On partnerships, I think I've explained that we started off with products. You had Sanlam, you had EasyEquities. Now it's about partnerships on the Live Better side, on the purpose side, the technology side, and products. What we're working on is to create that unique client experience, is to be able to say what are we good at and what is our partners good at, and make certain that we deliver to our client what is best for the clients. Business bank, we're building a digital business bank.
That focus will be on the SME market. We're quite excited in that particular space. I think overall, thanks a lot. I think we, from our side, are fairly happy with the results. I think it's a good set of results, especially how we recovered from COVID and risks. Thank you very much. We'll handle questions now.
Good morning. There's only one question so far from Mark, he wanted to know whether the dividend of 50% is permanent or whether it's just for this period. The intention is definitely to change this going forward. We just have to look at the regulatory potential changes that are being discussed at this point in time. I think one can work on 50% going forward. No more questions. We've got no more questions. Any other comments, Gerrie?
No. Thanks a lot. Thank you very much.