Santie Botha, and I chair the board of Capitec. So it is my pleasure to welcome you all, our shareholders, to the 2024 annual general meeting. I would like to welcome everybody that's present here today, and then also shareholders that's attending virtually. So in the first 5 months of calendar year 2024, we have launched Capitec Business. We've announced the acquisition of a controlling interest in AvaFin, a European-based online consumer credit provider operating in 5 countries, including Mexico. And we've piloted Capitec Life Cover. It's another new product that will be launched in the market very soon, and Catherine, our CEO, is present here today, and she can tell you all about it. Capitec's world-class, and it's truly a world-class executive team, has a razor-sharp focus on digitalization, innovation, and placing the client front and center of every decision and new it...
initiative that's launched in the market. As South Africans, we voted in our general election this past Wednesday, and I'm convinced that if Capitec's name was also on the very lengthy ballot paper, a third of South Africans would definitely have voted for this brand, because that's how many South Africans trust Capitec with their money. Delivering on promises and exceeding client expectations are the fundamentals of what this business is about. We all know, as South Africans, that we always make a plan, even when serious odds are sometimes stacked against us. And nowadays, with ever-increasing food and energy costs, unpredictable load shedding, record unemployment, all linked to very low economic growth in a politically charged, uncertain, and highly volatile country and world, the odds sometimes seem insurmountable. But in every challenge, there's always opportunity, and that is how Capitec started, and that is how Capitec still thrives today.
The Capitec can-do culture and people are an inspiration to every single one of us to be active in whatever way we can to defend our democracy. Which brings me to the matters of today. So as a quorum of members is present, and notice of this meeting has been given in an appropriate manner, I declare this meeting properly constituted. The notice convening this meeting was distributed on the 26th of April, 2024, allowing sufficient time for members to peruse the contents thereof. I propose, therefore, that the notice be taken as read. This being a hybrid meeting with a virtual component, we will vote on a poll on all the resolutions proposed in the notice. Guidance on how to vote was included in the notice of this AGM and is available on the Capitec website in the Shareholder Centre .
A copy of the guidance note on the voting procedure has also been made available at this venue, so please follow the instructions carefully. We will open the voting on all the resolutions now to enable you to vote at your leisure while I read through the resolutions. You will be able to send questions, view the webcast, and vote while the poll is open if you have joined online. I will allow for questions after all the resolutions have been read. Once all your questions have been dealt with, we will ask you to finalize your vote, close the poll, and we will then display the results of all the resolutions on the screen here behind me.
Shareholders attending via electronic communication who wish to ask a question must select the Q&A icon, type your message in the chat box at the bottom of the messaging screen, and then press Send. The Companies Act requires that the audited annual financial statements, including the directors and audit committee reports, be presented at this meeting. A summary of the financial statements and the directors and audit committee web reports have been distributed to shareholders and is available on the Capitec Bank website. Gerrie Fourie, our Group CEO, will present an overview of Capitec's performance at the end of this AGM. The Companies Act further requires a member of the Social and Ethics Committee to report on the affairs of this committee. This report is included in the integrated annual report.
Cora Fernandez, who's sitting here in front, she's chairman of this committee, and she can address any questions that you may have at the end of this meeting. So we now move to the resolutions. We have 11 ordinary resolutions, and then we have 3 special resolutions. So ordinary resolutions, 1 to 3, 4 directors, including myself, retire by rotation at this AGM, and 3 are available for re-election. Jean-Pierre Verster will retire from the board at this AGM and is not available for re-election. At this juncture, I would like to thank Jean-Pierre Verster for his exceptional contribution to the board after his 9 years of service. I will now ask Vusi Mahlangu, our Lead Independent Director, to preside over my re-election. So Vusi, I'm just gonna stand here.
Good afternoon. Ordinary resolution number 1, the re-election of Santie Botha as a director of the company. Santie is an independent and non-executive director of Capitec. She was appointed on the board of Capitec and Capitec Bank on the 1st of June 2019, and she has been our chairman of the board since the date of her appointment to the board. Santie has vast business experience and has served as an executive director for both African Bank, so Absa Bank and MTN. Sorry, Freudian slip. She was the Chancellor of the Nelson Mandela University from 2011 to 2017. She is an experienced board chairman, having served as such for a number of JSE-listed companies. Please vote now if you have no questions regarding this resolution. Thank you.
Thank you, Vusi. Ordinary resolution number two, the re-election of Michiel Le Roux as a director of the company. Michiel is the founder of Capitec. His deep insight into the business is invaluable on the board. Michiel was CEO of Capitec from inception in 2001 until 2004, after which he served as chairman of Capitec and Capitec Bank from 2007 until May 2016, when he stepped down. He continues to serve on the boards as a non-executive director. Michiel was appointed to Capitec Bank's board on the 6th of April 2000, and to the Capitec board on 1 March 2001. Michiel is an invaluable member of our board. He is present, so please vote now. Ordinary resolution number three, the re-election of Vusi Mahlangu as a director of the company.
As already mentioned, Vusi is our lead independent director and was appointed to the boards of Capitec and Capitec Business, Capitec Bank, on 25 September 2020. Vusi is a co-founder and director of Tamela, a corporate finance advisory and fund management company. He has extensive experience in finance and investment banking and is a highly respected member of the Capitec board. Vusi, as you've seen him on stage, he's definitely here, and please vote now. Ordinary resolutions four and five, the board appointed two new directors, Nadia Bezuidenhout and Naidene Ford-Hoon, in September 2023. Shareholders now have the opportunity to confirm their appointment. So ordinary resolution number four... Sorry, just go back. Yes. Confirmation of appointment of Nadia Bezuidenhout as a director of the company. Nadia is an independent non-executive director of Capitec. Nadia was appointed to the boards of Capitec and Capitec Bank on 7 September 2023.
Nadia has extensive experience in mergers and acquisitions, strategic implementation, and business operations management, both in the telecoms as well as technology industries. She has served as financial director for Vodafone Ireland, chief strategy and business development officer for the Vodacom Group, and chief operations officer for Vodacom Business Ventures and Strategic Partnerships. So Nadia is present. So I think as the new board directors, you must get up so that everybody can see you. So this is Nadia. So please vote now. So ordinary resolution number five, the confirmation of the appointment of Naidene Ford-Hoon as a director of the company. Naidene is an independent non-executive director of Capitec. Naidene was appointed to the boards of Capitec and Capitec Bank on 7th September 2023. Naidene has over 25 years' experience in finance divisions. She has been head of finance functions, specifically in the financial services sector.
Naidene has, among others, served as the group chief financial officer of the South African Reserve Bank, as well as of Alexander Forbes Group Holdings. She also serves on the Independent Regulatory Board of Auditors. So Naidene is present. So then, Naidene, please stand up. Thank you. So please vote now. Ordinary resolution number six, the reappointment of Deloitte & Touche as joint external auditor until the next AGM in 2025. Lito Nunes, Deloitte's engagement partner, for Capitec, is present. So, Lito, is present. So please vote now. Ordinary Resolution Number seven, the appointment of KPMG as joint external auditor until the next AGM in 2025. So shareholders were informed last year that PwC will step down as external auditor due to the mandatory audit firm rotation rules imposed by IRBA.
The rule for mandatory rotation for auditors has since been set aside by the Supreme Court of Appeal, as you've seen. KPMG was, however, nominated for appointment as new external auditor for Capitec at the time. Gawie Kolbe, KPMG's engagement partner for Capitec, is present, so please vote now. Ordinary Resolution Number eight: Authority to issue loss-absorbent capital securities as well as ordinary shares upon the occurrence of a trigger event. So please vote now if you have no questions. Ordinary Resolution Number nine, the general authority to issue ordinary shares for cash. Please vote now if you have no questions. So Ordinary Resolutions 10 and 11, this is the non-binding endorsement of the remuneration policy and its implementation. So the purpose of Ordinary Resolutions 10 and 11 is to gauge the view of shareholders of our remuneration policy as well as the implementation of this policy.
Ordinary Resolution 10 is the endorsement of the policy, so please vote now. Ordinary Resolution Number 11 is the endorsement of the implementation of the remuneration policy. Please vote now on that as well. That brings to a close all the ordinary resolutions. The three special resolutions. Special Resolution 1 is the approval of the non-executive directors' fees for the financial year that ends on 28 February 2025. Please vote now. Special Resolution Number 2, the general authority to the company to repurchase, as well as its subsidiaries, to purchase up to 5% of the ordinary shares issued by the company. Please vote now. The last resolution is Special Resolution Number 3, is the authority for the board to authorize the company to provide financial assistance to any related or interrelated company within the group.
So please vote now. So we've now concluded on all the resolutions for this particular AGM, and it's now time for questions. For anyone that has questions, there's a microphone over there and over there. So if you have a question, please walk to the microphone, or otherwise someone can assist and maybe take the microphone to the person, but maybe just raise your hand or walk straight to the microphone. So I'll take my glasses off. Any questions from the floor? No questions? Okay. Are there any questions via electronic means? Okay. So Mdluli , from ESG Insight, on behalf of various pension funds, has the following questions on the remuneration policy. The ESG component is still too broad to allow shareholders to hold executives to account on this key strategic initiative. Why is Remco not setting specific measurable targets instead of being wishy-washy?
We raised this concern before, and the explanations given in the remuneration report are dismissive. So between Cora and Vusi, so the ESG component is still too broad to allow shareholders to hold executives to account. So, Cora, do you want to give it a go? Yeah. Okay. So... And Vusi, did you want to say something on ESG in-
It is work in progress.
Yeah. Maybe, maybe just stand up and just... Yeah.
It is work in progress, and we do acknowledge it, and we do engage with shareholders on a regular basis, and we undertake that we'll continue such engagements to get the specifics, and we'll try, where possible, to address, those, those questions.
Thank you, Vusi. So just as a matter of interest, in February, from a remuneration as well as social and ethics perspective, we engaged with shareholders, on about eight occasions and dealt with specific concerns or issues they had, and as we progress, we do address the issues where appropriate, for the business as well. So, we'll keep on engaging.... The remuneration report. Why is there no greater detail provided in the report for the 25% increase in CFO pay relative to the market and benchmarking? So, on this one, it's a new appointment, in terms of Grant Hardy. I think from a benchmarking perspective, one can provide greater detail going forward, if required. And we can deal with that usually, on a, one-on-one basis as well.
But, that has been benchmarked properly in terms of the financial services sector. So I will take that. Any more questions? No further questions. Okay. So, no further questions. So thank you very much for those two questions that we've received, via email. So I think what we can now do is have a look at the results, please, from the scrutineers there in the back. So if we can maybe look at, resolutions 1-7 first, ordinary resolutions. Is that at all possible? Are there still votes coming in? Maybe talk among yourselves. They're just sort of collating the results. Okay. Okay, the team is ready with the results. So if we have a look at ordinary resolutions 1-7, they have all been passed, above 95%. So thanks for that. And then maybe 8-11.
Just move here. 8-11 ordinary resolutions, all passed. And then the special resolutions as well. So everything. All the resolutions have been passed above 90%, which is pleasing. So in closing, Cora Fernandez, Chairman of the Social Ethics, I've said before, is present. Are there any questions that anyone would like to ask on the social and ethics and sustainability report that's in the integrated annual report? Okay. So if there's no more questions, I would like to thank you, our shareholders, for being present here today. I'd like to thank you for your interest in this great company, and I would now like to hand over to Gerrie Fourie, the CEO, who will take us through a proper presentation.
Thanks, Santie. Thanks. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I've got a strategic question or thing that I need to think about. Am I gonna talk for 2, 2.5 hours, and no drinking time, or 10 minutes and a lot of good drinking time? It's a pleasure for me to talk about our results, but I'm gonna talk much more about our strategy and where we're going and what we're focusing on. I think I just want to take us back in 2000, when we actually started. A lot of people has got this misperception that we are focusing on the lower incomes, and different segments in the market. But we said from the beginning, we want to bank 95% of South Africans.
So we want to offer banking services to South Africa in those four fundamentals in a very simplistic manner, making certain that a person understands it, it's transparent, it's affordable. And you'll see right through what we're doing in all our products, affordability comes out very strongly. I always ask that question: How are we not 20, 30% lower than the market? Accessibility. I remember when we opened our first branch, we opened up retail hours, not banking hours, from 9:00 A.M. till 3:00 P.M. I still don't understand why banks are open 9:00 A.M. till 3:00 P.M., why they're not retail hours. And then personal service. And personal service is, I think, the one area that we've done exceptionally well in making certain, certain things very measurable. I remember when we started, we said, "Our consultants need to have a metric.
They need to have math, and then psychometric tests that they need to perform to make certain that they can connect with our clients and do something special with the clients. Then for the first 22 years, we actually flew everyone down to Cape Town to make certain that they understand and are trained to a certain level. I think that's just how we've taken service to a different level. I think what is interesting, if you look at Capitec, how we've evolved. The company has changed tremendously, and you'll see in my presentation how the company in the last 4-5 years, how we've changed quite a lot. I think if we look at up to 2010, probably more to 2012, our biggest fight was to move from a microlender to become a bank.
Everyone saw us as a microlender, but it's actually interesting, as only in 2009 that we actually launched fixed-term savings, where people actually can put money with ourselves, and they actually are there for 16 months or for longer. It's also in 2010 that we've actually launched the 48-month product. We had a very interesting credit policy. Those days, we talked about one up, two up, and then you normally had the nightmares after that. I think 2.1 million clients talk to itself. It's interesting, when we actually started, we said the whole business model was built around 2 million clients.
Then 2015, I think there is a big milestone where people actually start realizing that we are a bank. We're offering full-fledged, full banking services. We moved to 6.2 million clients. Interesting people that actually designed the app and actually designed USSD was in my office this morning. They've actually decided to take other routes, are retiring, and it was quite interesting talking to them to put that app into the market in 2015. But I think the big change in service was that side-by-side consulting. And just that everyone understands that if you look at your any Capitec branch, you've got the computer in front and then the consultant here and the client on this side.
Everyone looking to that computer and making certain that the client is in control, the client understand what is happening with himself, and that made a big difference in where we were going. Then in 2020, we could actually say we are a digital bank. We've moved to close to 14 million clients, 6.7 million digital clients. But we've only launched a credit card in 2017 and funeral plan in 2018, and we'll look at... We'll unpack funeral plan later on, and then acquired Mercantile December 2019, just made 2020. So it's interesting, credit card only in 2017 that we've actually launched.
I think what a lot of people don't actually realize is, in 2017, we had a strategic conference with the exec team, and we said, "We need to create stickiness with our client. We need to move away from just becoming a bank or just being a bank, but become a full-fledged financial services company." I think what you're seeing now in 2024 is how we've diversified and how we've created a strategic initiative division, Capitec Business, Capitec Insurance, and then the acquiring of AvaFin, which I'll unpack. So the company has changed and evolved in 24 years tremendously, and we all know about the 22 million clients. Probably gonna be quite soon at 23 million clients because we're still growing with 160-170 thousand clients per month.
And then 11.2 million digital clients. By far, the biggest digital player in the market at 11 million digital clients. I think if we look at how we've diversified, we've spent in the last 3 years to diversify ZAR 6.3 billion. And it's quite interesting if you look at ZAR 6.3 billion, it's quite a clear lot of serious money. But if you think about what's happened, it was just after COVID. You had Russia, you had Ukraine, you had a world inflation going up, interest rates going up, going up. We actually had a world recession. We had South Africa in load shedding. We had a GDP growth of below 1%. So it was really tough times.
Yet, if I recall on the last three years, we've really never thought about the risk of a recession or world recession. We only spoke about the client and what is important for the client, and we invested that ZAR 6.3 billion. And actually, what we've done is, we've actually taken our IT system from a legacy platform into a completely new platform, and I will elaborate on that. And we're working with the best of class with SAP, Amazon, Microsoft, and changing our whole product portfolio. We've also moved all our data. And you'll see in my presentation, data is extremely important. We've moved all our data to the cloud so that we've got access to it, and we can optimize our client experience.
We've created a complete new payment solution, and we've created three completely new businesses. So let's just look at those businesses and see what they've done. If you look at personal banking, the ZAR 7 billion includes strategic initiatives. We've got a hybrid service model of branch and digital. The profit on that personal banking, ZAR 7 billion, that's come through. I think the challenge in the last two years was credit, 'cause it was extremely tough out there in the economy, and how do we make certain that we're agile, and we can make certain that we can manage our credit risk, and we're creating a platform to grow from. I think the one that surprised the market was our strategic initiatives.
The profit contribution of that was ZAR 2.9 billion, basically a billion up from last year. We brought in new products, new value-added services. We've launched Connect and a big, big focus on digital payments. Then our insurance business is quite scary. Like I said to you, 2018, we started with funeral, and now we're sitting with a business that's contributing ZAR 3 billion to our bottom line. And where we've been always in a self-captive structure, we've moved completely away to our own license, and I'll elaborate on that. And we're moving now, making certain that's a company on its own, and we're driving that growth opportunities. And then business banking. We bought Mercantile 3 years ago. We had COVID for the first year. We had to manage and survive in COVID.
Nobody knew what's gonna happen. Then we've rebuilt it, and we're very pleased that we've rebranded now from the 1st of March, Capitec Business, and we're growing that business. And I'm very excited at what the changes that this business can do for South Africa. I think the question is: What makes us successful? I think the most important thing about this is everyone in Capitec, we believe, should be the CEO, not only myself. Every single person must be the CEO, and as CEO says, clearly what it stands here. We're client obsessed, we energize our people, and we create ownership from our clear, from our staff. If I unpack client, I think we've spoken a lot about it, but we eat, drink, live client.
We think how can we innovate, we think about how we can diversify, we think about how we can disrupt. And it's not only the client experience for one product that you're launching, but it's that end-to-end client experience that you need to ask. What happens if there's a complaint? What happens if a financial records doesn't take place? How do you make certain that your end-to-end client experience is unique? I think you don't deliver what we've delivered if you don't focus on your people. So you need to make certain that your people are energized. A big focus on talent and bringing in the best in class. Make certain we've got strong leadership, that we develop our own people.
It's interesting, 16 of our best people were now through Duke University in North Carolina. They were now a week in India. They were 10 days in Singapore. Rubbing shoulders with the best in the world, making certain that we think big enough, we think client, and how can we actually change and make certain we are the best in class? So there's tremendous focus on our own staff. It's interesting, we're currently sitting with about 60% of our people that's employed from within, so they come through the ranks, and we're working now to get that to 80% of our people coming through. And then ownership. We've got the four businesses, but I think what you create is if you've got people that run completely on their own, you create silos.
But the moment you make certain there's a common goal, common vision, you make certain everything is coordinated, and we make certain what is the best for the company in totality. Clear strategy, clear business plan, but I think the most important, the ability to actually execute on that strategy. We spoke a lot about it. If you're going to look at our strategy and other bank strategy, it's probably the same. Client service, digital, IT platforms, et cetera. But how do you execute on that strategy that makes you a winner? And that, for us, is the most important. If I look at our group results, interesting, in August, with our half year results, we had growth of 9%. We ended up at 16%, tremendous in economy, that's under tremendous pressure, at 25 growth in the last six months.
And I think that comes back from where how we've diversified, how we've done brought different products into the, the mix. I think a very big improvement on our, impairments, where we've dropped our impairments on our credit loss ratio from 11% to 9%. And then I think the transactional income up 29%. But I think the figure that surprised the whole market is that where we always were seen as a microlender, where 100% of your income was coming from credit, and you've got that massive risk given the economy, suddenly, 72% of your income is now coming from other income, and only, a small portion, 28% of your income, is now coming from, credit.
The nice thing about it, if you look at your transactional income, a big portion of that is annuity income that just keeps on growing as you go on. OPEX up 17%, but if you invest in the future, your OPEX will grow. And then I think the other two critical areas, if you look at cost income ratio, at 36%, not a lot of banks that can talk about 36%. I see Chris here smiling. He always gives me a lot of trouble on 36%. He wants 40%, Chris. And then a ROE of 26% and a capital adequacy of 36%.
I think then, a figure that stands out for me, if we look at the last 10 years, our cumulative growth of 18% that we've actually achieved over that period with COVID included. So I think we had a very strong performance, if you look at our performance over the last couple of years. I'm gonna play a video that just introduce our 4 businesses, and then I will unpack the different businesses.
In a world that moves at the speed of now, Capitec reimagines banking, where every innovation begins with a simple question: How can we make the lives of our clients better today?
The year ahead is one in which we will leverage the strengths that we already have, optimize the clients that we already have to dominate mass market banking in South Africa. We will do this by leveraging our branches and our call centers to be the most trusted, and the fact that we're the leading digital bank, which is already the most used, by adding on new digital products and services to make it the most useful. That's the basis upon which so many of our other opportunities lie. It provides the foundation of brand, and client base, and distribution, and of course, all of the data that flows from that client base and the data capabilities that allow us to leapfrog in insurance and business banking and digital products, which provide so much growth in the year ahead. It's also our growth into the future.
It's gonna be an exciting year.
Strategic Initiatives is basically the FinTech division or FinTech department within Capitec. We're responsible for new value-added, non-traditional services and products that we bring to the bank, making us less dependent on just being a lender and lending income. It's value-added services, things like data, airtime, cash send, bill payments, license renewals, all those things that add value to the client that's non-core. We've got Capitec Connect, our telco business, and here we want to use probably the biggest commodity out there at the moment, which is data and connectivity, to incentivize behavior, to make us a better bank for our clients. The ultimate would be that if a client shows a certain banking behavior as a great Capitec client, that client should never pay for data and for airtime again.
Then we've got our rewards program, Live Better, which we're putting new technology in all the time to reward our clients for good banking behavior that we see. Then the last, but not least, is Capitec Pay, which is alternative payments. It's request to pay solution. It changes the client experience in the payments world completely. On the e-commerce space, you have to enter in your banking details, you have to have your card with you, you have to have all of those things. With Capitec Pay, you can just pay with your cell phone number, which everybody knows. You can pay any way you want to. Your apps open up in a secure way. You approve the transaction, the transaction is done. This year, we've done probably north of 150 million of these transactions. What does all this mean?
How does it, how does it affect the bank? In this year's financial statements, you'll see that alternative income streams, non-interest income streams, now make up more than 70% of the income, of total income in Capitec, which shows the success, and there is just upside. The potential in the future is huge. It's enormous.
Capitec Insurance aims to uplift our society by providing trustworthy insurance to all South Africans. Insurance that is accessible, affordable, simple to understand, and provides a personalized cover and experience to all our clients. It aims to do to the insurance industry what Capitec Bank did to the banking industry, by not only offering the best value for money product in South Africa, but also to reach the previously underserved market in the banking space. This year is a momentous year for us because we are launching our life cover product. This will be a product in addition to the funeral cover that we already offer, and that has been wildly successful and loved by South Africans. We're still selling in excess of 100,000 policies every month because South Africans truly trust the Capitec brand and trust what they get when they buy a policy with us.
We also will continue underwriting the credit insurance book. So a full-fledged insurance business with three products on our own license by the end of this year.
The SME market is a very badly serviced segment in South Africa. So we built the new business bank on exactly the same fundamentals as Capitec Retail Bank, and that is simple, affordable, accessible, and really good personalized service. So it doesn't matter if you're the smallest business in the country or the largest business, you all get treated the same, you get the same offering. And then from an affordability point of view, we're gonna be the most affordable in the market by a long way. We estimate we'll probably save you about 50%-60% of your bank charges every month. From an accessibility point of view, you'll be able to open a business banking account at your home at night within 45 minutes.
Then you'll have access to an app, internet banking, and then if you really want to speak to an experienced banker, you just push a button, and there's a banker on call waiting for your call.
At Capitec, innovation is not just about the next big thing. It's about improving your everyday life. Capitec, better never rests.
I'll now start unpacking these four divisions and just give some more detail around it. If I look at personal banking, it goes for us all about that unique personal service that we provide in the branches. And I must say, I haven't heard of a client that didn't say it's unique to go into our branches, how quickly, how friendly, how nice it is in a branch. And then the whole move to digital and how digital and a branch actually support each other. So if I look at, I've got a slide before. I need to brag a little bit. I thought I'm already in the service. If you look at the stats in South Africa, it's quite interesting.
If you look at the population Santie talked about, if the Capitec people voted for Capitec yesterday, it would be an interesting thing, what would have happened. But, Santie, here's some perspective on that. If you're looking at a 61 million population, you're sitting with 22 million clients. So 36% of the clients is actually banking with ourselves or using us. Remember what we're talking about, 22 million? That is people that we're actually making an income of. So that's actually active clients. We've signed up about 26, 27 million clients over time. Interesting, if you look at the population between 15 and 64, suddenly the picture changes, because now we're sitting with 49% market share. 20 million of our clients are actually between that age bracket.
So we're starting to get close to that 50%, and hopefully we'll get to that aim of 95% that I've spoken about right in the beginning. And then if I look at the employed age, so I'm looking at people that's employed between 15 and 64, that's about 17 million people, and we've got 7.8 million banking clients. So that's 46% market share in that particular segment. And then what is interesting, if I look at the South African perspective, what is quite interesting is the average income in South Africa, I don't think we always realize that, is about ZAR 15,000. That's Bankserv.
Bankserv looks at all the salary that's coming in, 'cause everyone has got this perspective that in South Africa, people earn quite a lot, but the average is 15,000 ZAR that's actually coming in. Then if you look at SARS data, people earning more than ZAR 1 million, there's only 290,000 people that earns more than ZAR 1 million. So it gives you a little bit of a perspective of the type of services that you need to offer and make certain that you are unique in the banking sector. If you look at personal service, how do we service our particular market? We've basically got two models. We've got our branches, and if you look at our branches now, 846 branches, it's been fairly flat.
Everyone asks me: Why do we still got branches? Interestingly, we're gonna increase our branches with plus minus about 20 branches this year. We've got 80 branches that's under tremendous pressure that we need to increase the capacity in those particular branches. But what we've seen is we've moved people away to self-service, but now our consultants are really there to sell to the client, to connect to the client. So we're sitting with 39, 39 million interactions, where we, where we're really making a difference in the branch and make certain that the client really understand the product and we optimize the client usage. Cash has been fairly flat. We've only grown about 3%. Interestingly, we've got about 8,000 DNRs. Everyone asks me about the queues at the ATMs.
Believe me, we're trying to break that and to make certain that we haven't got queues. And now, for the first time, if you draw money with ourselves or any other ATM, the fee is exactly the same, encouraging people to actually move away. But somehow, people want to draw money at a Capitec ATM. That's brand loyalty. I think the other interesting one is social media. You probably won't know it, but if you phone into our VSC, you think you're chatting to a person, but it's actually a bot on the other side. That's how the world has changed. In February 2023, 9% of our calls were answered by a bot. Now we're talking about 65% of our calls has been answered by a bot.
If I look at the app, I think the interesting thing is on the app, we know about 11 million clients, but our number of transactions last year was up 49%, 1.7 billion transactions that have been taking place on the app, or 45% of our total spend was on the app. And then what is critical for us on the app is because the person is not coming into the branch, so you don't see the person, so you need to communicate with the person, and that's why our client engagement center are there to make certain that we can engage with that client. And that's where we're using AI and machine learning and sending out over 40 million messages per month to engage with the client and make certain he fully understands what's happening at a bank.
I think the most important thing is we're sitting with 2 trillion data points that we actually use to optimize the client's life and engaging with our clients over time. If I look at the app, we are by far the biggest app in South Africa. It's interesting if you look at the rankings on social media on Google, it's actually only retailers and the social media that's bigger than ourselves. If you take on people that are signing on to the app, so we are at number 5. We're working on that number 1 place, Francois, so that you have to work on.
But if you look at where we are on the app, you can basically open up a bank account in minutes, and then you've got all the products is available on the app, and you've got over 60 features on the app. I think the scary thing for me about the app, I'm not gonna go through it in detail, but there's 500,000 logins per hour on the app, and on our peak times, we're working on about 5,500 transactions per second. It is scalable to 12,000, and we can add cloud infrastructure anytime to increase that capacity. We've processed more than 1.2 trillion transactions last year on the app.
If I look at the credit environment, that 28% of our business, yes, we had a tough time last year. I think we were under tremendous pressure in that first six months. But I'm glad to say with agility, with focus on the credit management, Will and his team here, making certain that we bring that credit loss ratio down. We said, it was at 11%, it dropped to 9%. We said through the cycle, it will be at 8.5, and I can reveal that in April, our figure was at 8.4. What is interesting, how it's actually shifted. We've got 1.4 million credit clients, but a massive shift to people earning more than 50,000 ZAR, and then our credit card is up 57%.
A big focus on our credit card client base. What we've also done is we've moved away and created more channels for our clients. If you look at our direct lending business, it's now 15% of our business, where a person can phone up and he can be helped over the telephone for a particular loan. And then on self-service on the app, growing, we've just launched it about a year and a half ago. That is growing very, very strongly. I think the focus area here for me is on the multiple income, people with more than one income, where we actually really see focusing and starting to focus on those people.
Not only people that's earning a salary, but if you've got rental income, if you've got other income streams, to see how we can optimize that particular area. And then we're starting to look very strongly at how can we get the purpose lending into home loans, vehicle finance, and improvements. We've got agreements with CTM, Build It, and Cashbuild, where people can take up a loan within those organizations, and there's about a 6%-7% difference as when you take up a purpose lending versus a normal loan at branch. If I go to strategic initiatives, I think the most important thing is we're focusing to get everyone to actually do a payment electronically. We don't want to use cash. Why is that for us important?
If you draw ZAR 1,000 in cash, we don't know what you've done with the ZAR 1,000. We see the ZAR 1,000. But if you spend ZAR 1,000 electronically, we can see what you've done with every single swipe. And what you can see is, electronically, what we're doing is it's ZAR 127 billion per month that has been swiped, and 31% of that is in our ecosystem. So it's a Capitec person paying another Capitec person. And what we've done is we've created to make payments easier. So there's a magnitude of payment options. You've got now new wallets. 5 of these things are completely new. New wallets, Samsung Pay, Apple Pay, Google Pay.
You've got the new PayShap rails, whereby it's much cheaper to actually do a payment through it. You've got international payments. You've got Capitec Pay. I think it's referred to that in the video. So you can see what we're doing is we're trying to make payments as easy as possible for our client base. And what has happened was, where we were 90% cash-based, now only 17% of our transactions are taking place on cash. 83% is taking place on electronic. And the big nice thing about electronic is just not enhancing the client experience, but you can score the client from a credit perspective. If you look at e-commerce, other areas growing very strongly. We're sitting with 4.2 million clients in e-commerce, doing about 3.6 billion transactions.
It's quite interesting if you can see who's doing that, it's that Generation Z and Y. So there's people between 13 and 14 that's doing about over 80% of all the transactions. And where they're spending their money on, you can see it's a wide variety of items that they spend their money on. Capitec Pay, Jerome is sitting here. He developed it, grew it. We launched it last year, and it's basically coming from where you've got screen scraping. You need to fill in your card details. You need to verify it. It was very unsecured. The success rate was about 46%. Given Capitec's innovation or disruption nature, we said we need to do it completely different.
What we're doing now is you click on Capitec Pay, you enter your cell phone, you authenticate it on your cell, and you do your payment from there. The success rate now is about 84%. What is quite interesting is we're doing about 15-16 million transactions per month. April was 3 billion transactions that's taken place, and 5.1 million clients is actually using Capitec Pay, a tremendous success for Capitec. Then international payments. I don't know whether you've seen it. If you're on the app, you can actually do international payments now to 50 countries. We've with the majority of the transaction takes place within 24 hours, completely different to SWIFT, where SWIFT is normally about 3 days.
87% is within 24 hours, and it's a fixed fee of ZAR 175, the lowest in the market. It's interesting, we've just launched it, very low key, and we've done ZAR 21 million. So please go in and go and try the new Capitec international transfers, using your ZAR 1 million allowance. If I look at value-added services, I think if you look at value-added services, not a lot of people actually know that we're doing about ZAR 2.6 billion in airtime and electricity in a month. We control about 30% of airtime and electricity in South Africa. So that gives us a very powerful tool to understand what our clients has done. We've launched vouchers and Flexi vouchers.
You can see, on the left here, whereby you can buy a voucher and send a voucher to a person. You can actually buy a Pick n Pay voucher, or a Boxer voucher, or you can buy a Flexi voucher that you can use it at any one of the 36 retailers that we've launched with. Send Cash, the ability to send cash to somebody else, to all retailers and to ourselves. We've sent about ZAR 4.8 billion every single month to people. By bill payments, where you actually, if you want to pay your DStv or municipality, you click a button, and you do your bill payments. And the one that is for me, quite nice, I enjoyed it. I was one of the first guinea pigs, is your license renewal.
If you're due for a license renewal and you hate queues, you just click on it, and a day later, your license gets delivered to yourself for ZAR 150 for all your cars included. We've done 70,000 in the first three months, which is quite amazing if you look at your client base. Also with no promotions. The one that I'm excited about is Capitec Connect. I've mentioned that 60% of airtime and or 60% of South Africans is on prepaid. So if you look at the prepaid market, 60% is on that particular market. 8.8 million of our clients is on that. We can see that they are using prepaid.
What we've done is, we're launching a new product coming out in end of June. You can see what we're doing is we're saying to you, no expiry, 1 day, 7 days, 30 days, and then you're paying your fees on it. Disrupting the whole market, making it much more simplistic, because what you see is what you pay. It's not what's happening in the telecommunication space, where there's the whole time promotions and whole time different offers that's coming through. Very simplistic, very straightforward, and I think this is gonna be very successful going forward. Live Better, I think the most important thing is we've started with Live Better. We've given every single client that has got a certain behavior, we've given a 1.5% back on every purchase that they've done.
But we suddenly realize if you work at our scale, the retailers don't like us, and they don't want to go permanently with us on because it's just getting too big. You can imagine if you're sitting with 22 million clients and 18 million clients are swiping their cards at a particular retail, what is the cost of that? So what we've done is to say, "Okay, right, we need a new platform. We need to gamify it. We need to have certain specials coming through. We need to encourage people to actually take up our product range and give people vouchers," et cetera, et cetera. And that's all been launched in this coming month. We will take Live Better to a completely different area. If you look at value added, I've spoken about it.
I think this is an interesting slide. I don't think there's a lot of people that can say they launch new products, and they add ZAR 1 billion extra to the bottom line. And that's just that power of 22 billion of 22 million clients and 850 branches that you sell through, that you can see the take up. You can see, Capitec Pay, we've made ZAR 192 million out of that. And you can see Lotto vouchers, bill payments, close to ZAR 900 million that we've made out of those products. And you can see our market share on the right, basically controlling on electricity and data. We're controlling about 30% of the market. Insurance, yeah, it's a business already at ZAR 3.1 billion. What is our strategy on it?
We were on a cell captive with Guardrisk and Sanlam. I think everyone knows by now, we had a very good partnership with Sanlam, but the regulators' requirements forced us to have our own license. So we're departing, or our contract is ending the 1st of November. Our partnership was 30-70. 70% to ourselves, 30% to Sanlam. Now, the full 100% is gonna come through to us from next year. But I think the nice thing is that we can actually now really go and take, because they'd own the futures and benefit of the product and the pricing. Now, we can actually go and change it and create our own Capitec value to that particular area. And then we're launching a new Capitec Life, which I'll cover now.
I think the biggest thing, if you look at the insurance business, is that nobody actually understand is our advantage of 850 branches and 22 million clients. Because if you talk to the Sanlams and the Old Mutuals, they're making, they're very dependent on agents and in commission because they haven't got the branch network. We've got that infrastructure to actually sell insurance into our client base at a very affordable rate. If you look at Funeral, we've got a market share now of 35%, and 12 million clients in South Africa is actually being covered with Funeral. If I move over to Life, that's a product that we're launching next week, or no, the week after the ninth. I'm seeing Catherine here. 9th of June.
A lot of work has gone in it. If you look at Life, it's been sold by a lot of agencies. Nobody is actually focusing on that ZAR 1-3 million market or 100,000-3 million, because I think everyone is looking for that ZAR 3 million+ because of the cost of the distribution cost associated with that. What are we gonna do? You can see on the right, the person on the app takes on his life cover. He can choose, am I covering my funeral cost? Am I covering my monthly income to my wife or children? Do I have a lump sum all my children needs? And what is quite nice is we've created a trust company that actually manage it.
So if you say you look after your children, the trust company will make certain that your children education is looked after, plus then their cost of living is looked after. So I think that's completely unique. Our premiums will be the lowest in the market. 6-8 very simplistic questions that we ask. But again, the power lies in using our data. I think it's the first time that somebody is using transactional data, credit data, to optimize the client offer. So we're very excited. We've launched it in our staff, and we've sold 2,500 policies in the first 2 weeks in Life. So it's gonna be very interesting to see what happens in this space, but I'm very excited about it. Business banking.
If I look at business banking, what is the opportunity? I think everyone knows the opportunity. But if you look at this, round about everyone talks about between 2 and 3 million SMEs, and I'm talking formal SMEs, contributing about 34% to our GDP. But the one that everyone is missing is the emerging market. And, if you talk to GG Alcock, who's the specialist that grew up in those particular areas, we work a lot with him. He's estimating that market between 3 and 5 million emerging markets, with an estimate, turnover of about ZAR 750 billion. Just gives you a power. He estimates, if you look at our unemployment rate, is around about 32-33%. If you bring in the emerging market, it's more like 10-11%. And again, think about it.
Why are we still peaceful in South Africa? Because there's this very strong emerging market that is creating an economy on its own, and that's where we would like to focus. Very straightforward. What we've done in retail, we've done, we want to do in business banking. Very simplistic, transparent business solutions for business banking. If I look at business banking, I think everyone talks about business banking, but forget about our other four divisions. It's not only one division. There's some surprises. So our merchant services division, selling point-of-sale machines, rental finance, financing different, a variety of equipment, payment services, and then Forex. A very strong Forex business, whereby we taking money abroad and bringing money across. So if you look at business banking, please look at those four divisions.
I think if we look at the product, very simplistic, single solution. What we've done in retail, everyone gets exactly the same. No differentiation on income, no differentiation on size. Very unique pricing. For the first time that we're saying, actually, the pricing in retail and business banking is exactly the same, apart from the monthly fee, which is ZAR 50. The question is that I always ask, if you do a payment in retail, it's ZAR 1, why is business bank ZAR 5 or ZAR 10 and ZAR 20? The average in payment in business banking is around about ZAR 10. We're gonna come in, we've already come in at ZAR 1. Just making certain that there's no differentiation between the retail bank and business banking. And then a very unique service model.
We're gonna use our branch infrastructure for the emerging markets or for the sole props. We're using our relationship suite, which is already at 130 relationship managers, whereby you can anytime talk to those people via chat, via Teams, via WhatsApp, talking to your relationship manager. He sees... He or she sees exactly what you're seeing. So that's side-by-side consulting, exactly the same in that particular areas. And then we've got about 20 business centers across the, looking at businesses at ZAR 20 million and higher, focusing on that segment. Our focus will be on ZAR 100 million below, but predominantly focusing on the emerging market. Interesting, when we started retail banking, 60% of South Africans were unbanked. If I look at the emerging market, 60% of those people are unbanked.
Our mission is to go and bank the emerging market and unlock the potential in South Africa. I'm also quite exciting about this initiative. Our merchant services side, our point of sale side. Currently, these are the two, the Pro and the Print. The Print is about ZAR 4,200. The Pro is about ZAR 2,400. You can actually now sit, go onto the web, and you order, and it gets delivered for you tomorrow. And you can then start doing transactions. Because we believe we can disrupt the whole point of sale market. Because what we're gonna offer is a very aggressive pricing that's gonna gone in from 1st of June. And you can see the pricing here on debit cards.
I'm just gonna touch on debit cards. If you are doing a turnover below ZAR 500,000, you're gonna pay 0.8, 0.85, and if you go over ZAR 1 million, you're gonna pay 0.6. It's by far the lowest in the market. You will settle immediately into your account, and then you'll have your business bank account on top of that with those fees to make certain that we understand the data. And then from there on, we will start moving and providing a personal loan for your, for the person. Because all of them hasn't got assets, so you need to actually look at cash flow lending to make certain that you can provide lending solutions to those.
So this we've launched, and I think it's gonna be exciting to see what happens in this particular way. We had the question on ESG, and I'm gonna answer it, Cora. If you look at what we're spending on it, it's just over ZAR 200 million that we spent last year on it, so it's a very big number. If I look at what we're doing, and I'm not gonna go into the detail, but the one that excites me is the one on the left. We've started off by giving a lot of bursaries to children, but quickly realized that they don't understand what's really happening. And we said we need to fix the school from the top.
So we've taken the headmaster and actually put him through a MBA for a year, make certain he can manage the school. Taken the math and science teachers and make certain that they are equipped, and then work with that school and educate the school. And it's interesting, if you look at the success rates, was about 35-36%. Those schools are running 70, 80, 90%. And then the consumer education, where we're spending a lot of time on people, especially in these tough economic times. How do you budget? How do you make certain you can manage your financial lives? And we've got over 700,000 people that we have educated in last year on it.
And the one on the right is looking at supplier development, where we've spent over ZAR 280 million on supplier development. Working with BEE people to make certain that we can encourage them to grow their businesses and grow going forward. AvaFin, yeah, I think probably the surprise to everyone, we bought AvaFin in 2017. We acquired 40% of it. And then we said that we understand it, what's happened. We've got a very strong management team in AvaFin, a very strong CEO that's grown the business tremendously lately. And we believe there's a massive opportunity for ourselves from a funding perspective, later on, putting a banking license on top of it and grow that business on an international scale.
We've paid roughly about ZAR 500 million for our stake in it on a PE of about 4%. So I think it's a very good acquisition. I've seen their profit figures for the last three months, and I'm quite happy. So a lot of opportunities in it. We're operating in Mexico, Spain, Poland, Czech, and Latvia. And we can also operate in other countries as well. But this just gives us that opportunity to grow our business going forward and diversify our business. I think the big question that everyone ask is you grow, and one of the nightmares we've got in the IT space is you grow your transactions with 30% per year. So you can imagine if every year you add 30% to it, where, how quickly you double.
You basically double every 2.5 years. And how do you keep up with that pace, and how do you make certain that you can cope with those volumes? I think what we must understand, we've made a deliberate strategy 3-4 years ago to work with the best in the world. So we've worked with AWS, Amazon Cloud. 70% of our architecture is in cloud. We're sitting with Salesforce. That's taken over all our call centers. We've got full client history of the client base. So if you've spoken to ourself, we can understand what was your previous engagement and then come up with what is the best actions.
What is interesting, to re-platform our own BSC with our own people would probably have taken us five years if you do it yourself. If you do it with Salesforce, we basically now... We started in January. We will be finished by the end of this year. Just giving you the power of these big companies that comes in to help you to speed up your operations. We are SAP-based, and Microsoft is the other big partner. What does that enable us? It enables us to take all our developers, and we've got close to 1,500 developers, to actually focus on our products and our client needs and to be quicker to market.
So it's a big focus from building and maintaining, to making certain that we can go and focus on our own people. And then the whole journey on data, making certain that we understand data and we run data. We said we're a bank, then an IT company, and now we're becoming a data company, making certain that we understand data, optimize data. We've moved everything to the cloud. We've got over 42 predictive models. Our whole credit models is running on machine learning. And it's interesting, these things are about 80%-90% faster than the old models, and we can go to market much quicker. And then we've really started to use AI across the bank stock, only in the beginning phases, but we believe there's a massive op-...
Opportunities in AI space. Just think about it, we've added a massive amount of products and features into our-- for our consultants. They can't remember every single thing. But now with AI, it's a click of a button, and we can give them the right information to make certain they give the right information to our clients, and make certain that they connect to our, our clients. Our aspirations, there's a saying that says, "If your dream doesn't scare you, you don't dream high enough." So what is our, aspiration? I think our aspiration... Well, not think, this is our aspiration in the next five years, is to really realize the full potential of South Africa, and to optimize the whole eco-ecosystem that we've created: insurance, strategic initiatives, business banking, retail.
To optimize that and really unlock the potential of the emerging markets, that we can really get South Africa to grow. I don't believe the government is gonna do it, the private sector is not gonna do it, the entrepreneurs need to do it. And we're sitting with a massive amount of entrepreneurs in the emerging markets that can unlock the potential in South Africa. And then, if we've done that, then it's time to build a leading global brand, take Capitec international, and make certain we take up our space in the international world. From my side, thank you very much. Our special thanks to Santie and the board for their support, what they've done. To my Exco team, our management team, our own staff, we don't do what we've done if it isn't because of our staff and our...
what's taking place. So thank you very much, from my side. We've changed the format slightly. In a sense, you can see there, there's four cubicles, where we'll handle the personal side and retail side, strategic initiative, business banking, insurance, as well as our social impact and financial education. So if you've got any questions, my staff will be here. So you can take any time, talk to any one of those people and ask questions about the bank. From my side, I think it's now time for wine. So I'm thirsty, so enjoy the afternoon. Thank you very much.