Good morning, everyone. I'd like to welcome you to our 2024 financial results. We've had a really strong year this year. Our group revenue is up 20%, and our PBT is up 30%. This has primarily been driven by our fintech business, which has had a very successful year, and Sean's going to tell you a little bit more about that. Just starting about who our businesses are, we've got Weaver Fintech. This business covers four verticals: consumer lending, wallets, payments, and insurance. Our heritage business, Home Choice, which is an omnichannel retailer and selling own-branded products. One of the special things about our 2025 year is that our retail business turns 40 years old this year. I've been in the business for 25 years. 20 of those I've been the leader of, of the running the business or leading the business.
I think if I stand back and have a look at what has made, given this success, I think we're a highly entrepreneurial team. This is evidenced by the fact that over the last 40 years, we started out as a retailer. We moved into financial services 18 years ago. We've moved into payments. We've moved into insurance. There's a really vibrant aspect to our team and the people that work in the business. I think for me, the other thing that I've really loved about this business is how much fun I've had at work. I wanted to bring a little bit of that color to you. Just to highlight a couple of things, we've decorated 7 million women's bedrooms in the last 10 years.
If we melted down our most favorite customer's favorite pot set, that would be 88, the weight of us would be 88 fully grown elephants. I am looking forward to the next 40 years. I wanted to then, the person who's made the 40 years possible is actually our customer. Who is this woman? I refer to her as a woman because she, 70% of our customers are female. She is an urban African woman, very digitally savvy. Her income is about ZAR 16,500 a month, and on average, she is about 37 years old. This customer has really given us great success this year. We are adding about 100,000 new customers into our business every month. Our group customers are up 50% this year. This has been driven by our fintech business. They have had outstanding customer growth, up 70% to 2.7 million.
Our retail business is back into growth again, up 2% this year to 522,000 customers. Success all around from a customer perspective. Moving forward, please. I wanted to highlight three elements of growth as I see the most pivotal aspects of our growth over the next three to five years. The first is our Weaver ecosystem. As this drives forward both our growth and our profitability, I wanted to give you a little bit of color. We have two customer sets. The first is our merchant customer. We've got about 2,800 merchants. The service we provide to our merchant partners is primarily conversion, either at the till or an inflow payment. Their customers will come in, and we will help facilitate the payments, primarily on a buy- now- pay- later product.
Once that customer, once we've facilitated that sale for our merchant customers, that customer then moves onto our left-hand side. You are seeing it, our 2.7 million customers. We will bring her in on the payment product, and then we will offer her either a consumer loan, insurance, further buy- now- pay- later , or personal loans. She will then get access to our shopping directory and be able to take a deal or be offered another product from our merchant customers. This will then provide a lead or a referral back into our merchant base and provide more sales for our merchant customers. We see this as being our most pivotal driver of growth over the next couple of years. Moving on to our retail business, one of the big shifts that we have driven in the last couple of years has been our new showrooms.
At the end of this year, we think we'll have about 60 showrooms across the country. Our customers are just loving it. We're bringing our brand into her world. She's able to experience the quality of our product. This is evidenced by the fact that we've had 66,000 new customers, 150% new customers coming from the showroom strategy. Chris will chat to you a little bit more about it. We're very excited about this strategy. Finally, the third element that I see as being pivotal for us is our AI strategy and how we see AI as transforming our business and ultimately the next wave of customer experience and product. We see AI across three verticals. The first is operational efficiency, so just improving our processes and ultimately, improving our profit margin.
The second is enhancing our customer experience, moving from being a reactive customer experience with our customers to being a proactive customer experience. Finally, using data differently and driving insights across the groups in order to get the right product to the customer at the right time and actually manage our risk effectively with pricing in an improved way. Just to highlight, you know, we have had success during the course of 2024, and just to highlight a couple of them. The first is that we're now using generative AI across 40% of our customer interactions in PayJustNow. This has given us a 30% improvement in our agent-to-customer ratio to one, one thousand, one to every 9,000 customers.
Across our data science, our decision engines with data science, we're now processing 7 million different decisions using our data, our decision engines across the group. How are we going to be measuring ourselves from a success perspective on this strategy is going to be our revenue per employee. Over the last five years, our revenue per employee has moved, has improved 2.4 x. It was up 2.4 x to ZAR 5,000 per employee. We see this is going to be where we're going to see, where you're going to see success in this strategy. We're confident that we can drive this strategy because it's similar. We see it as similar in using our data effectively as we've done over the last five years with our digital strategy.
Finally, I wanted to just give you some color on the impact that we've had, using our digital ecosystem across all of our stakeholders. The first is our customer base. We've given 130,000 new loans and new borrowers and credits extended across our platforms to our customers. Our employees, 70% of all of our promotions have been internally driven, and this has been giving our employees new skills, and our graduates, we put bursaries. We've created 130 new jobs just in our retail business by driving our store, our store strategy. The SMEs that we work with in terms of our employees, we have 1,800 SMEs that we work with, and we've driven ZAR 1.1 billion of increased sales to this merchant network. Finally, just looking at our customers, we see her children as being the most important to her, the center of her heart, her world.
Because of that, our social development is focused on children. Today, 41,000 children have now gone through our EDCs in South Africa, which is something we are really proud of. Before I hand across to Paul, can I ask that you please pose your questions in the chat, and we will pick them up at the end of the presentation, and I will forward them to whoever the question is for. Thanks so much again for your attention.
Thank you, Shirley. The group has delivered excellent results for 2024. Revenue is up 21%, profit before tax is up 31%. Group customers have doubled over the last two years to 3.1 million, and these customers have continued to pay well, with group cash collections increasing to ZAR 12.1 billion in 2024. That's an average of ZAR 1 billion successfully collected from our customers every month during the year, during 2024. Most exciting for me is the trajectory of profitable growth that the group has established. You can see that this has been driven by the Weaver Fintech business and genuinely looking forward to the trajectory of growth that lies ahead for the group. Looking specifically at the group's profitability in 2024, top line growth has been underpinned by fintech revenue increasing by 34% in the year.
Included in the fintech revenue growth is the strategic investment in fee, fee income initiatives. Fee income has grown to 26% of revenue, and that compares well to last year's 22%. We're also very pleased with the momentum that's been achieved in the retail business, with sales increasing by 14% in the second half of last year. Chris will share more information on the successful retail strategy of the showrooms rollout. Chris will also speak to the significant improvement in the gross profit margin, so up 270 basis points in the year. Debtors costs have been grown with the fintech business. I'll cover that extensively in the next two slides. Trading expenses growth has been well managed, so we continue to benefit from how digital a business we are. We've purposely invested in the Weaver Fintech business.
That's required funding, but I'm very pleased with the conversion of profits, margin, and returns that the group has achieved as a result. The group has two separately managed credit portfolios. The first book is the Weaver Fintech book. It's a quality credit book, and it's well provided for. During the year, we had an implementation of a new collections dialer that caused some challenges, and we also wrote some higher risk acquisition business in the second half of 2023, which increased write-offs in 2024. However, we actively shifted the disbursement mix in the loans book to customers with a proven payment record. This lifted the stage one proportion of the book to 78%, which consequently resulted in an improved provision rate. Our credit loss ratio is stable, and it's well managed within our thresholds.
We are pleased with the stage two and three loans cover that has been increased to 70% closing at the end of 2024. The second credit book in the group is the retail book, and this continues to benefit from the strategic tightening that was implemented in 2023, which has been maintained into 2024. The retail book is flat if you compare the closing balance last year versus this year. Write-offs are down, and the improved collections performance and the higher stage one mix of the book has resulted in the provision rate continuing to reduce year on year. We are pleased that the stage two and three cover is very healthy at 67%. My last slide, I will speak to cash flows and funding. The Weaver disbursements and payments portfolio are short-term and high-yielding.
They resulted in collections increasing to ZAR 10.5 billion in the year. It's notable that that's higher than the disbursements total value for the year of ZAR 10.3 billion. We've purposely invested ZAR 1.3 billion in the profitable Weaver Fintech book. We've also invested in the fintech ecosystem with building new products for a rapidly expanding customer base. These investments have required funding, so funding for the year increased by ZAR 1 billion and resulted in the group's commercial term loan net debt increasing to ZAR 2.8 billion and an improved ROE on the Weaver Fintech business of nearly 16%. Very happy, with, the level of funding in terms of operating within the thresholds that we have set and that our lenders have set. We continue to be well supported by our lenders.
In the second half of last year, we increased our funding capacity by a further ZAR 750 million. It is notable that that funding upsize was more than 60% oversubscribed. We are happy about the capacity that we have created to continue the growing Weaver Fintech business. Standing back in terms of the group's results, we have achieved outstanding growth in revenue, profits, and quality customers. We have established a strongly profitable growth track record, and I am excited about what that track record means in terms of our future profitable growth going forward. With that, I am going to hand over to the CEO of the Weaver Fintech business, Sean Wibberley. Over to you, Sean.
Thank you, Paul. Very pleased to share the continued strong trajectory of the FinChoice and PayJustNow business, the Weaver Fintech businesses. Growing CAGR over 30% across our key highlight metrics. Revenue up ZAR 2.5 billion. Our fee income mix now representing 36%, which I'm very pleased about. ZAR 911 million on fee income coming from our merchant commission and our insurance business. Our cash collection strongly up at ZAR 10.5 billion. Our profit before tax, the CAGR of 36%, ending the period at ZAR 561 million PBT. Our customer continues to see us as her favorite digital financial services provider. Last year, we booked over 100,000 customers per month, landing 1.2 million new customers into our Weaver Fintech ecosystem. Our base now sits 12x bigger over the last five years at 2.7 million customers. Our engagement is high on the ecosystem, on our lending business in particular.
We grew disbursements per customer, per average customer by up to 33,000. 85% of our lending customers retained over an annual period. Our Google ratings are very, very strong at 4.6 stars and 4.7 stars respectively, as are our net promoter scores, proving our customers' love for our ecosystem. Thank you. Looking at the ecosystem from a model model context, we are a two-sided digital ecosystem with customers on the one side and merchants on the other side. We have a range of products across three key verticals: lending, payments, and engagement services. Our lending products encompass a credit-backed wallet, Mobi Money, and various personal loan products. On the payment side, we have buy-now-pay-later , our hero viral product, as well as a newly introduced PayStretch product, which I will touch on later.
We also have the ability for customers to transact out of a wallet and to make payments using QR codes across participating merchants. On the engagement side, we have value-added services, our funeral business encompassing funeral and also recently launched personal accident, and then a range of different products servicing our customers and merchants, driving traffic back into our merchants via search deals and a shopping directory. Thank you. A key strategy in our ecosystem is growing the number of products per customer. Customers come into our ecosystem and are then digitally cross-selled additional products. The reason we do this is our first product we see on average, the average revenue per user over an annual period, the APU, is about ZAR 1,000.
On her second product, that jumps materially to over ZAR 8,000, and then products three and four also jumping up, thus demonstrating the power of the ecosystem. This is a very efficient business as it is a customer being pulled into our products using an ecosystem that she has in the palm of her hand. We can make better credit decisions using our data to offer the right product at the right time at the right credit limit to our customers. Of course, the system is highly engaging because it is so digital and so tiered towards our different customers' approach to digital. This drives velocity. We are seeing an increasing rate with which customers adopt their second and third product. Of course, this translates, because it is so efficient, it is so engaging, into better profit metrics for the business.
We've seen tremendous growth in the last year of our ecosystem cross-sells, 2.3 x up on the prior period. Thank you. Looking at our numbers, really pleasing to share our P&L with you. Revenue up 34%, driven by our loans, up 31% in terms of disbursements. Our fee income mix up 43%, very pleasing now, representing 32% of our mix, key to our strategy to grow the fee income proportion of our revenue mix. Payments up very nicely, ZAR 260 million. Our insurance, as I mentioned, up 23%, ZAR 282 million in premiums collected. Our debtors costs up 37%, which is slightly above revenue. We had some challenges with our dialer and a pocket of business we booked at the end of 2023, but I'm happy to report that the quality of our portfolio is very strong as we closed out the year.
The scale we're enjoying with this fintech business is tremendous. We're getting really good scale in terms of staff driving revenue, leveraging our data tech and AI platforms. We're now at ZAR 5 million in revenue per employee, up 35%. Shirley earlier mentioned 5,000. It's actually 5 million. And 25.3% of our revenue is our cost base, down 1,100 basis points. Profit before tax up 32% with consistent margins at 22.2%. We've taken market share, growing our disbursements to 6.5% of the disbursed market in South Africa, and have done so whilst maintaining our credit consistency. On the top right-hand side, you can see our debtors costs to average book. Our book ZAR 5.8 billion, the debtors costs hovering just above 20%, which I'm very pleased with.
We compare ourselves every year using Experian and compare our performance with our top competitors in the banks and other lending providers in the marketplace, and we remain a top quartile performer and have consistently been in the top quartile for many years in the past. Because of our short-term book, we're able to respond to issues in our credit, booking of a poor bunch of customers, for example, or dealing with macro shocks. Because the book is so short, it writes off quickly, and we're able to pivot the portfolio very quickly in response to this and tighten, which is what we did at the beginning of last year and into the second half of last year, which is why we've ended the year as well as we have. Thank you. FinChoice's book, I'm very pleased with how we finished the year.
We had challenges with a pocket of business we booked at the back end of 2023, which wrote off quickly in H1. We also implemented a new dialer, which was set to improve how we handle our arrears collection. We had some teething problems in its implementation. We've pivoted the business in the second half of the year to focus more on our existing business, which shaped the book nicely, and we've ended the year with a very strong and healthy portfolio. We launched a new behavioral scorecard and a new bespoke scorecard for acquisition, and those scorecards are proving to be bringing in better risk than the prior scorecards did.
On the right-hand side, you can see our average disbursed term only marginally up to 12.7 months, and our average balance is up from ZAR 8,000 to ZAR 9,500 as we pivoted the business towards product progression to our better existing customers, thus shaping the book more favorably from a portfolio point of view. Very happy with how we ended the year from a credit point of view. Looking at the buy-now-pay-later credit, they've had a fantastic year. Their new application scorecard and behavioral scorecard and their use of selfie technology to limit fraud has really paid dividends for them. Their capital at risk has been well maintained despite their high growth of 157%. You can see in the call out on the handset that the capital at risk drops off significantly with repeat customers.
A new customer coming in just under 4%, and that drops off to below 1% with customers who frequently engage with the platform. You can see the tight vintages on the bottom left as this portfolio is very tightly managed and well within our risk appetite. Average limits have gone up from ZAR 3,300 to ZAR 4,200, again because of the confidence that comes out of our existing business and the new behavioral scorecard. We are able to give better limits to our better existing customers, thus growing the demand in the portfolio. Thank you. Customers have always enjoyed being able to access credit in the palm of her hand via her cell phone. 95% of all of our lending is done by customers doing so 24/7 via her smartphone. Our disbursements grew in the period 31%.
A lot of it driven by our high velocity Mobi Money wallet, where we saw last year 1.1 million withdrawal transactions over the year as customers engage in this mobile-only digital product. We started to scale QR payments, enabling Mobi Money wallet holders to scan a QR code at affiliated merchants and thus transact out of their wallet at the till. That grew 47% over the period as customers are enjoying this new way of shopping. Thank you very much. Insurance, again, our annuity fee-based income and a key pillar in our strategy that grew to ZAR 182 million. Very pleased with the insurance product. It is 136,000 active customers. Most pleasingly for me is the trajectory upwards of customers who are taking insurance from end to end using her smartphone, in other words, a digital sale.
Customers are becoming more and more familiar with our ecosystem and are trusting in our digital tech and thus are purchasing insurance that way. Our personal accident product, which we started to scale last year, grew by over 200%, much of it on our digital platform. We have just a 16% penetration of our active Weaver base. We have taken one of our insurance products and we see a lot of opportunity to grow this further. Thank you. Being with her at the till is a key strategic imperative of ours. Being cashless, driving the security of being cashless at the till is very, very key for us and for our customers. We bought PayJustNow, the buy-now-pay-later business in 2021, allowing customers to transact at the till and split the payment three ways.
In 2023, we introduced a wallet where refunds from buy-now-pay-later or a top-up loan from FinChoice can allow the customer to top up her wallet and then shop at any PayJustNow merchant. Last year, my favorite product, PayStretch, was launched in Q4. This product allows customers on the PayJustNow network to split their payment by up to 12 months, thus enabling her to buy larger ticket items at all PayJustNow retailers. She now has the option to pay in three, pay out of her wallet, or pay in 12, all cashless at the till. Thank you. Looking at the buy-now-pay-later product itself, this is our virally loved and adopted product. It is sold mostly by word of mouth, and we are booking over 100,000 new buy-now-pay-later customers every month into the ecosystem.
Our base is now 2.4 million customers on BNPL. You can see on the top right, the demand is coming increasingly from repeat customers. To date, we have done ZAR 4.2 billion GMV to customers who have previously purchased on GMV and then brand new ZAR 2.1 billion. We see those jaws widening as more and more customers become repeat customers. We see over time, bottom left graph, that customers purchase more frequently at higher amounts over an annualized period as they get familiar with the concept of splitting payments at the till. Frequency is up to 2.12, average spend is up 12%, 21% to ZAR 7,000. Our new PayStretch product, we disbursed just over ZAR 45 million in GMV, and we see that growing very, very strongly in 2025.
On the other side of the equation, our merchants, they enjoy the buy-now-pay-later and the payments product in general because it allows customers to afford items at the till and also improves their conversion. A third element is how many repeat customers are attracted back to those same merchants. The GMV over time, if you look at that purple graph on the left, which shows you the starting point of when someone took up a cohort of business, took up that product, the purple business tripled in 2023 and then doubled again in 2024, showing the stickiness of the GMV and those customers coming back to merchants and repurchasing. We have over 2,800 merchants across 10,000 points of presence across major retailers and household brand names that you would be very familiar with.
A key benefit to our merchants is we are able to serve up offerings to customers both in our UX and via email and others. When customers are searching on the PayJustNow platform, we served up over 300,000 touch points or eyeballs to customers, converting at 8% into lead referrals back to merchants, driving repeat spend. A very virtuous relationship with our merchants and our consumers. Thank you very much. I'd like to now hand over to Chris, who will talk to you about the retail business.
Thanks, Sean. September last year, I shared with you we were in the final stages of our turnaround. I'm proud to say we've completed that, and the table is now set for fantastic growth over the next two, three years.
In terms of our results, retail sales up 8%, really underpinned by our rollout of showrooms and also improved customer response centered around our bedding offers. Gross profit, proud of the team, 2.7% improvement year- on- year, mainly due to effective merchandise strategies and also our smart fulfillment technology and closure of our second warehouse, driving reductions in our supply chain costs. In terms of debtors costs, 16% year on year, we are very pleased with our debtors cost and our credit risk, some non-comp rehabilitation cost in there. Trading cost well managed, only 2% growth year on year. There we have pivoted, growing our direct costs relating to customer acquisition and managing our indirect costs really, really well. Overall operating profit growth of 22% and profit before tax, 85% growth to ZAR 50 million.
Just at the bottom, 51% growth in our showroom sales and an increased trajectory of sales with some really good momentum in the last quarter. Overall sales growth, as I've mentioned, strong momentum in the second half and in the last quarter last year. Our overall channel mix, we've shifted to showrooms, Shirley alluded to this earlier. Our customers love engaging with the brand and coming into our showrooms, and that is a key, key strategy for us going forward. We have started rebuilding our customer base up 6% year on year. You'll also see there at the bottom, 42% growth in new customers, and we're attracting about 15,000 customers per month, and most of them active at 82%, and that's really also centered around our strong credit risk management and focused marketing.
Our showrooms, this is a big, big strategy for us, and we want to target about 100 showrooms by 2027, 60 at the end of 2025. These showrooms, they are smaller of nature, so about 250 square meters, but they've got 4x higher trading densities than our old format stores. High bedding contributions, so 57% bedding mix in these showrooms, and they come at really good margins. What we found in this recipe, about ZAR 2 million for these showrooms, and the payback period is less than two years. Our customers love coming to the showrooms. They love engaging with a brand. We also serve them in terms of collections, payments, resolving queries, and collections, creating a really amazing experience for our customers.
In terms of our gross margin, as I've mentioned earlier, 2.7% improvement year- on- year, and just some really key, key things also to mention. Outside of our smart fulfillment, and this is a logistics solution we've implemented, we've been able to reduce the cost of a parcel by about 9.5%. We are also now delivering one in three of our parcels to a Home Choice collection point. Again, this is for convenience for our customers. In terms of managing our overall stock, the team has done an amazing job at managing our product mix and our health of the stock. Our age stock has reduced by about 60% year on year, and we are focusing on product innovation.
If you put all of this together and 40 years of knowledge and IP, we've gone back to our kind of heritage knitting, and you can see that comes through in the margin. Credit, very pleased where we are now. Our vintages at the bottom, you can see that our credit vintages are well within ranges. We are very pleased with that. Some of the things that we've done in the last year, we've invested in technology, in collections. This has yielded higher yields and also a much better NPL. Paul has alluded to our drop-in provisions earlier. Also by taking payment solutions to the customers, so these are digital solutions in store, in our showroom solutions. We had over ZAR 200 million of payments done. These are the type of things that we are doing to make our customers' lives easier and to pay us.
The last thing also just to add in terms of investment in our fraud defenses and in making sure that we have sufficient protection around that. From a credit risk point of view, it really sets up a good foundation for us to grow into the next 2-3 years. Digital is very, very important for our customer. Our customer, in terms of the ease, what we've done there is WhatsApp. On WhatsApp now, you can do certain service elements. What is your balance? What is the next payment? You can initiate a service query. We have seen about 140,000 customers engage with us on WhatsApp. What we've also started doing in the last quarter last year is testing WhatsApp sales.
Once the customer is comfortable engaging with us on service on WhatsApp, they are starting to test to buy on WhatsApp. Very, very exciting about chat commerce. In terms of the contact center, we've invested quite a bit here last year in technology and relooking at some of our processes. In terms of that digital transformation, about 43% improvement in sales per agent. This is in our contact center. We are changing our contact center to combine voice and digital. It is a digital concierge, a digital agent. In collections again, by investing in technology, we've seen a 30% increase in collections per agent. In terms of our social media, we've improved our ratings. We've focused a lot on service and first-time resolution, and we are proud of our Facebook and Google rating.
In terms of the app, again, ease of convenience for our customer, 218,000 app customers. We have seen about 145% more sessions where we have introduced push notifications. Combining all of these things, and we want to combine the digital engagement with the physical engagement in our showrooms, it sets up for an amazing growth trajectory, taking the product to our customer and fulfilling your needs. We are really excited about the future. I am now going to hand back to Shirley.
Thanks, Chris. In terms of how we see how our year has started this year, we think that our fintech business is going to continue to outpace the market as our ecosystem gets further embedded. I think, as Sean has just explained, Weaver is a very profitable business. We are very clear on what we are trying to do.
Over the last five years, we've had a 30% CAGR, and we're excited about seeing what the next five years brings us. We're seeing a lot of momentum in our cross-sell benefits from our ecosystem. Our team is very clear on our product innovation over the next couple of years, both from PayStretch to other payment products and further insurance products. Chris has described how we've turned around the retail business and are now back into growth. He is very clear in terms of his digital chat and showroom strategies as we roll these out across the country. Our first couple of weeks of this year has been strong, and you can see what we've achieved. We are continuing to see our momentum across the business. In the first quarter of this year, we're very excited about what our 2025 year will bring.
If you can please continue to put your questions into the chat, and as we go, I will direct questions to the CEO or our CFO, Paul. Thanks very much for your time. Right, Sean, this is the first question for yourself. What are the primary drivers of your fee income contribution that grew so strongly?
Yeah, thank you, Shirley. When the Weaver business, the biggest driver of the mix of fee income, going up to 36% of our income, was due to the merchant commission we earn from our payments business and from marketing as a service to those same merchants where we drive traffic back to the merchants. That fee income grew from ZAR 116 million to more than double to ZAR 269 million. The biggest driver by far of the mix of fee income.
We also, of course, have grown our insurance line as well, which generates annuity fee income.
Thanks, Sean. Chris, a question for yourself. What would you attribute the retail sales swing between the first and the second half to?
Thanks, Shirley. In the second half of last year, we saw some really good momentum on our showroom strategy and saw really nice compounding growth, especially focused on bedding and also more data-driven decisioning where we market to our customers and other channels. Those things altogether have really set up a good foundation for this year and a really strong foundation for the next 2-3 years.
Thanks, Chris. That kind of half answers this question. Do you believe this kind of growth is sustainable and that you've achieved this year? I think Chris has answered it from the retail perspective.
He believes it can be sustainable because of the growth that we're driving through the showrooms. From a FinChoice and Weaver Fintech perspective, our CAGR has been 31% over the last five years on revenue, and from a PBT perspective, it's been 35% over the last five years. Those kind of these growth rates are kind of quite well entrenched in that business, and we do believe that this track record is going to continue as we drive up the ecosystem strategy. Sean, do you want to add anything into that commentary?
No, Shirley. I mean, the last five years of track record, I think, speaks for itself. We've had great above 30% CAGRs, and we still have a relatively small market share in lending and insurance. We're the dominant buy-now-pay-later provider in the market and still seeing high growth.
We're booking over 100,000 customers per month into that BNPL product. We're going to add further products into the retail space. PayStretch being one we mentioned earlier, and I see that getting great traction into the future. I think the growth that we're currently seeing will play out into the future.
Thanks, Sean. Paul, a question for yourself. What is HIL's view of the potential impact on profitability from a further drop of interest rates in the next 12 months?
Thanks, Shirley. Our experience of an interest rate reduction is that it improves the consumer's health, which improves our credit performance and the profitability. There's a marginal impact on the lower interest earned off the credit books, which is partly offset by lower interest costs on funding. The group's going to keep driving fee-generating activities, which are then not impacted by interest rate variances.
Yeah, Shirley, we're comfortable with, we're quite excited about a reducing interest rate environment.
I've got a question here. Your marketing seems to be very female-centric. Do you think you could expand your product more to males? This is a question, I'll take this, that over the last 20 years, I've been asked many times. We actually don't specifically market or use our scorecards. There's no split from a gender perspective. As I mentioned upfront, most of our customers are women. 70% of our customers are women. She naturally shops with us. Maybe it's because women tend to be the primary drivers of kind of the home and the family life. Irrespective, what we do is we keep her in mind when we design product, definitely from a retail perspective. A lot of men shop with us, and we love our male customers.
We do tend to keep a woman in mind. The reason I actually was the one that started speaking about our customers as she, and one of the reasons I did that is that I felt that talking about our customers in that way, as he and she rather than they, gave people greater empathy towards customers and also brought her into the room. I think it makes designing product much more personal and relevant. Yes, we love our male customers, but from a product design perspective, speaking of her in that way, for me, is really, really important. Sean, another question for you. Do you currently offer product insurance to BNPL customers?
We do not yet. Obviously, we have an opportunity in the payments funnel to add short-term insurance, and that is something in our pipeline, as well as potentially bolting on or embedding our life offers.
These are exciting strategies for us this year that we're going to be pursuing. Definitely a huge opportunity for us.
Another question for yourself, Sean, while you're answering. I'll keep going with you, sorry. How do you ensure that you are not ethically lending money and not over-indexing your customers?
Thank you, Shirley. We operate under quite a lot of regulation, as you can imagine. Firstly, we screen for politically exposed persons, and we do AML screening as well. From a customer's affordability standpoint, we assess the customer's income, we assess their bureau obligations, we assess their necessary living expenses, and we work with the customer to assess their affordability. We also have a strict low-end growth strategy with customers. Customers who have first offered credit in the group start on low installments.
As they learn how to use credit for the first time, very often, over time, we're able to increase their installment as we gain confidence and the customer gains confidence in how to service the debt. That is how we do it, Shirley. It's a low-end growth strategy using our data and obviously falling under the remit of national credit regulation in terms of affordability.
Thanks, Sean. Chris, a question for yourself. Can retail repeat the operating leverage displayed this year, which was very strong?
Yeah, we've completed our turnaround, and the table is now set for growth. We are very positive that our operating margin will widen up over the next 2-3 years, and we can see a similar type of growth and also leveraging the cost base that we have.
We want to reach 100 showrooms over the next two to three years. We are really positive. Absolutely, yes.
Thanks, Chris. Got another question here. Well done on the results. Thank you. It seems that all profits are invested back into the credit books. Should cash flow and net investment in the credit books not improve as fee income grows? How do you keep on funding the business at this rate of growth? Sean or Paul, which one of you would like to take this question? Paul, thank you.
Thanks, Shirley. I can start. Shirley, we continue to be well supported by our lenders. When we compare ourselves to other similar businesses with large consumer finance books, we are still relatively lowly geared. We are operating well within our lender thresholds, which are linked to the book, the book quality and equity in the business.
In the short to medium term, we'll continue growing our funding with our existing lender group. I think what's positive as well is that our last upsize was more than 60% oversubscribed. That just speaks to the support that we have in terms of continuing to fund the growth in Weaver. In time, and yeah, so well pointed out in the question, we will keep driving fee-generating activities, which will yield from a cash generation point of view, but we're still in the fairly early stages of that. We're looking forward to that impact in the after years as well. Sean, is there anything that you'd add to that?
No, I think you're right in what you've said there, Paul. I mean, the other pillar in our strategy is to grow the mix of our income that is fee-generating.
That's grown to 36% now, and we're going to continue to grow our services-type revenue from insurance and from our engagements with merchants. We believe that's going to drive up that percentage over time, which, of course, is cash positive for the group.
Thanks, Sean. There's another question, I think, for Sean. Is there a risk that Klarna or the equivalent could enter the South African market, and how would you defend your market share?
Yeah, I mean, I think there's always that risk. However, we are the dominant buy- now- pay- later provider in the marketplace. We've got over 10,000 points of presence, and that's growing daily as we engage more and more merchants. If a Klarna were to come in there, they'd have to start from ground zero. We believe we understand the South African consumer. We're a much-loved brand at the till.
We get very high engagement from our consumers. We offer a product that fits the South African market. You take a third now and a third at the end of each month on your pay date. It is a sweet spot in the current market and well understood, and we have seen good traction there. Any other competitors that arrive, be they local or foreign, we believe we have a strong moat to grow ourselves and defend ourselves against such competitive action.
Thanks, Sean. We are going to be wrapping up quite soon for questions. Please, if you have further questions, put them into the chat. I have a question here. I have two questions. What is HIL doing about share liquidity, and can the share liquidity be solved through a merger with another fintech -listed business? If yes, have there been many suitors?
At the moment, we've got no plans for solving the share liquidity. Obviously, we currently have access to capital from the capital markets, so we're going to be using our debt. We're going to be debt funded for the short term. In terms of, yes, it could be solved through a merger with another fintech, and we do have people approaching us and having discussions on an ongoing basis. If we looked at a merger, it would be from a market perspective that it would need to make sense strategically. Yes, we're looking and having discussions all the time. Another question is, what do you attribute your strong cash collections to? I'm not sure which business this is going to. Maybe, Paul, you can address that question or Sean, who would like to pick that up?
I'm happy to pick it up.
I mean, the key element is that across the group, we have relatively short-term credit books. The buy- now- pay- later book is only six weeks long. The FinChoice book is about 20 months, and the retail book is about 17 months in terms of the tenure of their credit, which means the books are naturally high-yielding. In the Weaver Fintech business, 100% of our collections are done by debit order. In the PayJustNow business, 100% are done by debit or credit card strikes. The strike rates are high in those businesses. Those factors combined with the health of the credit book means our yields are higher, which means we collect a relatively large amount of cash given the outgoings in GMV disbursements and purchases.
Thanks, Sean. Okay, the last question for yourself. How much lower can the expense ratio in Weaver Fintech go?
Sean, do you want to pick that question up?
Yes, the Weaver Fintech business is getting this flywheel effect in the ecosystem. We have merchants and customers on either side of this two-sided ecosystem. As we add more merchants and customers, we get a higher number of transactions, which starts to scale the fintech platform that we have. Our cost-to-income ratio dropped to 25.3%, which is 1,100 basis points down on the year. Can we continue to do that? I think so. I think we invest heavily in tech and the growth of our platforms, but that stands to reason that over time we are going to start to see scale. I mean, we are already at a ratio within Weaver Fintech of 9,000 customers served by one contact center agent.
That ratio increases as we get the flywheel effect and more and more customers are self-serving on the platform. Thank you.
Thanks, Sean. Thanks, everyone. In closing, I'd like to thank our non-execs for their continued support and, most importantly, our staff and the leaders in our organization and everyone that supported these results. Really, it's a great set of results. We're very proud of our—we're very proud of the results, but it's due to, obviously, our team. Thanks to all of our team. Thank you for your time this morning. I appreciate it.