Morning everyone. Thanks for your time. As always, we appreciate your interest. I'm going to be taking you through our June 2025 half-year numbers with Paul Burnett, Sean Wibberley, and Chris de Wit. Before we start, as always, please, if you have any questions, please put them in the chat so we can address them at the end of our presentation. I wanted to start today just talking a little bit about our name change. Obviously, this has been a really big change for us during the first six months of this year. We've been going through a transformation, actually, for a very long time as a group. I just wanted to give you some of the history and then some of our thinking as to why we've changed. We launched FinChoice in 2007, primarily through leveraging the HomeChoice Retail business as the retail business's customer base.
Obviously, our HomeChoice business was our heritage business, and we decided that we wanted to try and set up a new vertical from this business. We launched digital loans, added a number of new products. We launched a new vertical, which was insurance, in 2016. We added a payments vertical through an acquisition in 2021. Over the course of time, our customers, as you can see, during 2023, actually became dominated through our financial services business. At the moment, at the end of 2024, 84% of our customers came from our fintech division, and our profits followed a similar vein. At the end of 2024, our fintech business represented 92% of our profits.
What we realized stepping back is that we were still being seen as the heritage business HomeChoice, which is a known and loved brand in South Africa, but we felt that this no longer represented who we were and that this transformation was actually masking who the group had become. We decided in 2025 to reflect both our customer and our profitability. We renamed ourselves Weaver, which is the holding company for our financial services brand. This was launched WVR as the ticker symbol on the JSE, and we're really excited. This is the beginning of our new journey as the Weaver Fintech business. We're off to a flying start. We've had a fantastic first half of the year. Our profits are up 48%. Our revenue is up just under 30%.
We've had great customer growth, and our earnings and our dividends are both strongly up, reflecting our increase in profits during the course of the year. A very exciting start for us. I always like to start with our customers and just talk a little bit more about who she is. As I said, in 2011, our digital journey started in our fintech side, and we've been in lockstep with the customer. With her, as we've changed both her digital landscape and our digital landscape, we're over 95% of our transactions are digital with our customer, and this has really changed us and also facilitated change for her. 70% of our customers are women. Her average age is 37, and you can see her income is about R17,000. She really is an urban African woman and has enabled us to change with her digitally over the last couple of years.
Moving on, I wanted to spend a little bit of time talking about our primary strategy. Sean's going to spend a little bit of time talking to you about some of the strategy in detail, but I wanted to just pause and reflect on both our B2B and our B2C strategy. We've got an ecosystem that basically creates benefit for both our B2C, our customers, of which they're 3.3 million, and our B2B strategy, which is our merchants, 3,100 of them at the moment. Starting with our merchants, we give them payments and conversion. This enables an upsell and ultimately, through really strong adoption of our payment products, we give a number of customer referrals to our merchants. We have inflow payments, embedded insurance, marketing as a service, and checkout as a service.
In terms of the scale, we had more than 20 million customer referrals in the first half of this year across our platforms to our merchant customers. A very powerful delivery mechanism for our merchants. Equally, from a customer perspective, customers will come on with their merchants, whoever they're trading with, and in so doing will become our customer. As they become our customers, they will come on maybe on a payment product. This is both BNPL and retail credit. Thereafter, we will offer them other products that are within our ecosystem. These could be personal loans, wallets, or insurance products, or shopping services. She'll move across from one side to the other within our ecosystem. This is the kind of must-understand strategy for us, and Sean will chat to you a little bit more about this concept and how we're embedding it over the next couple of years.
Finally, I wanted to end on just talking a little bit about, you know, we've had a very strong digital strategy. Like I spoke to you from 2011, we started driving a digital strategy with our customer. We see from today, going forward for the next five years, our primary strategy is actually going to be around AI. There are going to be two elements of this. The one is how we enhance our customer journey, and the other is to be driving optimization from a profitability perspective. If you look at the graph on the far left-hand side, you can see how we've enhanced our revenue per employee. This is our primary kind of where the rubber hits the road of how we're seeing AI within from an optimization perspective. You can see we've had really nice growth, 22% increase in the first half of this year.
From a scale perspective and her journeys, as we've automated her journeys and the use of bots throughout our customer service experience, we've reduced the customer service cost per transaction by 20% to R390. We're doing this by really focusing on our technology spend. We've doubled down on our spend in the last couple of years, and we're going to continue to do so. We see AI as really being the thing that's going to enhance our customer experience, both being consistent and also giving the experience that she wants across all of our digital channels. Finally, I wanted to share with you outside of our customer universe, some of the partners or stakeholders that we work with and how we're sharing this commercial success with our partners over the course of this year.
I've spoken to the fact that we've got 3.7 million customers, but we also work with a lot of SMEs. Our SMEs are about 2,200, and during the course of this year, we've enabled R1.1 billion of sales to go into this network of SMEs. Finally, on a social development perspective, we now have 42,000 children that have been through our schools. We've got about 800 ECD, early childhood development schools, primarily in the Western Cape, and we've championed the development of over 3,000 educators within our schools. We're really passionate about this and are delighted that we're able to have such a big impact on the children of some of our customers. I'm now going to hand across to Paul, who's going to give you some more color around our financials over the course of this half of our year. Thank you.
Thank you, [Shirley]. I'm very pleased to present our interim results for the first half of 2025. These results reflect continued acceleration of our fintech-led growth. Starting at the top plan, group revenue is up 29% to R2.6 billion. Operating profit rose 45% to R564 million, and profit before tax increased 48% to R370 million. Fantastic margin expansion for the first six months of the year. Our customer base grew 48%, reaching over R3.7 million, and cash collections surged 47% to R7.7 billion in the first half of the year. This underscores the quality of our receivables and the strength of our digital processes. Most importantly, this isn't a once-off. It's off the proven track record of our fintech business delivering compound annual growth rates of revenue and profitability north of 30%. We're very excited about the trajectory that this has laid for ongoing growth going forward.
Unpacking the profitability further, fintech continues to be our growth engine with a 39% higher revenue. That's driven by lending income growing 31%, fee income at 47%, and part of that is the payments revenue more than doubling in the reporting period. Fee-based income now represents 28% of total revenue, up from 25% last year, marking a continued shift to higher margin capital-light revenue streams. Strategically, I'm very happy with the traction and the ongoing progress that we're achieving there. This is the result of deliberate investment in our scalable fintech infrastructure, our digital lending platforms, and our payments ecosystem, as well as launching new insurance products. Chris will share on the improved gross profit margin, a really strong lift of 70 basis points. Our debt to costs have increased in line with and were driven by fintech's 39% higher revenue growth.
This represents stable credit performance, and our trading expenses reflect strategic investments in our fintech capabilities, particularly in technology and product innovation. This all results in profit before tax increasing by 48% year- on- year. I'd like to double-click on the margin and the profitability drivers. Our profit before tax margin increased to 14.2%, up from 12.5% last year. This has been driven by, firstly, looking at fintech innovation in payments, insurance, and merchant services. This is driving high margin revenue. Secondly, our retail DP improvements are supported by supply chain improvements and category focus from the retail team. Thirdly, this fintech ecosystem is driving lower customer acquisition costs. Similarly, just how digital we are is allowing this top-line growth to be achieved without a proportional increase in our costs. We'll continue to develop this trend with automation and AI-driven focuses going forward.
These are structural advantages, right, as a fintech business that continue to place us well for margin expansion and more cash flow from operations going forward. That takes us to the cash flow. Our fintech books are driving profitable growth and also strong operating cash flows. Looking at the bottom of the slide on the right, you can see that the fintech net receivables have grown 53% in the period. Looking upwards to the right, you can see that we've continued to have collections in the six-month period higher than the disbursements in the period. That's a trend in terms of our focused digital short-term portfolio. R149 million higher collections than disbursements in the period. We're seeing a good lift in the 121% collections relative to the book. That's up from 106% as of last year.
The key takeout here is that this growth is controlled, it's high yielding, and it's cash generative, and this leads to a well-managed digital credit portfolio. Looking then at our capital structure and our returns, we've matched growth in our net debt with our growth in our net receivables, and we've continued to maintain a healthy gearing profile. Our net debt to equity is appropriate at 83%. That's well below some of our peers that are above 100%. Fintech is driving higher shareholder returns with its return on equity improving to 18.1% in the period. That's up nicely from six months ago at 15.8%. We've also then strengthened our funding base. We've upsized our term facilities by R1.25 billion in the reporting period. We've extended maturities, and we've secured improved pricing as well in this time.
This recent funding, refinancing, and upsizing was 35% oversubscribed, and we've retained R2.1 billion in unutilized capacity. Demonstrating strong lender support for the continued growth in the fintech business. In closing, I'm very proud of what our teams have achieved. These results are not just a strong six-month performance. It's the continuation of the fintech's multi-year trajectory of profits and revenue being up year- on-y ear by north of 30%. We've strategically invested in our scalable digital platforms, and these investments are yielding higher returns and stronger margins. With this track record of profitable growth, a robust balance sheet, and strong lender support going forward, we're confident in our ability to continue to deliver superior value to our shareholders and our funders alike. With that, I'd like to hand over to Sean Wibberley, the CEO of the fintech business. Thank you, Sean.
Good morning, everyone. I think my word for today is wow, and I really want to thank the fintech team for driving such stellar performance, especially with our first set of results now trading on the JSE as Weaver Fintech. Revenue up close to 40%, R1.6 billion. I'm very pleased to say that the fee income portion of that is up very nicely, up 43% as we grow that strategy of garnering more and more products that are fee-based into our ecosystem. Our receivables continue to be high yielding. We collected R6.6 billion from customers in the half versus R6.5 billion in disbursements and gross merchandise value. Ultimately, profit before tax is up a very strong 42% on the half to R402 million. Our performance drivers, the team are focused on our existing customers, really driving growth there at better performance.
Our payments vertical is scaling tremendously with good cost efficiencies. Our fee income mix has gone up as well as the fact that it's higher margin coming down through into profit margin. We continue to invest in our tech and our digital spend for our future innovation and growth of our ecosystem platform. Our transacting customers are also nicely up 39% to over 1.1 million customers earning us revenue each month. Looking at our customer base, our customers really enjoy our digital platforms. It's a sense of reassurance and engagement and convenience for her. We garnered over 700,000 new customers coming into our ecosystem in the last six months. That's up nine-fold from five years ago. Now our customer base is sitting at 3.3 million fintech customers, up 7.5x from five years ago.
You can see the ratings we get from customers, both on the FinChoice brand and on the PayJustNow brand, really strong Google ratings as customers share their enjoyment of working with us and building that relationship on our ecosystem. Looking at our core customer strategy, we have three verticals within the ecosystem. Lending, helping our customers navigate her life successfully through access to personalized credit. We have our insurance vertical, insulating our customers from life shocks. We have a range of life policies, and we're going to be building up shorter-term policies. Our payments vertical is sort of being with her at the till, reassuring cashless, enabling her to make transactions in real time at a number of merchant points of sale. Shirley mentioned the range of products earlier. We have lending products, insurance products, payments products, and a lot of innovation.
I can call out four innovations. We are going to be launching Funeral Accident and Easy Life, a life product, into the PayJust Now brand in the second half of the year. Our Buy Now, Pay Later product is doing really well, and we have extended the terms now from Pay in 3 to Pay in 6 and Pay in 12. There is really pleasing growth and development across our verticals, all coming together in a unified digital ecosystem. On the B2B side, we have tremendous opportunity to add value to our merchant partners. There are three core strategies we are focusing on. On the right-hand side, checkout as a service.
This is providing tools and products for our merchants to enable greater conversion and upsell of basket size through their tools, both online and inline. We have been doing this for a number of years now with our very successful Buy Now, Pay Later product. We have launched PayStretch , and that is in scale-up mode. We are going to be adding insurance at checkout as well. Our second strategy is marketing as a service. We have over 3 million fintech customers, over 3,000 merchants, and this is growing daily. This accumulation of customers has allowed us to revamp our UX that the customer engages with. She is now seeing more relevant, more personalized offers from our merchants, helping the discovery of products and merchants and brands, and driving traffic back to our merchants, again enhancing the relationship and driving traffic to our very loyal merchants.
Our third strategy is analytics as a service. Because of the wealth of data from our customers, the behaviors, the transactions, we are able to add valuable insights to this data and this information and feed that back to our merchants. Our strategy is to have three different tiers: a descriptive tier of what your customers are buying, a predictive tier of what they could buy based on analytics and AI, sort of forward-looking models, and then comparative, comparing merchants' behaviors with others out there in other sectors globally and locally in order to add real insight value to our merchants. The flywheel effect in our ecosystem is really building momentum.
This concept, which we've been focusing on strategically for a few years now, is a customer comes into our ecosystem attracted by one of our very attractive products, chiefly the Buy Now, Pay Later product, but also our lending products and our insurance products. The ecosystem flywheel effect is the customer taking a second or third or fourth product. The reasons are really obvious. If you look at the graph on the top right, a customer who takes two products increases their revenue with us over an annual period from just under R1,000 to just under R9,000. If they take three products to R11,500, that's a sort of a 12x increase in ARPU or revenue over a year from customers because of their progression through the ecosystem.
Customers come in on BNPL, they cross-sell into PayStretch , then into our lending products and our insurance products, the whole time adding value to that customer's life and increasing the number of products that customer has. You can see down on the bottom right graph, those customers of ours that have two or more products have increased from an average of 2.3 products now to 2.6 products. We're seeing very nice growth in our two, three, and four-plus growth product categories. Next slide, please. Looking at our P&L, this has been echoed a few times already. Revenue up really nicely, 39% and 43% up in fees. Our data's growth is tracking revenue growth at 39%. We continue to invest in tech data and our AI capabilities. We're really seeing the operating leverage share where our cost of revenue is down 90 basis points on the half.
The margin overall, profit margin, PBT margin up 120 basis points to 25.3%. On the bottom right, you can see our core verticals all getting tremendous growth. Lending up 30%, payments close to 90%, and insurance over 20%. All these efficiencies coming through, R2.5 million per employee of revenue per year, up 22%. Very pleased with how this ecosystem is starting to get that flywheel effect and starting to scale. Looking at our data's book, data is core to how we run this business. It's been something we're experienced in for 40 years in the HomeChoice Group, and consistency is the key. You can see on the left, data's cost as a percentage of revenue down to about 39%. Our fintech gross book is up R6.4 billion.
I'm pleased to see that Stage 1, which is the best-performing portion of the book, is up 77% of the mix of the portfolio, up from 73% this time last year. On the right-hand side, you can see our coverage with our provisions of Stage2 and three loans up to 67.9% and the ECL percentage down to 15.3%, driven by an improvement in book distribution. Credit really does enable our customers, and it's a core focus area of ours. We focused a lot in the last 12 months or so on product progression to our existing customers, not term extension, but focusing to our existing customers, the demand which we offer her. You can see in our loans vertical, the average disbursement term is still relatively short compared to the market at just 12.8 months.
We are acquiring new customers, obviously, and we continue to look at pockets of opportunity to grow within our risk appetite. We do actively manage our customers based on which sectors they work in, which companies they work in to see if there's any distress that may well happen in the second half of the year due to the U.S. tariffs. This is a skill we learned during COVID, where COVID tended to unevenly hurt different sectors of the industry. We work with our customers who are in those particular industries to give them the ability to pay half, for example, and also to make sure we are being wise with our limit allocation. Our two payment products, BNPL and Pay Stretch, both performing well. BNPL consistently under 2% risk, and our Pay Stretch product is performing better than our forecasted expectations, which I'm very pleased about.
Ultimately, you can see the Peacock Vintage graph for the bottom left. Very range-bound, very tight, and I'm very pleased with the consistency of the performance of the fintech credit portfolio. Our disbursements up to R3.6 billion, so a growth of 30% half on half. All of our disbursements are actually pulled, as it were, by our customers. Customers come to us using their smartphone to request a loan. These loans are personalized and pre-approved in large part because we know the customer. You can see that almost all of our transactions are now done digitally by customers requesting the personalized credit from her smartphone. Our credit metrics on the lending book, very consistent, 20%, 21% data's cost to average book, and our lending book now at about R6 billion. Our Moby Money product is a very highly engaging product with our customers.
It's now serving over 330,000 customers, and they're making just under 100,000 transactions each and every month at the moment. In our payments world, we have two products, the Buy Now, Pay Later product, really successful, well-loved product. We're booking now over 110,000 new customers a month. Six months ago, that figure was at 100,000. We're actually accelerating the rate with which we're acquiring. We've disbursed over R 9 billion in GMV through our merchant tills on this product. At the back end of last year, in October, we launched Pay Stretch, a Pay in 12 product, which customers can use dynamically at the till, wherever there is a Buy Now, Pay Later affiliated and integrated merchant. That's growing really nicely. We're carefully scaling this product and getting great feedback from our customers and merchants who've adopted to it.
Existing customers over the years, this is the clever way to pay. They like to use the product more and more, and we see a lift in spend and frequency year- on- year from our loyal customer base. On the bottom right, you can see some stats in terms of average spend. The BNPL product is designed more for shorter-term purchases, and the Pay in 12 is designed more for larger ticket items. We're getting into our groove with that product. Looking now at our insurance business, again, nice, strong, steady growth, up over 20% to R 103 million in premiums written for the first half. We have 148,000 active standalone policies in force. Our digital footprint in terms of how customers are acquiring funeral and personal accident products, 46% now do it end-to-end digitally.
That I see really growing vertically as our ecosystem takes effect and more and more customers engage and trust the ecosystem and then the proposition of the insurance we're going to be offering. On the bottom left, you can see we're launching some PayJust Now-branded products into their shopping portal. So PJN Funeral and Accident, and I think we're going to start seeing a lot of traction on those product lines into the second half of the year. The business side of the merchant side of the business, the B2B side, tremendous growth year on year from our merchants. Merchants we acquired a couple of years ago, the following year, even more demand goes through their tills. The following year, even more so. Very loyal merchants, very loyal customers at those merchants. That is why we are the number one BNPL in South Africa.
We cover a range of household names and brands, and we continue to grow our merchants and their points of presence on a daily basis. I mentioned marketing as a service. We've revamped the PayJust Now user interface, their app. It is now much more of a shopping destination, much more a place where customers using our data and relevance models are seeing and finding merchants, products, and brands that are curated for that particular customer, much more relevant. In this half, we've generated close to half a billion impressions where customers are seeing offers or brands or products on our shopping destination. 20 million of them result in clicks through to those merchants, and then 4.1% result in sales. Last year, just to compare, we did 300 million impressions over 12 months. We've done half a billion just in six months.
The conversion rate was much better last year at 8.1%, but we always see better conversion in the second half of the year due to the seasonality of year-end Christmas shopping. Again, really pleased to see where B2B is going and adding value to our merchants. I'm now going to hand over to another retailer, Chris de Wit, who's the CEO of the HomeChoice Retail Business. Thank you, Chris.
Thanks, Sean. It's my privilege to share our retail results with you. Our first half this year, it's been about growing sales and improving our profitability. We are very pleased with our revenue growth of 16% year- on- year. We focused on the rollout of new showrooms and focused on our heritage bedding. You can see that coming through in our gross profit year- on- year, we've increased our GP from 45.5%- 46.2%. A well-executed merchant strategy and a key focus on inventory. We are also pleased now that the closure of the second warehouse and some supply chain efficiencies have also improved in the margin. Another notable thing to call out on the P&L is our finance and other income growth of 25% year- on- year. That's an analyzation of some of our fees and the growth of the book.
The one item that has increased more than the kind of book growth is the debtors' cost. We have taken on slightly more riskier business, and we've closed that down in the second quarter of this year. For the second half of this year, we are comfortable with the level of risk that we're taking on board. Our operating profit growth year on year is 60%, and the business is on that continuous trend to improve our profitability. Strong customer response this year, we've seen some really strong growth. You can see in the left graph, we've had double-digit growth for the first two quarters, and we've continued the momentum from last year. Our focus on our heritage product in terms of bedding, we've seen the increase in our contribution last year, 60%- 62%.
I've menti-ned the improvement in our GP year- on- year, which we are very proud of. Rebuilding our customer base has been a key thing over the last 12- 18 months. There we've seen a 38% growth in new customers, reaching about 20,000 per month. We're doing all of this by pleasing our customer and keeping convenience at the center. Our NPS at 58%, an improvement from 54%, shows that kind of commitment. In terms of created risk, we've taken on some higher risk business. In the first half of this year, we've made some changes. We've looked at approval rates and also we've reduced limits. The industry-wide RM rollout, where they changed the collection mechanism, that's caused some challenges when we went live in May. We've increased our percentage authenticated debit checks, and that should offset some of the risk we've seen on RM.
We believe that we are well- positioned for the second half of this year, very comfortable in terms of the level of provisions that we are carrying. You can also see there that our provisioning year- on- year is still lower with sufficient Stage 2 and three cover. Showrooms are a key growth engine for us. It's really about an amazing experience for our customer. We're on track for the 100 showrooms by 2027. By the half of this year, at the moment, we're at 46%, and we're well on track this year to get to 58%. Strong growth this year from our showrooms, 53% up year- on- year. Two things maybe just to call out in showrooms is it's got a 67% bedding mix versus 62% of the business. That really helps us with our margin and focusing on our heritage business.
Also, it's got a very high cash contribution, just below 20% versus 9% of the total business. Showrooms are really a key growth engine for us for the future and making sure that we get that great customer experience to the customer. We're also combining the showroom with some of AI and automation. This does a few things for us. It's a reduction in cost, and it improves our efficiencies, but also it plays a big part in our customer experience. I've shared that our NPS has gone to 58%, an improvement year- on- year. We've invested in things like our website optimization this last year. As an example there, with AI, we've seen a 50% cut in our operating costs. In terms of our chat support, we now have automated replies in real time. We've seen quite a significant customer using this solution.
In terms of our call center, now 100% of all our agent calls are transcribed using AI. We use these AI-driven insights to refine scripts. We use it for agent training and enhance the customer experience. Really excited with the things that we are doing every year. At the bottom there, building a more digital call center where we are combining voice with digital investment and leveraging AI really sets us up together with the showrooms that will have good growth at lower costs by keeping the customer at the heart of it and a great customer experience. I'm now going to hand back to Shirley. Thank you.
Great. Thanks, Chris. Very exciting to hear about some of the digital strategies that you're driving. For me, this 2025 year was kind of a foundational year. I know that may be an odd thing to say considering our results, but I saw this year as kind of being a year where we pause in terms of our momentum. We're really embedding our ecosystem and scaling some of our new products and positioning ourselves for the next five years. We've spoken about the scale of customers that are signing up, which is, and ultimately, customers are the sustainability of an organization and one's ability to drive or offer her products that she's really excited about. I think we've proved that out.
We've got a lot of innovation around our new products, and Sean spoke about our new products that we've launched in the first half of this year and that we are scaling. In the second half of the year, our new products that we're also going to be scaling. I spoke about how we see AI as being our next phase of digitization and how we're going to use this to both optimize her journeys and our profitability. We've really embedded and understood a lot of the data now across the different businesses, and we've aligned scorecards and the language that our data teams use. I think this is going to start giving us a platform to drive cross-sell across the group. Sean spoke about the benefits of our cross-sell.
We've just closed out, our finance team has closed out a new round of funding, and we've had really fantastic support from our funders, which we're very excited about. From the end of June to now, we've seen our growth has continued. Our disbursements are up 25%. Our GMVs are up just under 100%, and our retail sales also up 12%. I think this is going to be a second six months of scale, but more importantly, it's going to be the beginning of the next five years of growth for us as we build momentum across the business. Thanks very much for your time. I'm going to close and encourage you to ask questions. Please put them into the chat, and we'll endeavor to answer them. Thanks again for your time.
The first question is for you, Sean. How do you plan to build the contribution of fee revenue for the business?
Yeah, thank you, Shirley. Look, we've got a number of strategies, I guess, best splitting them between the B2B and the B2C side. Looking at our merchants, as I mentioned earlier, we're going to be driving checkout as a service, marketing as a service, and analytics as a service. All of those three services to our merchants earn us fee income. These are commissions and charges to our merchants. Secondly, on the B2C side to our consumers, we will continue to grow and penetrate our insurance products into our ecosystem base. We have a number of life policies already, and in the next half of the year, we're going to be branding some of those with the PJN-branded insurance brand to get more brand affinity and scale of those product sets into the base.
We'll also look to add short-term insurance products to the checkout process for our customers, adding value at the till for our merchants and our customers. We're exploring a virtual card. We're very much in strategic development on this card, and that card would earn us interchange when spending it at merchants. Another big thing we want to focus on is value-added services. We have a few services at the moment. We want to really explore opening that up with the benefit of a virtual card and a wallet in the background in order to give customers access to a range of value-added services, all of which are fee-based forms of income.
Shirl, I think you're on mute.
Not on mute.
Are you back?
I'm back. Paul, apologies. Could you please go into more detail into your working capital cycle and whether a working capital unwind is possible?
Thank you, Shirley. Certainly. One of the reasons why we have such strong lender support is that we have this high-yielding short-term fintech portfolio. We're investing in that. We've generated cash from operations, but we've invested in this high-yielding, highly profitable book. If you slow down growth, you quickly generate cash to repay debt. In simple terms, we've collected over R6 billion in the first six months of the year. In simple terms, that's over R1 billion a month versus net debt of R3.4 billion. You can see, yeah, very short-term working capital cycle that's actually quite highly cash generative if you're not investing in this working capital portfolio.
Thanks, Paul. Chris, I've got a question for you. Please, can you clarify what registered mandates are and why this impacted collections?
Thanks, Shirley. Maybe a bit of a technical explanation, but earlier this year in May, the Reserve Bank and PASA introduced a new collection mechanism. In the past, we had a registered mandate service, and it was replaced by a registered mandate. In short, what it means is if you don't have an authenticated debit check from May this year, an RM, which is a registered mandate, now moves to the second window of collection. Because it moves to the end of the collection window, those collection rates are lower than a mandated authenticated debit check. Therefore, in our world in retail, because the biggest majority were RM mandates, we have to increase the number of debit checks to offset the lower collections from the second window.
Thanks. Chris?
Shirley, I think you're on mute.
No, I'm not. Maybe a dodgy Wi-Fi. Let me try again. What is the most common thing your customers buy with your fintech services? Paul, Sean, do you want to take that?
Shirley, I think he's struggling with a bit of sound there. Let me look at the questions and pose a couple.
It's a good idea.
Excuse me, while I refresh the questions. Yeah, there's actually one I'll take. You know, what's driven the fintech surge in profits in the first half of 2025? Towards the back end of last year, we grew our disbursements, and we've seen very good growth again in the first half of this year, up 30%. Our payments business is up around 90%, and our insurance is up 22%. That kind of flywheel effect of the growth from previously and into this year, off of improving cost structures and stable credits, has meant that we've opened up the margin and seen the fantastic result that we now have. Up 30% in revenue, but up 46% in terms of profits. We're very chuffed with what we've done with the fintech business. I'll look at another question.
No.
Shirley, are you there? Is your voice back?
It's a no question. Okay, there's a question. I think what's your—just for you to share what you think your competitive advantage is, Sean. Do you have a sustainable—do you believe it's a sustainable advantage in your digital loans and payments businesses, given the increasing competition in that space?
Yeah, look, there's always massive competition in the space, especially in the lending and insurance spaces traditionally. I do believe that as a group, we are intensely focused on our customer and her experience. Our team really does obsess about the user interface, the simplicity of our products, and how they fit into her life. We use data personalization and our experience in order to design our products, their pricing, and how we serve them up at the right time to the right customer at the right point in her life and in an affordable manner. Obsessing on the customer, having the right tools and tech, and the capital of our people really is what's driving. The competitive environment out there just makes us sharper, I believe.
We really are in the front foot of what's going on, and it's all about staying sharp and competitive and sticking to your vision of growing an ecosystem that really helps our customers and merchants thrive.
Thanks, Sean. Paul, I've got a question for you. Talk to the sensitivity of your earnings to lower anticipated interest rates.
Thanks, Shirley. Our experience on lower interest rates is that it actually benefits our consumer the most in terms of our business. What benefits our consumer benefits us as a group in terms of growth and in terms of the quality of our books. There's a relatively small profit degradation on our revenue, but that's partly offset by lower interest costs on our funding. Bottom line, relatively small perennial impact, with the bigger impact coming from a higher quality consumer in terms of her own cash management.
Thanks, Paul. I've got another question. How does the group think about growth of the fintech outside of South Africa? Sean, would you like to take that? Otherwise, I can.
Yeah, thanks, Shirley. Definitely an option for us in the future. The South African market still represents a lot of potential growth and market share for us. All of our products, lines, lending, insurance, payments are still in early stages right now. Our lending business has a market share of about 6%. In terms of disbursements to unsecured, our insurance business is around about 1% or less than 1%. In our payments business, we are the market leader in BNPL, but there's a lot of growth for us in terms of extended credit at the till, Pay in 6, Pay in 12, Pay in 24. We still see a lot of runway in the South African market, but we constantly look at other markets and are able to take our model and deploy in other countries. For now, very focused on doing what we do best and growing our ecosystem locally.
Shirley, you've gone a bit quiet again. I'm going to jump in because of that.
I'm back.
Now you're back. Carry on.
I'm back. Okay, Sean, it was one for you. You've expanded your fintech offering to more merchants. Could you expand it to experiences or services like holidays, plane tickets, flights, beauty procedures?
Absolutely. We started the payments business working with merchants that sold goods online or at the point of sale: clothing, footwear, home textiles, household items, consumer electronics. Services is an obvious next place for us to go. We are exploring, for example, helping customers afford expensive hospital bills, procedures, planning a holiday, and using our payments products to be able to afford that holiday. Absolutely, services are on our radar.
Great. Thank you. Chris, a last question for yourself. Given recent global developments, could you comment on the impact of trade tensions and supply chain disruptions? In addition, have you been hit with any currency volatility, and has it affected your cost of imports?
Maybe the second part of the question in terms of currency fluctuations, a part of our foreign buy we do hedge. We've not had a negative impact on that, and we've not seen too much movement. In terms of the kind of the trade things, we're not really impacted at this stage. Where we have seen some pressure earlier this year was on the lengthening of our supply chain. There we've been a bit more conservative to add a week or two on the shipping lines. At this stage, you know, we haven't seen any evidence that will push up the prices, and we are slightly more conservative on the weeks when we are importing.
Great. Thanks, Chris. This really is the last question.
Sean, you'll have to jump in again.
Yeah.
Yes, I will. I see there's a question regarding the Buy Now, Pay Later business model, which is growing significantly in the South African context and is likely to attract the attention of regulators. I'm reading the question. Are you expecting this to have adverse impacts, and how is the business positioning itself for this certainty? Absolutely. Globally, Buy Now, Pay Later is coming under increased scrutiny from regulators, and Australia, the U.S., Europe, and the U.K. are all looking at ways of making this, pulling it under regulatory arm. We've been working with SeQura, wanting to report our Buy Now, Pay Later transactions to the Bureau. There's still delays in that happening within SeQura. However, what we see is a very positive thing because we want to be able to report with the Credit Bureau.
What this does is it enables younger consumers and those with thin credit records in order to build up a credit profile using the BNPL product and then have access to better forms of credit later on with a more robust credit record. Now, bad rates are under 2% in the BNPL product. This is credit that is offered to consumers with no interest and no fees. It's a perfect entry-level product for customers. We're looking forward to be able to work with the regulators to have sensible digital-first type regulation around this, mainly to do with reporting in the industry.
Great. Thanks, Sean. Thank you. I'm going to mark the non-executive myself and the board, and I'll manage to jump up on that and mark all of our staff for this.
Right. Shirley, I think we're coming to the end here, and I'm going to choose another question. What new products or services will the fintech business be launching next? I've kind of mentioned this a bit. You know, in the second half of the year, we're going to be launching PayJust Now-branded life products and a new life product itself called Easy Life. We want to expand our marketing as a service and analytics as a service. We've got wonderful momentum in terms of the volume and number of customers and transactions and increasing merchant footprint, and being able to add B2B services to our merchants to bring customers with relevance to merchants so they can find their brands and their products. Later on, we'll also launch a virtual card and value-added services. Shirley, I see a few there to close. Otherwise, I'll close on your behalf.
Thank you. Close on my behalf.
Thank you, everyone, for listening to our results. Very pleased with them, as you can tell. Thank you for your questions. Thank you for listening. Thank you very much for the team. On Shirley's behalf, thank you so much for being here today. Thank you.
Thanks.