Good morning, everybody. Thank you for being here. Thank you to all of the Capitec people, all 7,781 of you for the excellent job that you have done, these results are yours. From client care to the branches, from tech and data to our risk teams and finance teams and HR and everybody, the job you have done has been exceptional. Thank you so much. It has been a half in which there has been a little bit of global uncertainty, and our approach has been to simply continue. To continue to calmly focus on our clients, to make a meaningful difference in now more than 26 million of those clients, to diversify our income and to focus on executing our business plan. Executing our business plan leads to clients being served well, we now have more than 26.6 million clients. That is up 7%, that is pretty cool.
All of this was delivered as a team. All of these client numbers, all of the client experience that we are so proud of was delivered as a team. Because we delivered the results as a team, we are also going to be delivering this presentation as a team. A little bit later on, Basani and Deepesh and Karl will come up and speak on Personal Bank, Insurance, and Business Bank respectively. If you are wondering why we are all dressed so similarly, it is because we are modeling for you. We are modeling for you our new branch uniform, which will be in our branches from December. When you look at these client numbers, what pleases all of us most is the depth. 16.5 million people are active on our app now, active on our app every single month, highly engaged.
Our fully banked clients, they are now at 10.4 million. That is the growth which really drives our business. If you look at the segments which have the highest potential, high income earners, people who earn above ZAR 50,000, that is up 22%, and multiple income earners. People working in the gig economy, people with hustles, entrepreneurs, that is up 138%, those client numbers. Then of course, businesses. Businesses and entrepreneurs together now comprise 686,000 clients. This is the base.
These clients are our asset from which we will build all of our future businesses. At Capitec, what we build is for everyone. We do not discriminate. What we do not do is create something exclusive just for a few. We differentiate without discrimination. Our offer resonates with many different types of clients, and you can see here just two of them. Banking the youth is where we build the next 25 years. We now serve 4.9 million clients who are aged between 18 and 25. 78% of these are app clients.
Clients taking credit card for the first time, a youth credit card, accessible credit card, is up 57%. For young people, that is an opportunity to build a score, to be able to develop their credit responsibly, supported by rewards that are meaningful to them. Our credit card remains the best card to travel with. It travels exceptionally well. No forex fees, no international commission, no forex margins, 1% cashback on everything, as well as the free lounge access, the free travel insurance that you would expect. It now means that our card has been used in the last six months in 178 different countries. Clients respond to our fundamentals and the fact that we put them first.
You have seen the slide before. As I mentioned last time, you will see it again next time and the time after. That is the point. Our founding philosophy has not changed. Our fundamentals, how we design and build for our client of simplicity, affordability, accessibility, and personalized experience, they remain our watch words. How we show up, how we as individuals, the employees of Capitec show up, putting our client first with energy and with ownership, that is what sets us apart. The world around us changes, our principles do not. Our vision is to be the most trusted. In a world of AI-enabled crime, being the safest bank is not hygiene, it is a competitive advantage. We put so much into continuing to develop everything we can to protect our clients.
We use the world's best technologies, including but not limited to AI, to identify and categorize fraud as it emerges at the level of individual conversations themselves. We see new patterns earlier. We create interventions earlier so that we can be there in the moment that our client needs us, not too late. The result of that is that in the last six months, we have protected clients from themselves and prevented more than ZAR 229 million in scams by helping the client see it before it happened. Our clients notice. The banking division of the National Financial Ombud Scheme has received more than 4,600 complaints from the banking industry in totality. Most of those relate to banking fraud, digital fraud mostly. Capitec is 18% of those complaints. Far too high, but it is much lower than our market share.
We have by far the lowest complaint-to-client ratio of any one of the significant banks. We are never going to stop. We release improvements every single day, and these are just a couple. Secure Safe hides your accounts on your app when you want to, when you never want it to be visible to anybody else. Malware alerts now scan your entire phone and prevent dangerous apps from interacting with all of your other apps. Scam Scanner now screens links and messages for you. That is a first in South Africa to help you identify when this is not legitimate. Trusted Approver is coming soon. That is the ability for you to ask somebody else for any high-risk or high-value payments to be part of the approval process so that you can be stronger than just yourself. Turning to the economy, it has given us some mixed signals.
Formal market growth stumbled in the second quarter, and you can see that trade, manufacturing, and mining all contracted. What we see from our data is that this is not broad-based across all of our clients. It is very much concentrated in specific sectors. There are data points that we find encouraging. Firstly, non-salary inflows. Inflows coming to people on a regular basis that are not from a formal employer. They continue to outgrow salaries. 5.8% for the non-salary income compared to 3.5% growth for the salaries. That is the entrepreneurship and ingenuity of the emerging market at work. We also take great comfort in all of the great work being done as part of the collaboration between government and business, and we continue to make a difference together in improving our economy and growing business confidence.
If you look at the client-level data itself, what we see is a picture of transactions across our client base that remains healthy. That gives us some cautious optimism for growth in the future. Clients themselves, though, do face headwinds if you look beyond what we are simply seeing in the data today and look forward to 12 months and 18 months from now. Two of the great risks are a re-escalation of both global conflict, and then from that, the global rates and inflation that flow. There is also a risk that an exaggerated El Niño event will lead to higher food price inflation, and both of those will weigh heavily on our clients and economy.
The fuel and transport, particularly taxi inflation that you can see up on the screen at 20%, they are bad news for our clients, both now because they are having to pay those costs, but also because they are lead indicators of further inflation to follow because so much of our economy is based on logistics that travels on road. Households are responding in the way that they always do by prioritizing what is necessary and making the shifts that they need to to manage their lives. Our data lets us see the different ways in which our clients are adapting. Youth under 25 and lower income earners are reducing their discretionary spend and concentrating it much more both in transport and groceries. Higher income earners, as a contrast, are spending much more now on clothing.
Two really interesting data points, although small, is that more affluent clients have a very significant increase in luxury brand clothing. That is up 16%. The paid full use of AI, people using paid full AI subscriptions, that has gone up 122%, albeit from a very low base. Thinking of our business plan, we strategize and execute and think and plan all in multiple time frames in order to be able to diversify our income and serve our clients. We prioritize always protecting and growing what we have, our base. I have showed this to everyone here before at the beginning of the year, and the message is simply that we are continuing to execute our business plans. Our strategy remains unchanged. Executing our business plans together yields results. Our key indicators show quality growth. Our headline earnings are up 19% now to ZAR 9.5 billion.
That growth comes from all sides of the business. If you look up on screen, we grew our net interest income by 7% to ZAR 12.7 billion. On the other side, our non-interest income is up even more, 21% to ZAR 16.1 billion. That non-interest income now comprises 70% of all of our income from operations after taking credit and payments into account. Our credit and payments are up 21% to ZAR 5.7 billion. Our credit loss ratio has raised as a group from 7.9% to 8.4%. These credit numbers are very important numbers that I would like to explain clearly. Out of context, I can imagine that they would be cause for concern. I would like to give you assurance that these are sensible numbers that indicate that we are executing our business plan. I will tell you why. There are four drivers of these numbers.
The first is that we've deliberately raised our forward-looking macroeconomic provisions early, not because of the experience that we're having now, but looking ahead to 12 and 18 months where we think the macro is going to be tougher. That's proactive. The second is we planned to grow our loan sales and our credit book we have. We have significantly grown our loan sales on our credit book, and the implications of that in the short term are a large upfront provision. The book against which we're holding our provisions is much bigger. That's successfully executing our strategy. The third is there's been a change in mix, a change in mix in our business bank, particularly towards more scored unsecured lending for which we price. That's executing our plan.
Lastly, the driver is serving the emerging markets, bringing a business repay-as-you-earn that is appropriate to the small traders, the mechanics, the hairdressers and salons, all the emerging market who need to pay differently. That's brand new business for us, and we're providing prudently whilst we grow and learn. Those are the drivers of those two numbers. Then Capitec Cover is up very significantly, 32%. Deepesh will talk about that a little bit more. Operating expenses are up only 5% to ZAR 10.5 billion. We held our return on equity steady. If you look at where our income come from, it's now even more evenly spread than previously. We're not dependent on one single income stream. All are now significant in proportion and are independent enough to provide quality diversification.
Personal Banking contributes 37%, as well as the platform of branches and service and people upon which our brand is based. Fintech, which has everything to do with VAS and Capitec Connect and the advances that go along with that, is now at 29%, insurance 27%, business banking at 6%, and all of those will be unpacked in detail just now. AvaFin contributed ZAR 90 million to the half's earnings. That's down from ZAR 120 million. The reason for that, it's expected, is because the plan at AvaFin is to increase term, reduce rates, and attract better quality clients, which in the short term means that we're earning less interest income. The proof point of that is that AvaFin's credit loss ratio has gone down by more than a third. Looking at our expenses in total as a group, overall the expense growth is very muted.
What you can see if you look at the different components, though, is salaries go up by 10%. We have more people serving all of our clients. If you take all of our IT investments, that's the OpEx that we put directly into our systems, into our hardware, into our software, as well as all of the brilliant people who do so much of the work. That's up by 12%. Our incentives are down slightly, and that's driven largely by a small decrease in the share price since the beginning of the financial year. All other expenses are flat.
Just a thought is that in the previous years, we invested very heavily, particularly in technology and data, to create new businesses, insurance and business banking. We invested very heavily in providing platforms that would scale in the future. Now, those businesses are turning. Now, the revenue of those businesses are growing far more than the expense of the platforms. I will now hand over to Basani, who is going to take you through Personal Bank.
Good morning. Thank you, Graham. Turning to Personal Bank, we are very proud to be serving 26 million clients. How we serve those clients is by making available to them an entire ecosystem of products, rewards, and channels to help them to bank better so that they can live better. I am going to go through all that list of rewards and channels, etc, in my subsequent slides with an attempt to demonstrate to you how we have created value for our clients over the last six months. The first one I am going to talk to you is our distribution. We believe that having a multi-channel distribution strategy is absolutely a winner in the environment we are working in.
As we know, the client preferences or client behavior has been evolving quite rapidly over the last few years, driven predominantly by the switch to digital across our entire client base. Whether it is now a client who pops into a branch quickly to print a card that has expired, or a client who chooses to sit with an SC in the one-to-one area because they have a complex need that they need to solve, or a client who has a few minutes between meetings to quickly make a payment on an app, we plan to be there in every channel required for our clients to make sure we are providing the most convenient service when and where our clients need it.
As a result, we continue to invest in our existing channels and to evolve our channels to make sure that we are there when our clients need us to be. As you know, lastly, the last bullet point on this slide, over the last six months, we have been in a relationship with the Department of Home Affairs to start providing Smart IDs to our clients. The uptake of Smart IDs in our branches has really been overwhelming and the demand for it continues to grow, and we are pleased to report that in the last six months, we were able to successfully conclude 594,000 Smart ID applications. Then moving on to our personal banking income.
We have been on the journey over the last few years to diversify our income stream in Personal Banking, meaning we want to make sure that we are diversifying away from too high a reliance on our lending income. If you look at last year, our transactional banking income was ZAR 1 billion lower than our lending income. In this year, you can see that we are now pretty much equal at ZAR 11.3 billion, which is an 18% increase in our transactional income and at ZAR 11.4 billion for lending income, which is up by 9%. The increase in our transactional fee income is particularly notable because it is driven by an increase in VAS and Capitec Connect, which has gone up by a massive 32% in the last six months. Looking specifically at Transact.
Transact is really a story about a digital transition for our clients. But before we talk about digital, I want to just talk about cash for a little bit. As you can see, cash has gone up by 8% in the six months to August, and that's on 433 million transactions that have been executed on our cash devices. Our clients continue to rely on cash. Interestingly, on Friday last week, 25th of September, we hit one more record in withdrawals, with 1.5 million transactions or withdrawals specifically being executed on our ATMs in one single day. The reliance on cash continues and as a result, we will continue to roll out more and more cash devices to make sure that we're meeting that evolving client need.
But over and above that, if you switch to the right of the slide, you can see that digital and card payments have increased by 21% to 3.7 billion transactions. Maybe the most exciting thing about this is the increase of 27%, which is attributable only to digital transactions. I will look now specifically at what that actually means. I think the most telling thing is the adoption of VAS and electronic payments, which are the two bottom right transactions or numbers there on your screen. VAS has gone up by 26% and electronic payments by 18%. But what really stunned me about these numbers is that we processed ZAR 1.6 trillion of value in the last six months for electronic payments, meaning our clients really are getting very comfortable with operating on our app in particular.
What's also notable here is the 66% increase in pay wallets, which is the uptake of Google Pay, Apple Pay, and all the other pays that our clients are now using. Now I'm going to shift to credit. We were really excited to have grown credit by 20%, or our sales by 20% in the last six months to ZAR 38 billion. I think what's really important to note is that the sale is underpinned by an increase of 21% in applications, and I will talk about those applications in the following slide. But what I want to focus on in this slide is that the growth in our sales has not been at the expense of very prudent credit risk management.
You will see there that we have made 1,500 different micro changes to our models over the last six months to make sure that we are taking account of the changing macro environment that Graham explained earlier. As you know, we have seen petrol prices go up. We have seen a lot of fluctuations in client behavior and of course in different industries as well. All of these trigger changes to our granting models to ensure that we are managing our credit risk prudently. As a result, we continue to be very selective in who we grant to, and our approval rates have stayed at that 50% level with take-up rates of 22%. Looking now at that 20% increase in applications, this is a story that I am going to tell in three phases.
The first talks about the high income segment that Graham spoke to earlier, which is our multiple income streams. Capitec for sure has one of the best credit businesses, unsecured businesses in the country. Those skills have been honed on lending to salaried clients. Over the last few years, we have seen that clients who are not salaried but actually have multiple incomes have been growing and, as Graham explained, these are clients who are either in the emerging markets or they are clients who are now deriving income from operating on YouTube, Spotify, etc. Over the last couple of years, we have been honing our skills and lending into that base and we are proud to have been able to lend ZAR 1.5 billion into that client, which typically is underserved over the course of the last six months.
The next high level area that we have seen from a credit point of view is growth of sales on our app. Over the last few years, we have also been working hard on making sure that we are personalizing offers on the app and making sure that the journey for clients to take up credit on the app has become much more seamless. As a result, we have seen 100% increase in our sales in that platform over the last six months. Last but not least is our lending to clients in our high earning segments. This is a story mostly of our credit card.
The sales in this area have predominantly been driven by growth in the take-up of that credit card, and that is predominantly because our credit card has been positioned as the best credit card to travel with, and that is particularly attractive to clients in that market segment. Turning now to risk. Graham has spoken at length about why it is that our credit loss ratio has gone up, and you can see there that our credit loss ratio has increased predominantly because of the FLIs. The increase in our forward-looking overlay of 0.7%, and that is a question of looking forward and thinking to ourselves, we are seeing a lot more risk potentially going to create more stress, financial stress on our clients over the course of the next six months that lie ahead.
I think what is really important is to note that our NPL ratio has stayed pretty stable over the last two years, which is really a function of our very prudent credit risk management. Then last but not least, from a credit point of view is a conversation about how proud we are to have now grown our credit book to ZAR 100 billion. What is really gratifying about the growth in this book is also just the mix of products that now sit in that book. If you look at what that mix looked like in August 2021, we really were focused on three main products with a high concentration in our fixed term loans.
But if you look now five years later at our book, we now have about almost 40% of our books sitting in facilities, which is credit cards and access facilities, which of course, de-risks the entire credit book for us as well. I want to just touch a little bit on home loans. We know that home loans are a key need, particularly for clients who are in the high income segment and of course also lower risk clients. You know we have our partnership with SA Home Loans, which in partnership with us disperses loans to our clients. Last year we mentioned that in December we entered into a partnership with SA Home Loans in terms of which we are investing in the disbursements of loans to our home loan clients.
In that partnership, we have now invested ZAR 1.5 billion to start to lend to our client base. The significance of that is simply that we are now able to offer loans into our home loan base that are much more attractive from an interest rate perspective than what we were able to do prior to entering into this investment strategy with SA Home Loans. Due to those much more attractive offers that we can put in front of our home loan clients, we have seen this 27% increase in registrations, a number which we are very proud of. Then turning now to Capitec Connect, which is definitely one of the new kids on the block in our product suite.
I think what's important to note here is the important thing around Capitec Connect was to make sure that we build this product to complement our entire banking service. As a result, it has been built on the same fundamentals of accessibility, affordability, simplicity and personalized experience. This is exactly what has allowed the product to grow as fast as it has. I will show you what I mean by that in this slide. As you can see, we now have 1.8 million active clients on Capitec Connect. That's a 64% increase over the last six months. In addition, over the last six months, we launched free Capitec to Capitec calls, which has seen a really strong uptake from our client base.
Specifically, this means that we now see clients coming into our branches and taking up multiple SIM cards because they want to be able to give SIM cards to their loved ones so they can take advantage of the benefits of free Capitec to Capitec calls. In addition, we have been giving a lot of rewards to our clients in data for good client behavior, and this has definitely increased the usage of our banking services because of these rewards. Notwithstanding our rewards and free Capitec to Capitec calls, we have seen an increase in data usage of 34 million GB, which is a 130% increase over the course of the last six months. You can see the increase there in our minute usage as well.
Potentially what is most exciting is that we have seen the 72% increase over the last six months of our net income from Connect to ZAR 284 million. Also exciting over the course of six months is the launch of device finance or devices that we are now selling to our clients. This offer to our clients is really exciting compared to anything else that is available in the market. We are able to make available premium phones, premium Apple and Samsung devices in particular, to our clients at a price point that is really, really attractive in the market. Not only that, our clients are able to buy either in cash or to get credit from us to be able to acquire these devices.
Last but not least, we also add a sweetener to clients buying devices from us of 5 GB of data per month for the first year which is extremely attractive given that we know that data has now become a human right, a thing that none of us can breathe without. That is valued at ZAR 1,200 for the year. If you look at that proposition, it is really an attractive proposition and we expect to see a lot of traction as clients take up devices through our app and our branches over the course of the next few years. Now, moving on to savings. We know that when clients save with us, it is absolutely an indication of them demonstrating the trust they are putting in us as a brand. A trust that we work very hard to earn and to retain.
We were particularly encouraged to see that our deposits have grown by up to ZAR 170 billion in the last six months. What is even more encouraging is that we have seen a 13% growth, let me try that again. We have seen a growth of ZAR 13 billion in our savings plans. You can see there that the savings in our main account have remained flat over the course of the last three years. This has been by design. It has been by design because we have, over the last couple of years, increased the portfolio of savings products that we now offer to our clients. I will demonstrate this by showing you the growth that we have seen in our notice deposits.
We launched notice deposits about two years ago, and that explains the very high growth rates that you are seeing year-on-year of 75% and 59% on those two deposit accounts. We launched these deposit accounts specifically to give our clients a lot more flexibility in terms of how they can save with us. The take-up that we have seen absolutely encourages us, because we can see that clients definitely like the product. They clearly were looking for a different way to be able to invest. As a result, the strong culture of savings that we are seeing in our client base has been allowed to continue. Our market share as a result on fixed and notice deposits has gone up by 13%. Then last but not least, we have finally launched our Stokvel account.
This baby has been in gestation for a good two years, and we are finally very happy to allow it out into the world. While we are not the first to launch Stokvel, we definitely will be the best. That is the Personal Bank story. Like Graham, I want to congratulate you all on a really good set of results for the first six months of the year. I will now hand over to my colleague, Deepesh, who will take you through the insurance results.
Thank you. Thanks, Basani. Our insurance business is a good example of what happens when we apply the Capitec fundamentals, simplicity, accessibility, affordability, and personalized service, to a market that has historically not really served our clients well. Over the past six months, the theme in this business has been efficiency and scale. Growing the number of clients we protect, deepening the value of that protection, and doing it at a cost that keeps the cover affordable. You will see this pattern repeated on every slide in this section. We have strong book growth, better claims outcomes, and continued investment in the client experience. What is this client experience? Capitec Cover has a competitive price that delivers value from day one. Our premiums never increase, giving our clients certainty in a world where very little else is certain. We do not double-debit any premiums.
What has this meant for our clients over the past six months? We have covered 60,000 funerals, we paid ZAR 3.2 billion in claims. This is money that reaches families the moment they need it the most. Because our pricing is so affordable, we estimate that we have saved clients ZAR 4.8 billion in premium. Funeral Cover remains the foundation of this book. We grew lives assured by 8% to 17.1 million. This means that one in four South Africans are likely covered under a Capitec insurance policy. What is really good to see, though, is sum assured grew by 10%. Sum assured growing faster than lives assured tells you that our clients are not just joining Capitec Cover, they are choosing more meaningful levels of cover for themselves and their family. However, Life Cover, our newest product and our fastest-growing product, had a really standout performance.
Sum assured here grew 75% to ZAR 126 billion. We are now giving, go for it. This is really unique. We are giving ordinary South Africans access to meaningful life cover. Many of these clients have never bought this product, so it is really the first time that they are accessing something like this through probably South Africa's most personalized channel. This product is really designed around how clients experience a loss because at Capitec, we took time to understand what these families need at the time.
Benefits payouts are needs-based, so we have about 50% that is paid out as a lump sum for clients to settle any immediate obligations. Just over a quarter goes to children's needs. For example, children's education, and this is paid with a regular frequency. Just under a quarter goes to household income, just to make sure that this family can keep running after an event.
This mix tells you the protection is doing real work in our clients' lives, and we are really very proud of this. What does this mean for us financially? The net insurance results for funeral and Life Cover grew 32% year-on-year. The drivers are on this slide, so I am just going to pick out what I want to highlight or focus on. The first one is ZAR 221 million, attributable to funeral claims. This is a combination of three things. One, highly disciplined pricing, two, very effective risk management, and three, we have had favorable mortality experience. This was the single largest driver. However, that gets reduced by about ZAR 38 million, which is something that is deliberate on our side. It is a choice that we take on proactive claims. What does this mean?
We go and actively find and pay valid claims rather than our clients asking us. It may look like it costs us in the short term, but in the long term, it is how we build trust in a product that most people are only just finding out about and buying for the first time. We are really very proud of a 32% growth rate. But in this period, we had some once-off movements that buoyed it. For example, claims experience and interest rate movements. We do not expect this to repeat consistently at every period. The sustainable engine for this is the book growth, the ZAR 205 million that is coming from a growing client base, both new clients and existing. So we expect growth to normalize to this trend over time. Finally, we keep investing to make this better and to build better cover.
Just to call out some of the areas, we now have a much better claims process that keeps getting better, but this means that 80% of our claims are paid in 24 hours. If you are a family that is planning a funeral, the speed is actually the product, and this is something that we are most proud of. We have new product features and pricing, where we give some better value for cover. We have premium pause functionality now for families that need to manage their premium payments over tough times. Our app and digital features allow for better arrears management. Really importantly, our risk management processes have saved at least, or estimated ZAR 155 million in fraud. This is incredibly important because it means that we protect our most vulnerable clients, and we also keep this product affordable for many people.
Lastly, what I want to end on is that what Capitec has done is increasing awareness about this cover. Most of our clients know what Funeral Cover is. Far fewer have ever been shown what Life Cover can do. We are on a mission to create better awareness around this product, educating our clients that cover means protecting a lifetime, not just a funeral. Capitec has started this, let's call it, a national conversation around what can we do today to protect our families tomorrow. I will end off for saying that Capitec Cover, you can bank on being covered for the funeral and every day after. With that, I am going to hand over to Karl Kumbier, our Executive for Business.
Thanks, Deepesh. Hello. Morning, everyone. It has been hard work over the last few years building the business bank, but we are starting to get some really nice momentum at the moment. Just a little reminder, while we all get out of bed every morning, we really feel that if we can provide access to finance to small businesses, those businesses grow. As they grow, they create jobs. As they create jobs, they stimulate the economy, and that makes a difference in the lives of all South Africans. When we built the business bank, exactly like Basani and Deepesh said, we built it on the four fundamentals of Capitec. The first one, simplicity. We got one account for everyone. It does not matter if you are a tiny business or a big business. Some of our competitors out there have up to 32 different variations of a transactional account.
We have only got one. Then the affordability piece. We wanted to be the most affordable in the market by a long way. We feel SMEs have paid too much for banking in the past. If businesses move to us now, we will save them up to 50% in bank charges. The larger businesses that are moving to us are saving up to 90% at the moment in bank charges. The next one is accessibility. We wanted to make it really easy to open an account, full remote onboarding, no paperwork, and then access to an app, access to online banking, and then personalized experience. Every one of our clients has access to a banker, and that banker's job is to help the client grow the business. I just want to explain the flywheel.
If you look at the top right-hand side, we wanted to reduce the cost of banking, then get a whole lot of clients to join us. When those clients join us, we have got data going through the account. When we have got data going through the account, we can score the clients and lend them money to grow their business or cross-sell other products. Then we generate more revenue from that, and then we can reinvest that revenue in improving the client experience or reducing the cost of banking. This flywheel is starting to turn slowly now, so we are quite excited about that. So what have we built, right? We have got a fully fledged business bank now. I am not going to go through all of this, but I am going to just say from a lending point of view, we have got commercial property loans, car finance, asset finance, overdraft.
I want to try and hone in quickly on two products we launched recently. The first one is an overdraft for small businesses. If you qualify, we will present an overdraft to you in your app. If you like the terms and conditions, you click, and then you sign the legal agreements through a selfie. Then we load the limit on that overdraft. The entire process takes less than two minutes for our clients. The second product is what Graham mentioned briefly, is our business repay-as-you-earn. That is for your higher risk client. For that reason, we collect daily. We give a term loan, one- year, two- year, or three- year term loan. Every single day, we collect a little bit out of the account. Then basically, you repay your loan over that year or two years, whatever the term was.
If you have a good day, we collect a bit more. If you have a bad day, we collect a little bit less. The next thing I wanted to just touch on is our systems. We re-platformed all of our systems. We moved all of our systems into the cloud. That gives us, well firstly, scalability. We can scale this business now because it is without impacting on client experience. Secondly, it is stability. Since January 1st this year to end of September now today, we have only had 20 minutes of downtime in all that time for business banking, which is a fantastic achievement for the technology staff. Thanks for that. From a pricing point of view, we spoke briefly about it now.
We are the only bank in the country that is priced retail or Personal Bank pricing and business bank pricing per transaction exactly the same. We always felt why should businesses pay a higher amount? It is the same rails. From a point of sale device, the traditional market, you rent a device at ZAR 450 a month. We said, "No, no, we will rather subsidize it, sell you the device upfront for ZAR 699." If you think about it, then you have 1. 5 months, your device is paid off. Then you have the device, you never pay rental again for the next five or six years or however long the device lasts. That is the first thing we did. The second thing is we are the only bank in the country that is completely transparent in our commission rates.
We have four tiers of commission rates, and your turnover falls within a certain tier. That is the commission that you are going to pay. If you go back now that, since we changed our pricing for the last two years, between bank fees, commission rates, and the subsidy we have given our clients, we have given back ZAR 550 million to our existing client base that banks with us. What has this all done for us? Our Global Biz account, so that is the formal market. Our businesses, we have grown the client base just under 50% since August last year. The red block, that is an exciting block for us. That is the Entrepreneur Account.
We built that in the Personal Banking rails, and the reason why is because if you have a Global One account, and now you have a side hustle or you are a sole proprietor, you have a business, we want to make it really easy for you to open that account. You go in your app, you open your Entrepreneur Account. You can then get a debit card. You can order a debit card with the name of your business on there. Then you can get a POS device and settle into that Entrepreneur Account. Also, if you have enough transactions going through the account, you can start borrowing money in the future to help you grow your business. If you take all of that into account, we have over 500,000 businesses now banking with Capitec. All right, here is a real nice story for us.
This is our merchant, our point of sale business. You will see that two years ago, we had August two years ago, 32,000 merchants. Last year, we had 85,000 merchants. This year, we have 141,000 merchants that have moved, doing their banking through us. If you look at the You say, are they quality merchants or not? You have to have a look at that. The turnover going through those devices went from ZAR 27 billion two years ago for the six-month period to ZAR 42 billion a year ago, to ZAR 62 billion in the last year. It is growing really, really nicely. Normally, when you look at point-of-sale turnover, your December month is your biggest, and then the next biggest month will be the next December because it is such a big jump in turnover.
Well, the good news is in August, just last month, we beat last December. We had ZAR 12.5 billion of turnover going through the devices, and we processed 44 million transactions just in August. We are starting to get some really good progress there. The lending. This is exciting for us because this is the fuel that the economy needs for the small businesses. We have grown our lending book. It has gone up 37% to ZAR 35.5 billion. Our traditional book, which is our intuitive book, has grown 29% to ZAR 31 billion. It is still 88%, 89% of the overall book. But we are really excited about the scored book. That is the small little loans, the overdraft, the BRAI, the business repay-as-you-earn product. That has grown from ZAR 1.5 billion to ZAR 4.2 billion over the past year.
Graham touched on it briefly, but on impairments, but I thought let me just go and just unpack quickly because the one item in the income statement I wanted to highlight, and that is the credit, our impairments. The impairments has pretty much doubled year-on-year from a rand value point of view. But let us look at the credit loss ratio. On the left-hand side, last year was 2.1% credit loss ratio, and that has grown to 3.4%. If you look at our traditional book, the intuitive book, it is exactly the same as last year, so it is exactly the same quality. In fact, the rolls into stage two and three are actually performing even better than we expected. That is in line. The 0. 6, the next lighter block on top, that is the upfront provision.
We've grown our book faster than we have in the past. You add another 0.6 there. Every new loan you write, you have an upfront provision, which is a good thing. I'm just going to go to the red piece first. That's the forward-looking macroeconomic data that we spoke about earlier, the FLI. Because of what's happening in the economy, we've raised just under ZAR 80 million of additional provisions there. That counts for 0.5%. The grayish block, that's what Graham spoke about. That's the new scored unsecured product. That's raised our provision or credit loss ratio by 0.8%. We price for it. It's a higher risk loan, but we price for it. Your yield on those loans is much higher than what it is on our traditional intuitive book.
Every single day, we're looking at that, ways of improving our credit models, improving our collections, how we collect on those loans. The reason why is because this is a really, really fantastic product for small businesses, and we want to try and get this product out to as many small businesses as we possibly can in the future. All right, then we got our payments business. Just to remind everyone, we got our point of sale business, which we've spoken about. Then we got our debit order collection business, and then we got Capitec Pay, and that all together forms Capitec Payments, right? We've had a really fantastic run on that side. Capitec Pay transactions have grown 37% year-on-year. Our point of sale, we've spoken about 60% growth year-on-year in that business. Debit orders is up 21%.
If you just look at the number of transactions, in Capitec Pay, 180 million transactions, POS transactions, 240 million, and debit orders, 127 million transactions over the past six months. The exciting part in this business is we launched two new products recently. The first one is Variable Recurring Payments, and if you go into Checkers Sixty60 and you do your delivery, you normally only a card option. Now you'll see a little Capitec Pay button there. If you click on it, you can pay, and then within seconds, your payment's been made. We already processed close to 2 million transactions just in the past couple of months when we launched the product. The last one is Capitec Pay International. This is where you can either do a once-off payment or a recurring payment.
Say that you buy something from Shein, you'll go into the system, there's a Capitec Pay button, you click, and you're done. You've paid for your overseas goods that you bought through Capitec Pay or the likes of a Spotify, Meta, Canva, those subscriptions you can pay also using Capitec Pay now. That's also gone live. We already processed close to 3 million transactions in that space. What does it mean from a bottom-line point of view? Our net interest income's grown around about 40%. Non-interest income has been as good to us as well, it's been 38% growth. The impairments we've spoken about, but our cost growth has only grown 8%, and we really feel that we've got the costs in place now that can handle scale into the future.
We don't have to invest heavily in systems and process, etc, like we have in the past. We can continue with what we got now, and that resulted in a bottom-line increase of 52% for the business bank. What does it mean for us? The exciting part is if you look at the profit pool for business banking in South Africa, we've only got about 5% of that market. We've got 3% of the lending market of lending out to clients, and we've got around about 2% of the deposit base.
It just shows you there's a massive runway there for us to be able to grow our business, which is very exciting. I just want to say thank you so much to everyone who's been involved in helping build the business bank. We really appreciate it. Then thanks so much to all of the clients that have joined us and chosen us as their partner to be able to help them grow their business. Thanks very much.
Thank you. All I've got left to say is thank you. Thank you to all of our teams, all of our people, for the excellent job that you do. Thank you to our board members for the expert advice and leadership that you give us. To all of our shareholders, thanks for the support, and to our clients, thank you for continuing to trust us. Thanks. We have covered quite a lot in quite a short space of time. Grant, please, will you join me? Grant is going to come up, and together we will do our best to answer any questions that you have.
Okay. The first question is from Charles Russell at Standard Bank. "Could you give some color on margin compression, therefore the disconnect between gross loans being up 13% and interest income only being up 5%?"
Thank you, Charles, for the question. We mentioned, you saw disbursement. We didn't mention, but disbursements on the Personal Bank book were up 20%, the bulk of that coming from credit card. Now credit card is at a lower interest rate and has a lower National Credit Act cap. As the proportion of that books changes and more of the mix moves to credit card, the interest income does become lower. Secondly, Basani highlighted clients earning over a certain amount growing more. That's also led to lower rates because we price for risk. Finally, just the change in repo. If you look at the repo rates for the first six months of last year, it was higher than the first six months of this year.
Great. The second question is from Baron Nkomo from JP Morgan. "How much of the recent CLR uptick is temporary in terms of the forward-looking overlay versus true deterioration in arrears and roll rate?"
Okay, so I think it's important to highlight if you go look at the staging of both books, so let's start with the Personal Bank book. The staging hasn't deteriorated. It's very, very stable. The increase has nothing to do with deterioration of the Personal Bank book. Similarly, if you look at the staging on business banking, the staging is very stable, both six months and 12 months ago.
The forward looking, as we mentioned, we've been proactive in providing for that, and so that's driven a part of the increase. The mix change, obviously as highlighted by Karl. As we grow more of the unsecured lending in business banking, you will see, let's say, that CLR for the total book increase, but you need to split it. You need to look at what is intuitive, so effectively secured, and what is scored effectively unsecured. But it's not driven by deterioration at all.
Okay, the next question is from a couple of questions from Ross Krige at Investec. "Please talk to the loan growth outlook in Personal Banking, and should we expect a slowdown ahead given challenging macro dynamics?"
What we see in terms of the macro is the impact is very much more on sales than it is on book quality. We have made quite a few refinements, and we are growing our loan book slower than our original business plan. However, our original business plan was quite aggressive. We do see consistent and sustained loan book growth in the future across all of our products, just not quite at the same rate as our initial plans.
Then, "On OpEx, should we expect the impressive mid-single digit growth rate achieved to be sustainable in H2 and FY 2028?"
That momentum will continue into, let's say the next six months. We highlighted the high levels of investment going into Business Bank and insurance, let's say in the past few years, and that momentum will continue. But we do continue to invest in new businesses, and it is just really the unlock. If we think about AI tech, we have in the past invested heavily there, and we are starting to see the benefits come through. I do not think it is at, let's say that sort of mid sort of teen level into next year, probably a little bit lower.
And then his last question. "In business banking, are you able to talk about the mix of the type of merchants in terms of formal versus informal?"
Yeah, so our product really is an excellent one. We're very proud of the complex set of things that we bring to all of our businesses but deliver in a simple way, and it's resonating with all types of businesses. So the mix really is across from very large to very small. If you look at the volumes, the volumes are very much concentrated more in the small, and the value is concentrated in the larger. But it is a mix across all different merchant types.
And then the last question is from James Starke at RMB Morgan Stanley. "Interest income on the investment portfolio was flat year-on-year. How do we see yields evolving over time?"
I think it remains fairly stable, obviously driven by what happens with repo. Again, I highlighted that the repo rate was higher on average for the first six months of last year than this year, and that, let's say, drove portion of the reason for it being flat. Also then additional deployment into the loan books as we grew them. I think the yields remain fairly stable and then will be adjusted for whatever we see in the movements in repo that then come through.
T hat is all the questions.
Cool. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you very much. Okay, now what we are going to do is we are going to cut the live feed.