Thanks very much for your time. I'm delighted to be sharing our 2024 interim results with you for HIL. As always, we will be taking questions at the end of this presentation on the left-hand side of your screen. Please take the questions and write the questions into the chat, and we'll answer them at the end of this presentation. We're really pleased with this set of results. Weaver has again delivered excellent momentum with driving our group profits up 36%, 36% to ZAR 388 million. This is also on the back of strong group revenue, which is up 15%, and our cash collections have been ZAR 5.2 billion in the first half of this year, up 32%.
We continue to see really strong customer growth, with an improved margin, and we've declared an interim dividend of ZAR 0.95, which is up 36%. So like I said, the team is delighted across the board with these set of results. Thank you. I always like to start talking about our customer a little bit and who she is. So she's an urban African woman. She's got a very vibrant digital world that she engages us through, with. And we've had very strong growth in this customer base, particularly in our fintech business. Weaver's seen a 76% increase in their customer base for the period, which is actually just represents an outstanding response to our product offering, our new products offers across the board, which Sean will talk to you about.
Our retail business has seen a 10% decline in their customer base, and this reflects the strong credit tightening that we did in the first half of last year. From a market perspective, 63% of our customers are within the Gen Z and Millennial category. As I said, her average age is 37. But from a market perspective, within the unsecured market, our fintech business only represents 12% of this unsecured credit market. I want to spend a little bit of time talking about our strategy from a digital perspective. This has been a long-term strategy that we've held in the business, and we've had it because we wanted to... But first of all, we see digital as being from a channel perspective, the most important channel that one needs to be in going forward.
Secondly, this channel, if you, if you're twinning it with automation, really delivers a lot of efficiencies, and you can see how this strategy has played out for us over the last five years. We've seen really great success from a, a digital and a customer perspective. So five years ago, our digital transactions were 50% of our transactions with our customer. This is now just under 90%, and you can see the impact that this has had from an automation perspective on our direct costs for digital transactions. These have gone from just under ZAR 500,000 to now ZAR 158,000 in the first half of this year. She transacts across a multiple of channels with us, and we're getting really strong span and growth pretty much across all of these channels.
On an average basis, we get about 1.8 million customers per month. It's about a 40% increase in the first half of 2023 across all of our platforms within the group. Our app has been our fastest-growing channel for the last two years, and it continues to be so. We've had a 100% increase to 1.4 million customers across our apps, and our digital life, from a social perspective, continues to be very vibrant, in particular for the retail business. Finally, I want you to spend a little bit of time talking about our ecosystem from a fintech perspective.
This is a very important strategy for us going forward and will remain so, I think, for the next couple of years, because we really see this as being the strategy that's going to be driving our lifetime value and ultimately our profitability with the customer. First of all, at the center of the strategy is the ecosystem. There are three elements to this. First of all, we see digital products as being the primary product set that we want to be rolling out with our customers. It speaks to the 90% digital I spoke about earlier. So we're gonna be rolling out digital products to our customers, and Sean will chat to you about some of our track record over the last couple of years here.
For us, how we see digital products is it's both through product progression that we're offering to the customer and also through embedded finance that we offer. So these will be financial products that we offer inflow to the customer. And finally, we stress a firm focus on women. For us, inclusion is a very strong push for our business. So when we design products, we're designing them specifically for our customer base, which has just a high focus on women. So for us, including her in this digital ecosystem is a very important aspect for us. There are three parts to this digital ecosystem. The first is driving engagement, the second is our lending products, and the third are our payment products.
Starting with lending, we did ZAR 2.8 billion of disbursements across our credit-backed wallets and a number of personal loans products. Very strong growth again in the first half of this year. From a payment perspective, we did ZAR 1.8 billion of gross merchandise value. These are across a retail credit product, which is new, our buy now, pay later, secure payments, and our PJN Wallet. And then finally, our engagement services. We've seen how we see this is elements that customers are gonna be coming into our ecosystem to either be learning something, understanding something, or taking an engagement product, and this is across our shop directory, our deals page, our search, and insurance.
And, Sean will talk to you a little bit about this later, but we've seen 13 million, just over 13 million customer interactions across these engagement channels, the shop directory and deals, in the last six months. So what will happen is the customer will come into this ecosystem on one of these through one of these three elements, on one of these products, and we will then upsell her products, digital products, like I said, either through one of our digital channels or through one of our product progression strategies, and she will come in one and then buy a first, a second, a third, or a fourth product with us. This is a new strategy for us, and this speaks to our cross-sell, and like I said, ultimately, our lifetime value.
So through this, through this conversation today, keep a lookout for our ecosystem strategy and, like I said, over the next couple of years as this plays out. I'm now gonna hand across to Paul, who's gonna give you some more insight around our financial performance in the first six months of this year. Thanks, Paul.
Thank you, Shirley. I'm excited to share the group's financial results for the first six months of 2024. Group revenue growth of 15% converted well to operating profit, growing by 36% in the period. We're excited about the track record that we've achieved over the last few years. Firstly, of growing customers, growing collections from customers paying well, and growing profitability that's been achieved. Where's this track record of growth come from? If you look at the blue shading on the graphs presented, you can see that Weaver Fintech is the business that's been driving the consistent track record of profitable growth. Weaver Fintech has now achieved 95% of the group's operating profit for the first six months. Moving on to the group P&L.
So the group's revenue growth has been driven by Weaver Fintech, whose revenue increased by 31% in the reporting period. We're pleased with the diversification of revenue that's been achieved by the fee income growth, so that now represents 25% of the group's revenue. Last year, it was 21%, and that's been achieved by the Fintech businesses' higher insurance and buy now, pay later products. Retail sales have been conservatively grown by 2%, and that's on the back of the stricter credit requirements that were implemented last year. Retail also achieved a significant improvement in the gross profit margin, so that's improving by nearly 200 basis points, and retail's trading expenses reduced for the reporting period. That's off the back of the significant changes that they implemented last year.
Debtor costs have been grown with healthy provisions in place. Both businesses have improved their credit loss ratios in the reporting period, and the Fintech debtor costs grew by less than both their revenue and their book growth. Trading on the trading expenses-wise, we continue to invest in the Weaver Fintech's marketing spend and its technology, and we've also continued to invest in funding to facilitate Weaver's growth. All of that has resulted in strong profit conversion, with profit after tax increasing by 35% for the reporting period. Looking at the credit portfolios, I'm very pleased with the consistency with which we've managed our credit books. You'll recall last year that the retail business implemented significant credit tightening. That tightened credit appetite has been held into the first half of 2024.
Retail has improved its credit loss ratio by 2%, and it's also been able to reduce its provision rate on its books, given the improved performance and the improved collections coming off the retail book. Looking across to the right-hand side at the Weaver Fintech book, the strong growth in the book has been driven through purposeful growing of loans to existing customers with a proven payment record. The Weaver Fintech's also managed to reduce its credit loss ratio by 2% in this reporting period, and it's maintained its provision cover and its provision rate at very similar levels to where it where we closed our financial reporting period six months ago. If we then look at the group's cash flows, we...
It's a very consistent message in terms of how the group has managed its cash flows over the last few years. So firstly, we've, we've purposely allocated working capital to growing the Weaver Fintech book. Secondly, the group's collections have continued to grow well off the short-term books, so collections from customers increasing by 32%. And thirdly, we've continued to invest funding in the Weaver Fintech business and its profitable growth. Lastly, with that, we're very pleased to continue to have the support of our funders. So we've got ZAR 1.1 million of cash and facilities available to the group to continue growing the way that we have been. So very pleased with the consistency of our cash flow management. My reflections on the group's results for the first six months of the year: firstly, strong, profitable growth.
Secondly, it's great to see the consistency with which we've managed both the credit books and the group's cash flows. Thirdly, it's also very pleasing to see fruit coming from the changes that retail implemented last year. And lastly, and most importantly, we're very pleased with the track record of profitable growth that's been achieved by the Weaver Fintech business. With that, I'd like to hand over to Sean Wibberley, the CEO for Weaver Fintech.
Thank you, Paul. The Weaver Fintech team has continued to consistently deliver on our Fintech strategy, and I'm really pleased to share our results. Our revenue's up very strongly at 31% to ZAR 1.1 billion.
and very pleasingly, a high growth of 45% in our, in the fee contribution of that income, as we've seen strong growth in our payments business, driving up that mix of business towards more fee-based income. Our cash collections from customers up 44%, very commendable in this tough climate, up to about ZAR 4.5 billion in cash receipted from our customers. And then translating into a profit before tax of ZAR 275 million, up 31% on the half. Our customers continue to adopt into our ecosystem. The virally loved buy now, pay later product from our PayJustNow acquisition a few years ago, is now bringing in over 100,000 new signups every month into our ecosystem.
We booked 555,000 new customers over the course of the last six months, representing a 30x growth in acquisition over the period, over the last five years. Our customer base of 2.1 million fintech customers is a 10x growth over where we were five years ago. So really strong customer acquisition and engagement into our ecosystem. And industry-leading customer benchmarks in terms of how they view our customer experience. So 4.6 Google stars for FinChoice, and 4.7 for PayJustNow. So very pleased with how our customers enjoy our platforms, come into our ecosystem, and then remain with us and engage with our product set. We've developed with our in-house tech team, a range of different engaging financial products, from personal loans, where in the last half we grew transactions by 35%.
Buy Now, Pay Later up 270% on the half in terms of customers transacting on that payment product. Our very much loved FinChoice MobiMoney wallet, we've done 500,000 transactions in the last 6 months. Insurance still gets high demand from our customers, with policies growing by 36%. We are actively piloting an innovation in the retail credit space, which I'll touch on later, and we now allow MobiMoney customers to transact directly at points of sale, at over 600,000 points of presence, with their QR code to access their wallet. All of these products are on top of our platform ecosystem. We leverage API technology to integrate our suppliers and affiliates.
We leverage the rich data we have on customers and the transactions we have with those customers, to feed into our algorithms, machine learning models, to personalize offers and make better credit decisions on our consumers. Our tech stack is a combination of being in the cloud and off premises at Teraco, and of course, our customers engage with us using a range of smartphone applications, where she has 24/7 access to the products I've just mentioned on her smartphone. So we're booking 100,000 customers a month across a range of products, and so one of our key strategies is to get our first-time consumer to take a second, third, or fourth product within our portfolio. So we seamlessly integrate our products across our ecosystem.
A customer comes into the ecosystem on the first product, typically the buy now, pay later product, and then is exposed to our other products in the ecosystem. Our goal is to get more than half of our customers to have at least two active products within our ecosystem. Right now, we're at about 79%, chiefly due to the very high growth in acquisition of first-time customers. You can see why we want to do this in the top right. The average revenue per user, the ARPU, is about ZAR 1,000 for the customer who takes her first product. When she takes a second product, that jumps materially to over ZAR 7,000, a third product, ZAR 9,000, a fourth product, ZAR 10,000, and so on.
So we have an average ARPU of our customer base in the half of just over ZAR 3,000, and our strategy is key in terms of getting customers to progress their products across our ecosystem digitally. Last year, we booked 4,000 cross-sells to our PayJustNow brand, and that's up almost 10 times this year, as we've gotten better and better at progressing customers through the ecosystem and driving up the ARPU of those customers. Our in-house tech team delivers innovation, which is obviously the cornerstone of any Fintech business. I'll give you a few examples of what we've just launched. We are in active pilot phase on a retail credit product known as PayStretch.
We are trademarking that name, and this allows customers to, at the point of sale in the PJN network, split the payment over 12 months, thus allowing her to buy larger ticket items. We have improved the efficiency and effectiveness of our search within our store directory of merchants, so consumers are able to come in and find items for sale across our merchant network, thus driving traffic to those merchants and improving customer engagement. We leverage machine learning tools and data to serve up the right kind of offers in our deals page, thus navigating consumers with personalized offers back into our merchant network. And we have a PayJustNow wallet, whereby refunds coming back from returned goods go back into the PJN, thus facilitating that customer doing a second and third transaction with that float. Thank you.
A brief walk through the profit and loss statement of the Weaver Fintech business. So very pleased with the strong growth in top line at 31%. And as I've mentioned, 45% growth in our fee income. This is a key strategy for us to pivot more and more of the mix of our income towards fees, and driven chiefly by our buy now, pay later business, where fee income is earned from merchants on the payment platform. Our funeral business also nicely up 25%. Debtors costs, we've maintained the growth in debtors costs below the growth in the book. The book has grown 33%, debtors costs are up 27%. And as Paul mentioned earlier, we still maintain conservative and prudent provisions in the climate. Our expenses up 33% as we invest in our technology and infrastructure and of course, in our growing portfolios.
However, to note that the cost efficiencies remain below 26%. So cost to income ratio is below 26%, evidenced, you know, by our use of fixed costs in the scaling fintech business. The bottom right graph shows you revenue per employee up nicely 33%, demonstrating the efficiencies of this business. Bottom line, profit before tax up 31%. That conversion down slightly due to the cost of interest as we in, from our borrowings, as we've invested in technology and the growth in our portfolios. Very pleased with the Weaver Fintech results. So managing credit risk, one of the key elements of our business is that we maintain a range of short-term lending products, ranging from one month to six months, as well as all the way out to 36.
But those shorter-term products are used chiefly for acquisition. Because they're shorter term, we are able to get learnings on credit behavior very quickly from that, that cohort of customers, and we use that as a bellwether for tightening or relaxing our credit policy in order to manage overall risk in the portfolio. If you look at our market share, we have 5.2% of the disbursements made to the unsecured market in South Africa, based on NCR data and our own data, but only 2.1% of share of the book. In other words, our portfolio is shorter than the markets, and that's, as I mentioned, we maintain short-term portfolios in order to drive faster learnings.
In the bottom left, you can see we remain a top quartile performer in the market, with over 80% of our customers in an up-to-date payment position on their lending products. Thank you. Credit policy in the FinChoice business. Despite the very constrained consumer and the persistent high interest rate levels, we have managed our vintages to within tight tolerances. We've deliberately slowed down the average amount we disperse to customers and the tenure from 13.4 months down to 13 months in the climate. And then we continue to give the majority of our disbursements, 87%, to our existing and proven customers. In the back end of the half, we launched two new bespoke scorecards, and the early signs on those scorecards is we're seeing improved early roll rates from those new scorecards.
It wasn't all plain sailing in the back end of last in Q2, the end of the first half, we had an issue with the implementation of a new Dialer, and that caused some of our late-stage roll rates to heighten. We've since corrected that, and I'm pleased to say that we're back on track in terms of managing our arrears customers. But I'm very pleased with the health of the credit book in FinChoice, and that we manage it within tight tolerances. Onto the buy now, pay later portfolio.
This book has always been very tightly managed, and a few months back, a new scorecard was implemented for the business, further tightening the split between good and bad customers in the selection process, and we were able to offer improved credit limits to better customers whilst curtailing worse customers. What we have seen is good performance coming through from that portfolio. They continue to innovate in the collection space and moderate their policy in order to manage this portfolio in very, very tight tolerances. Their capital at risk is maintained below 2% and a net of below 1% when taking cognizance of penalty fees for late paying customers. A very well-run and tight portfolio. Thank you. Our customers engage with us from her smartphone.
There are no cash transactions in the FinChoice business, and she's able to engage with us 24/7. The two biggest channels are our FinChoice MobiSite and the very fast-growing FinChoice App. The App is now more than 20% of our business and is our fastest growing channel. Our MobiMoney product, which customers engage with from their smartphone and can make several withdrawals over a period of a month. We've disbursed. Almost 40% of our disbursements were made to this product in the last six months to our 300,000 active MobiMoney users. Customers really enjoy the convenience of the 24/7 access, as well as the dedicated focus we have on her user experience during the onboarding of both new and repeat business. So a new customer can take up to five minutes to do a loan, which is...
which is incredibly convenient for new customers. And existing customers, just a minute as we reuse her previous data to approve her for subsequent credit. Thank you. Insurance, growing very nicely. We have a GDP for the half at ZAR 85 million, and our customers now at 131,000 customers in force. We embed offers for funeral and personal accident into our flows in the FinChoice business, and now 41% of all of our sales for funeral are done end-to-end by the customer on his smartphone. We have a very small market share in funeral, at just 1.6% of the addressable market.
FinChoice has very high penetration at 46%, and Weaver, which includes the payments business PayJustNow, has only 16% and represents a big area of market opportunity for us to embed further offers of insurance to those consumers, thus driving penetration. Thank you. Our buy now, pay later product from PayJustNow, this, as I mentioned, is that virally adopted product. We are booking over 100,000 sign-ups a month into this portfolio. You can see there a 40 times increase in the customer base, which is now sitting at 1.8 million strong. The spend of consumers is increasing, so not only are we acquiring lots of customers, but more and more of those customers are becoming repeat customers and increasing in the frequency with which they transact on the product.
So up from 1.7 to 1.8 times in a 90-day period, and they're spending now close to ZAR 4,000. Our top 10% of customers are transacting almost 12 times a year and spending about ZAR 16,000. And very pleasingly, even despite the very high growth in new customers, you can see that the repeat customers in that graph in the bottom left are starting to take off, and they represent now about two-thirds of transactions and GMV, going to existing proven customers. Thank you. On the other side of the equation are our valued merchants.
So merchants have been highly engaged with us and retained within the business, and you can see the graph on the top left representing the cohorts of business over time and how those grow year-on-year as more customers engage with those merchants and as more customers come into our portfolio, giving the merchants increased traffic and increased spend. We drive referral traffic that's up close to 200%: 32 million merchant referrals were made in the last 12 months. And then our My Deals page, driving customer clicks on these bespoke offers made to our consumers in our real estate. An enhancement to our store directory also driving click-throughs to the tune of 26 million clicks.
So this drives more customers to our merchants, increasing repeat business of their consumers and also increasing the basket size and the conversion of those customers. You can see the range of merchants we have. We have over 2,400, with household names which you would all be very familiar with, and very high engagement, and a very virtuous circle between consumer, merchant, and ourselves in terms of how this ecosystem is working for our merchants. Thank you very much. I'm now gonna hand over to Chris de Wit, who is the CEO of the retail business.
Thanks, Sean. HomeChoice. We are the bedding experts in South Africa, with a strong heritage of nearly 40 years. Over the last two, three years, our strategic actions are delivering key benefits for us, driving growth. There are five key things that I want to touch on. Number one, our unique merchandise. Our margins are back within the target range, and we've seen growth in our heritage textiles. We've invested in our fulfillment solutions, and our supply chain costs are back to historical levels. In terms of our quality credit customers, Paul and Shirley have both mentioned this, we've seen significant improvements in our credit yields, and we are now focusing on customer growth. Digital, we are transforming not only sales, but also our self-service channels, and here we're doing this with investment into WhatsApp, chat AI, and also transforming our agents into digital agents.
Then lastly, we've been on this journey, our unique showrooms, the new format showrooms, are performing really well, and we have a very clear rollout strategy. In terms of our overall income statement, we've seen retail sales grow again. Here, our focus on our heritage bedding and strong customer response, and we've also rolled out 10 new showrooms in the first 6 months. This is driving traffic and growth. Very pleased with our gross margin, which has improved significantly year-on-year. Here, we have invested in things like our Smart Fulfillment. We closed the Joburg warehouse. This is driving the reduction in supply chain costs, but also very tight management on our stock and also supply negotiation and innovative offers, really going back to that heritage product. In terms of our debtors cost growth year-on-year, 15%.
Our book performance has resulted in lower provisions, and there we've dropped from just below 33% last year to under 30% this year. And really, the growth there is the management of our REAP product, which we've taken in-house. Overall operating profit growth of 26.7%, and at the bottom right, we've seen really good increase in the cash customers. So we've grown that by 38%. We've seen growth in our showrooms by 33%, and our strategy is really starting to pay off, and we're excited about the future. In terms of marketing, we have focused on growing our customer base with good quality customers, and you can see there on the right-hand side, growing that by 20%. Year-on-year, our active customer base has grown by 28%, 28,000.
At the bottom left, our strategy where we've shifted sales into showrooms, and there our showroom contribution has gone up from 16%-2 1%. And our cash sales, we are very pleased by 38% growth, and you can see the impressive transition from 2020 to 2024, where we've taken it from 4.5% to nearly 9% in terms of cash contribution. Very pleased with the direction we're heading. Gross margin, I've touched on this briefly. So with us refocusing on our textiles, we're combining really three things, which is our product margin, it's our marketing initiatives, and combining that with credit. In terms of our Smart Fulfillment, we are focused on improved CX for the customer, and we've seen an improvement on unclaimed returns.
In terms of our physical product, it's centered on four things. Number one, it's innovation, the continuous innovation in our retail products. It's focusing on quality and value. Our curated offers, where we combine our marketing, credit, and product offers, and then also continuing with our range expansion. I'm very pleased on how we've managed our product and very proud of the team managing our markdowns and the level of stock, which has improved year-on-year. In terms of our credit customer, the vintage at the bottom, it shows that our credit actions of the last year to 2 years have really come into fruition. We've implemented a new bespoke scorecard. We have focused on our existing customer limits. We've implemented new fraud defenses and focused a lot on collections.
You can see there at the bottom that that's really, really pleasing. In terms of our overall customer balances on the right, average balances have remained flat year-on-year. We've seen a slight improvement in our average sales term. That is also largely to do with the credit risk and also the cash base. So very, very comfortable where we are now, and the business is really set up for good customer growth and sales growth. In terms of our showrooms, so our showroom growth, we've seen a 10x growth there from 2018 until now. And it's really combining the physical product together with some of our digital interactions in a showroom, and that experience for the customer.
So in terms of our customers, why showrooms are really good for us, our cash percentage is much, much higher than other channels. Our debtors cost is much lower than other channels, and also in line with our expectations, and we are looking to grow this channel going forward. And we are combining digital interactions in store, where you can pay through WhatsApp, you can browse digitally, you can buy while standing in the queue, and this is really centered around the customer experience and enhancing the customer experience. Using technology to improve our customer experience is at the heart of things that we do. So here are some great examples. In terms of our contact center, we've reduced the outbound talk time when we engage with customers, and we've seen an 80% improvement in our collections efficiency.
So we've reduced the number of agents while improving the cash collected. WhatsApp, we've seen engagements increase rapidly over the last few months since we've launched it, and that's also led to a 50% reduction in inbound agents. By focusing on digital and also the customer experience, we've improved our Facebook rating, which now sits at 4.2, and some of the Smart Fulfillment gains I've shared with you, lower unclaimed returns and keeping with our promise of the delivery to our customer. Technology is at the heart of what we do and combining that with an amazing emotive product. So when you engage with our product, it's an amazing feeling, and we are really set up for growth, acquiring customers, and very excited about the future. I'm now gonna hand back to Shirley. Thanks.
Thanks, Chris. We believe that our fintech team is gonna continue to outpace the market, as our ecosystem and our embedded financial product strategy continues to gain support from our customers. We have our payment product, the PayJustNow payment product is... It's the market-leading product in this space, and it's gonna continue to, it is continuing to outpace the growth. It's a viral product, and this is ultimately what's driving our ecosystem. We've proven out our ability to cross-sell the products within the ecosystem, and as Sean showed you, it's really starting to drive our profitability with our customers trusting our brands.
We'll be very clear on what products we're gonna be rolling out within this ecosystem, and we're very excited to see how our three-point strategy is gonna be playing out over the next couple of years. As you can hear from Chris, our retail business is back into a position of growth, and I'm delighted to see the traction that that team is driving in the business. We're continuing to see in the second half of the year, as you know, through August, that the momentum that we saw in the first half is continuing in the second half. So we're looking forward to the next couple of months, and yeah, excited about the growth that we're seeing in the business.
Thanks very much for your time, and now we're gonna go into questions. As I said, you can write your questions in the top, in the chat, in the top left-hand side of the group, and I will be passing on the question first to the right person in our team. Thanks so much. I'm gonna go to our first question. Sean, this is a question for you: What have you seen in terms of your cross-selling trends in the past six months?
Thank you, Shirley. Yeah, you refer back to the slide, where I shared the growth in ARPU for customers that have taken one, two, three, four products actively with us. In the last year, our project between the FinChoice and PayJustNow brands has grown our cross-selling by almost 10 times, to 34,000 lending products sold into the PJN universe. So that's as we've been adding more channels to serve our personalized offers to the PayJustNow customers. Trend-wise, going forward, we're gonna continue doing more of the same, using data to personalize the offer to the customer at the right time in our different ecosystem universes in order to get cross-sell happening, and an increased focus on insurance.
So insurance is a product that's come second in terms of our cross-selling focus, and we're gonna be focusing on that going forward in order to serve up the right insurance offer to customers in the payment space. Thank you, Shirley.
Thanks, Sean. I'll answer this question: What is it about your fintech business model or marketing, which is female-centric or attracts females exclusively, whereas others tend to be gender-neutral? So initially, when we started the financial services business, FinChoice, it was done solely to HomeChoice, the HomeChoice customer base. Obviously, that was 15 years ago. The HomeChoice customer base is just under 80% female. And obviously it's a homewares business primarily, as Chris described. So with that being, it's kind of a generation, it has had very strong female focus. It's now getting a lot of customers from PayJustNow, increasingly so in the future. So I think our acquisition strategy is skewed towards females. And then from a product development perspective, we also consider that specifically in our, in our product development.
A lot of our scorecards and our risk strategy brings gender into account. So, you know, the business, both in terms of its... how we started the business and then how we run the business, and we're very well aware that it is a very female-focused, business, but primarily, I would say that it's our acquisition strategy. And I think that's something that will, remain. I think we'll always be above 50% in terms of, female. Next question: what are the target credit loss ratios for HomeChoice and Weaver? Paul, I'm gonna give this to yourself.
Thank you, Shirley . Weaver, range, but I think just-
Sorry, Paul, you're breaking up, so I'm going to-
A similar range where we currently are.
Paul, you are breaking up, so I'll take that question for you. Actually, Sean, would you like to take it?
Yeah. Sure. I'm online. Can you hear me, just to check?
Yes, we can hear you perfectly. Thanks, Sean. Continue.
Yeah. So the retail's credit loss ratios have been under pressure in the recent past, and they've tightened their credit policy significantly, which has come through in slower trade last year, and they're starting to grow their trade now. But their credit loss ratios are likely to come down from where they currently are. In the FinChoice world, we maintain our credit loss ratios at around about 18%-19%. We don't give forward views. We're well within our mandates from our lenders, our covenants from our lenders in terms of our performance, and what you see in the FinChoice world is likely to stay or become slightly better. In the HomeChoice world, we can expect improvements because of the tightening they've done.
Thank you.
Thank you. Sean, another question for yourself: Are you planning on further verticals to diversify revenue?
Yeah, thanks. I mean, we're building out the ecosystem, so we have a lending vertical, an insurance vertical, a payments vertical, and we're looking to, in the near term, augment the insurance vertical more, so adding short-term insurance policies that play to the payments space. So we'll be adding those in, into the mix, and we've also seen incredible growth in our PayJustNow customers, about 1.8 million now. We're growing by 100,000, and we're gonna be trying to focus now on our merchants and giving them more value. So we'll be developing analytics as a service for our merchants to help them better understand their customers that trade through those merchants, and giving them reporting and monitoring and feedback to help them better understand their customers.
As well as enhancing the marketing services that we offer to merchants, in order for them to be served up the right types of customers from our pool of customers in order to have those customers find product and get traffic going to, to their stores and to their websites. So we, we'll be doing analytics and marketing as a service to our merchants. We've speculated about savings products and investment vehicles for our ecosystem, but at the moment, that's far in the future. We don't have near-term plans to evolve there just yet.
Sean, another question for yourself: Who do you regard as your peers and your main competitors?
Right. PayJustNow, the buy now, pay later product, has a couple of other competitors in the market, Payflex being a common brand. In the lending space, all of the banks who offer unsecured lending, which are the top five as we know, are competitors, as well as bespoke credit providers such as DirectAxis, RCS, and so on. So we consider anyone who offers unsecured lending to be a competitor to the FinChoice lending book. And on the insurance space, any insurer that offers funeral policies. We have a very, very small market share, and our strength is being able to leverage our platform and our customer engagement to sell insurance into that tiny market share. In, you know, buy now, pay later is the market leader in SA.
In our lending space, we are just 2% of the unsecured lending book, and in the insurance space, we are probably less than 1% of the funeral book out there. So lots of room to grow. A lot of competition, but I think we do the right thing by focusing on our customers and giving them 24/7 digital engagement to do the ecosystem cross-selling of those products.
Thanks, Sean. Chris, there's a question for yourself: What is HomeChoice's view of the potential impact on profitability from a drop in interest rates in the next 12 to 18 months?
Yeah. Thanks, Shirley . Maybe firstly, our customer is not that sensitive to an interest rate move. They're more sensitive on their day-to-day living, and the impact on, you know, basic things like food, travel, electricity. So, you know, we do foresee if the interest rate drops, that there should be more affordability that comes through to our customer. The impact on our profitability is that, one will see a drop in interest that we receive, but we always try and balance that out with our impairment costs. So we would try to maintain the differential between finance income and the debtor cost charge to the income statement.
Thanks, Chris. Sean, a question for yourself also on interest: Sean, can you please talk to the sensitivity of your earnings to lower anticipated interest rates?
So we charge interest to our customers based on the NCR regulation. So when interest rates go up, we can charge more. When they go down, we charge less. So obviously, if interest rates start coming down, our interest earnings will come down commensurately, but likewise, so will our borrowings from our lenders. So in the near term, when interest rates come down, we should start seeing our interest rate top line coming down a bit. But that drops straight to the bottom line in terms of our cost of interest. And then in the medium term, we should start seeing improvements in our customers' affordability and the liquidity in the marketplace, and I think a generalized improvement in debtors' health and consumer constraint. So it's a...
It's a difficult one to call when interest rates go down. In the near term, I think we would lose a bit of interest margin, but over time, the debtor cost benefit and the benefit of lower borrowings would come through.
Great. Thanks, Sean. We have another question for you, Chris. Can you provide more color on the increase in debtor costs in retail, and specifically the rehab product?
Yeah. So if we look at our overall debtors cost year-on-year, there is an increase, and it's largely due to non-comp. In the past, FinChoice managed our rehabilitation or restructure product, and from this year we've taken it in-house, and that's part of ensuring that the business are operationally independent from each other. And that should add probably about 1% on our debtors cost. Also together with that, what is really pleasing in our debtors cost is the drop in write-offs. So we've seen more than a 15% drop in our write-offs year-on-year, and our vintages are all tracking very well with past vintages. So we are quite comfortable with the level of credit that we're taking on board.
The rehab product will be absorbed this year, and next year we should be, you know, as Sean said, we should see some continued improvement on our non-performing loans.
Thanks, Chris. Sean, another question for yourself: Where do you see growth coming from, more your retail or fintech?
From a group perspective, definitely the trajectory is with, and momentum is with the Weaver Fintech business. We're seeing very high growth in customers, over 100,000 a month, and we're seeing those customers cross-selling into higher margin products as they work through the ecosystem. So I think we're gonna see continued strong growth in the Weaver Fintech business. The retail business is starting to get into sales growth off of the tight cuts on their credit, and that business is gonna start to grow nicely, and they're working now. The focus is on sales now that their credit and their credit systems and fraud systems are in order, and the vintages are coming through nicely.
Thanks, Sean. Chris, a question for yourself. How many retail stores are you targeting?
Yeah, so, retail stores are really important for us. As I've mentioned, it's got lower bad debt, and improvement in cash collection, so we're really excited about that. We are looking to open this year another five showrooms, and then also into next year, as we validate the feasibility of these showrooms, another 15. So by the end of next year, you know, we are targeting between 45 and 50 showrooms. Gives us an amazing opportunity for the customer to engage with the brand, to engage with the product, and our product is really an emotive product, so very excited about it.
Thanks, Chris. Paul, I've got a question for you. Will you continue to fund through debt or consider a capital raise at some point?
Thank you, Shirley. In the short to medium term, we'll definitely keep going with raising our funding through debt. The semi-report an increase of in which we were 40% oversubscribed for that. And in addition to-
Paul, you are still patchy.
Paul, you're still patchy-
Okay.
So I'll pick that question up for you. Sorry about that.
Okay. Sure.
Just in terms, we will continue. We're gonna be, currently our plan is to continue to fund through debt. We don't have any plans to do a capital raising at this point. I'm just gonna see if there are any further questions. Otherwise, we're going to be wrapping up. There's one more. Do you have a sustainable competitive advantage in your PayJustNow business? Sean or Craig, would you like to pick that up? Craig?
Craig, I think it's to you.
Thanks, Shirley. So yes, because it's a double-sided platform, the customers on the one side and the merchants on the other, getting to sustainable numbers on customers and sustainable numbers on merchants creates this dual-sided platform, which generates revenue from both your consumers and your merchants. So, I believe that as a business, we are scaling correctly, and we are gonna continue to drive value for this ecosystem while being able to offer these other payments, lending, and insurance products into that customer base. So, from a market perspective, we are the leading by size. So I do think we have got a sustainable advantage.
Thanks, Craig. Last question. Sean, this is for you. Your strong cash collections, where does your difference lie?
Sorry. There's a number of factors. So our book is short term versus many of our competitors. So, you know, approximately 47%-48% of our disbursements go out on terms of 6 months or less, which means we cycle that same funding a couple of times during the course of the year, and it enables us to have high yields from those lower products, lower-term products, as well as to get early reads on performance of different cohorts, which we can then use to tighten up our scorecards and hence improve collections out of our portfolio. We only offer 12-, 24-, and 36-month loans to proven existing customers who've come through our Low and Grow filter, so to speak.
I believe that focus on a relatively relative mix of short-term and slightly longer-term products gives us an edge in terms of high-yielding growth from those portfolios and an understanding on managing the credit very tightly.
Thanks, Sean. Sounds... I don't know if any of you are in Cape Town. I'm in Cape Town, and it sounds like the Wicked Witch of the North is riding past my window at the moment. I think that's a sign for us to knock off. I just wanted to thank all of you for taking the time out of your days to come and listen to our presentation. Thank you very much, and we look forward to seeing you in six months' time. Take care.