Good morning, everybody, and welcome to our Results Presentation for 2025. Now, this morning, Gary Thompson, our CFO, and I will be very happy to talk you through what has been another successful year for our business. I do want to acknowledge, however, that this is an unusual set of results in that we have, in the background, the BasePoint bid for IPF. However, today's presentation is all about those results, not about the bid. What we're gonna do is we're gonna go through the results as normal, and then we're going to follow on from there. If we're allowed to answer questions at the end, we will, but we'll have to take advice on that. With that, let's get started.
As usual, I'm going to deal with the results at a very high level, and then I'm going to talk about our strategy and how that is delivering for us really, really well and consistently. I'm going to talk a little bit about regulation, something we haven't done for a while, and I'll also touch on the security situation in Mexico. I'm gonna hand off to Gary, and Gary is gonna take us through the divisional results in a detailed way and talk about how each of our divisions has performed over the past 12 months. He'll also deal with the balance sheet, look at how the portfolio is performing, and how we finance the balance sheet, and also dealing with the capital side of things. I'll pick up at the end, and I'm going to do some closing remarks.
Now, as always, we have plenty of time at the end for Q&A. Just on Q&A, somewhere on your screen, there should be a dialog box that at any stage during this discussion, you can type in your questions, and at the end, Rachel is gonna pick all of those up and put those to Gary and myself to answer for you. Overall, I think this should take probably around 40-45 minutes. With that, let's get started. Hopefully, you had a chance to look at the RNS that we released this morning, if you did, you'll see that we delivered a profit of GBP 88.6 million pre-tax and pre-exceptional items, Gary's gonna talk about the exceptional items later on.
That's up 4% year-on-year, and it's delivered on the back of constant demand from our customer segment, but excellent execution by our colleagues throughout the organization. In terms of top line, we improved our lending by just under 12% year-on-year, and our net receivables are up by just under 14%. You can see it's fast approaching GBP 1.1 billion. Credit quality continues to be very good as are collections, and our Next Gen strategy really is delivering for us. With all of those things taken together and with a really good, strong balance sheet, the board are pleased to propose a final dividend of GBP 0.0 9 pence per share, and that's up 12.5% year-on-year. Those are the very summary highlights.
As I said, Gary's gonna take us into a lot more detail on that. What I'd like to do now is touch on our strategy. I know for many people watching today, you've seen this quite a few times, but given the circumstances, I'm expecting that there are a lot of viewers out there who don't know us that well. Please bear with me as I take those people through what our strategy is and how we're executing against it. It will seem familiar to a lot of you. This is our three pillar strategy. First of all, it's important to understand that we have a purpose in this business, and that is to build financial inclusion. For people who are less fortunate than most of us and have less access to financial services products, we are there to help them.
We do that through this three pillar strategy that you see on the screen now. What I'm going to do is walk through each of those pillars and tell you some highlights about what's happening under each of those. The first pillar is Next Gen financial inclusion, and this is all about where we're trying to build the products and services that are appropriate for our customers today, but will also be attractive to them down the line. We have Next Gen organisation, which is all about trying to become a smarter and more efficient organization and deliver better services for our customers. Finally, we have Next Gen technology and data, and this is just about becoming a technology-enabled business and using data in the right way to deliver services efficiently.
All of this is done within our guiding financial model, and Gary's going to touch on that. Underpinning everything here are our values, which are responsible, respectful, and straightforward. In the 14 years that I've been in the business, those have never changed, and they shouldn't either. Let's go and have a look at how we're doing under each of these pillars in turn, starting with Next Gen financial inclusion. I'm sure many of you will know that we launched our first-ever credit card in Poland some two years ago. In effect, we created a new market segment where one didn't exist. I'm delighted to say the credit card is proving to be a big hit, and we currently have over 200,000 users of the card in Poland.
In addition, it's now not just being delivered by our customer representatives or agents, but it's also being delivered fully digitally, depending on customer preference and credit standing. As well as being in Poland now, we are currently testing the card in Romania. This is something we talked about at the interim results. It is very much a test phase, but I'm quite hopeful that it's going to prove to be a success there as well. How else then do we interact with customers? Well, we have what we call our partnership model, and you might know it as point of sale finance. We want to be where our customers need finance, so when they're out there shopping.
We're now interacting or have our services offered through 2,700 retailers. What I can confirm is that there is no shortage of demand, and this is now in Romania and in Mexico. There are lots of customers in our segment who want this type of credit. What we're having to do is figure out how to calibrate the credit quality. Because ordinarily, when you do your marketing, and it's broad-based marketing, you get a good picture of the whole segment. When you then change your channel and you bring it down to an individual retailer, you automatically skew the nature of the customer that's coming to you, and so you have to change your scorecard. We're currently in that evolution phase, where we're getting plenty of demand, but we need to get the credit quality right. That's gonna take us a bit of time.
In Mexico, we continue to extend our reach. We've opened a further two branches, one in Monterrey and one Ensenada. I can confirm that in 2026, we'll open a further one in Monterrey, and a new one in Chihuahua as well. Essentially, it's just that the geography is so big, we need to continue extending our reach through the physical infrastructure. Short-term products. Short-term loans are something that we steered away for quite some time because of the negative association with payday lending. We came up with a construct of a short-term loan that met the customer's needs, but at the same time, tried not to penalize them if they got into difficulty.
By that, I mean, if they got into difficulty on the short-term lending repayments, we would offer them the opportunity to switch over to a slightly longer loan with a lower repayment and a lower interest rate. I have to say that, again, is proving very popular. Once again, it's a completely new product for us, and it's all about the credit quality, and we're working our way through that at the moment. Brand in Australia. When we spoke about the interim results back in July, August time, we talked about the fact that we'd taken a decision to invest more money in the brand in Australia, up to GBP 3 million per annum. We're currently executing on that plan. Brands haven't built overnight, so I would say this is one where we need to have a three to five-year view.
We're pleased with what's happening so far, in terms of the payback, that's going to come a little further down the line. Finally, at the bottom of the page here, you see a reference to a further GBP 5 million investment on our new growth initiatives. Essentially, what we're saying here is that we feel very positively about the growth that we're generating, to concrete that into the business, we believe we should spend a further GBP 5 million per annum for the next two to three years. It'll be a bit of a drag, we believe it's really worth it in terms of expanding the business over that period of time. I think Gary is gonna refer to this when he gets up shortly.
Those are all the things that we're doing to generate financial inclusion and bring current customers in, but also ensure that we're attractive to future customers. Let's look now to our second pillar, and that is Next Gen organisation. Trying to be a smarter and more efficient organization in order to deliver more effectively for our customers. Here, a lot of what we're doing is using technology to be better at what we do. A few examples for you here. In terms of delivering change in the organization, we have a huge amount of change going on, whether it's new products, new channels, or changing regulation that we need to adapt to. Even though we are one group, we have two very distinct ways of delivering strategic change.
In our digital business, it's done under the product operating model, which I'm sure will be familiar to a lot of people. Essentially, there, product teams are formed, and they own a product from birth through to maturity. They design it, they get the technology set up, they tweak it, they implement it, and then they monitor it. Whereas in our home credit business, it's done the more legacy way, which is to say that for each product, when we want to do something, we start to pull people out of individual functions, and we get them to work on it for a short period of time, and then they go back to doing something else. The second way is far less efficient and far less, I suppose, speedy in terms of getting impact in the organization.
What we've decided to do is to switch to product operating model across the whole organization. It is a really large undertaking. It'll take us probably 18 months, two years, but we've started, and we're really pleased with what we see so far. Much better engagement internally in delivering new product and delivering strategic change, but also much faster impact across the business. Multi-year project delivery. What I'm referring to here is the fact that we've embarked on delivering a new finance and HR platform, a global platform. It's gonna be SAP. It's gonna cost us approximately GBP 12 million, and I think it's gonna take us about two years. It will give us a new platform for all of our finance and HR communities across our 10 countries.
That will allow us then to standardize processes around that, and out of that, we will drive significant efficiencies. It's a big undertaking, but we've contracted with a lot of professionals internally. We have over 250 people working on this at the moment. It's something that we really need to nail, but I feel good about where we're at on that just now. ISO 45003. This might be new for some people, but it's all about psychological well-being at work. We want to be a great place to work. We employ about 5,500 colleagues, and we have about 16,000 customer representatives around the globe. We want them to feel valued and to feel safe working here. We want them to believe that they have opportunities and that their careers can develop.
Our team worked incredibly hard to achieve ISO 45003 for all of our home credit businesses and our digital business in Poland. It's a huge achievement, and my thanks to them for that. Finally, our reputation. We deal in a very specialist area of the consumer finance market, one where we have to be incredibly careful with making sure that our customers can afford the money that they borrow from us, that we treat them well all the time, but particularly when they get into difficulty. In order to make sure that that works for our business and for our customers, we need good regulation. To influence good regulation, you need to have a good reputation so that you get a seat at the table.
We spend a huge amount of time working with external stakeholders to get them to understand what we do and why we feel we do it so responsibly. Reputation for us is a key driver of our success and something that we'll continue to invest on in the years ahead. That's what we're doing on Next Gen Org, and turning then to the third pillar, Next Gen Tech and Data. The very first line you see here is what we spent in 2025, so GBP 35 million. For an organization our size, GBP 35 million on CapEx is a big number.
I can tell you in 2024, we spent GBP 24 million. If you look at the bottom of the page, you can see that we estimate that this year it's going to go to GBP 45 million and possibly GBP 50 million thereafter for a year or so before it drops back down. Why? Well, there are a number of reasons. One is we have over I think the number is 450 or 460 individual systems or platforms across this organization. We need to simplify, standardize, and secure our systems. To do that, we need new technology, and new technology costs money. That's one thing that we're doing. The SAP thing, the finance and HR platform, is just one example of that. Let me give you some other examples of what we're doing here. Omni-channel platforms.
In many other businesses, particularly banks, you would probably take this for granted. For us, it's been quite a challenge to ensure that when our customers, this particularly home credit, talk to their agents and then subsequently ring a call center or try to contact us by email, in the past, they've had three different routes to get to us, but none of those conversations really joined up in our back office. This omnichannel experience through our Xenia project is to ensure that all of the conversations with the customers join up. Whether they call an agent in a call center, whether they contact us through web chat or WhatsApp, which is now integrated, all of those conversations form part of a whole, and the customer gets a much better service, a seamless service, I would almost say.
It's a big investment, and I think we're closer to the end of that journey than the beginning, and it feels really good. Another example would be digital self-service through a customer app. We talked about this before. We have a very good one in Mexico that our Mexican team designed. We have a good one in Poland, designed by our team there, and we're rolling it out now in Hungary, Czech, and Romania. Within six to eight months, it should be across all of our Provident businesses. The great thing about that app is that customers will self-serve, 'cause we see it in Mexico, and we see it in Poland. It dramatically reduces the call volume, the inbound call volume, with simple queries, because the customer gets on the app, and they do it for themselves.
Not alone that, actual problem resolution back through the app educates the customer further on how to get the best out of it, and then that has a positive impact on their relationship with us. It's taking a bit of time and a bit of money, but the customer experience is vastly improved as a result. Digital payment flexibility. Here, I just want to mention Mexico. Mexico is a huge geographic area to cover, and we do it in home credit through our agent network, but clearly, they can't cover everywhere. What we've been finding over a number of years is that customers complained quite a bit that they weren't getting a consistent enough service when it came to collections. So what we did over the past three year.
Well, actually, it's probably more than four years now since the pandemic, is we've tried to give customers in Mexico home credit, more and more options through which they could pay their loan back to us. We've just signed up to a new platform now, and I think that was just in the last couple of months. It's added 30,000 payment points, so through retailers, 30,000 additional payment points, in addition to the 12,000 bank branches that we deal with, and in addition to the 23,000 OXXO stores that we deal with.
What we're really trying to do is to say to a customer, "If you can't see the agent or they can't see you literally have tens of thousands of other areas that you could pay your loan back for or back through." Digital capabilities with AI. I wanted to mention AI specifically because in our previous discussions on AI, I said that people shouldn't expect a silver bullet solution for AI in our organization. It would most likely be incremental benefits accumulating from lots of different projects. That is proving to be the case, but actually, it's proving to be more beneficial than I had expected. One example is here in terms of our own technology team, where there are developers, and they're using, I think it's called Amazon Q Developer or something like that.
I think that's the name of it. What they found by using this AI-assisted development is that the productivity gains are enormous. Actual development time is reduced by 20%, testing time is reduced by 25%, and error detection in code is improved by 33%. Those are quite dramatic numbers, and those are just in our own developer colleagues internally. Now what we're doing, we're going to our external contracts, people who develop for us, and we're saying: "If we can do this, and we're not a technology house, you must be able to do even better, and we'd like to see some of that benefit coming back to us in reduced prices." Another example in Mexico on AI, completely different. Our HR team in Mexico have started using an AI assistant to interview people who are coming for jobs.
I know this now has a very bad rep in the U.K. because it's been all over the media that prospective job hunters can't get to see a real person, they see an avatar or something like that. I do worry about that, but the experience in Mexico has been amazing. Using this AI-assisted, let's call it an avatar, in Mexico, what they found is that the quality of the candidates who eventually get through to the final application is increased. Of those candidates who actually get the job, they stay for longer. I went back with David and his team as to why that was the case, because I wanted to understand it.
What it would seem is this, that human behavior is, if I'm pitching to you for a job, I'm going to sell the job to you. When you arrive, the job might not be quite as spectacular as you thought it was when I described it, and so you're initially disappointed, and you may stay for less time. The avatar or the AI assistant tells you exactly as it is, and so when you arrive and you get through all of that process, the job you get is exactly the job that we have, and therefore, your satisfaction levels are higher, and you're more committed to staying. It was a complete revelation to me, but it's one of the multiple, I think, benefits we're going to get out of AI going forward.
I think that's all I want to say on tech for now. Those are our three pillars in terms of our strategy. Now I'm going to move on to regulation. Before I do, I just want to say that probably for the past 18 months or two years, Gary and I haven't talked about regulation that much. We've referred to the fact that, you know, CCD2 is coming up, and there's probably going to be a rate cap in the Czech Republic, things like that. Today I'm going to give you a more detailed update, and I'll explain why. It's all about CCD2. CCD2 was required because the way financial services are provided to consumers in the EU has changed dramatically over the last 12 or so years. CCD1 needed to be updated, and that is what this is all about.
The way it was structured was that CCD2 transposition into local regulation was meant to be achieved by November 25 and be effective from November 26th. In fact, only one country in the EU, as far as I'm aware, achieved that, and that was Hungary. All of the other countries have missed the deadline. The commission came out and said, "Unless you get on with it and get this thing done, we will be looking at fining people." What we have seen over the last two and a half or three months is a huge uptick in activity around the transposition of the EU regulation into local regulation or law.
What needs to be said is that the EU directive needs to be transposed into local regulation, but it doesn't prevent, in fact, in some cases, it seems to encourage local regulators to look at the whole of their regulation in this space and rethink a lot of it. As a result, we're getting what you see on the page today, a whole menu of items that are currently in discussion across either one or multiple countries. They're not even necessarily connected to CCD2, they're connected to the idea that the regulation in this space is being reviewed. I want to talk about a number of them because they're potentially quite big. The first one is introduction on caps on lending-related fees. Now, as you know, we already have caps, but they're mostly interest rate caps or total cost of credit caps.
We have them essentially in most countries, with the exception of Czech and Australia, I think. No, there is a cap there, but Czech in the European Union. What this talks about is that as well as that, there would then be individual caps on individual fee items for things related to a loan. That could get quite complex and difficult to manage, we're looking at that very closely. The rate cap in Czech we've talked about, and we think that's absolutely coming. Affordability assessments. At the heart of every loan that we provide, our ultimate aim is to make sure that the loan is appropriate for our customer, and in particular, that it is affordable. Affordability regulations are there in practically all countries.
The discussions that are going on at the moment in some countries talk about enhancing those regulations significantly. You could get to a point where, in effect, the regulations would stop you lending to some of these customers. We hope that's not the case. We're looking at it. Changes to rebates is straightforward. Increasing restrictions on advertising. There have even been discussions about a complete ban on television of any consumer financial products in some places. Value-added services, more restrictions, I think, to come in terms of how value-added services can or cannot be tied to a financial services agreement. Finally, introduction of free credit sanctions. This one is particularly significant. The concept here is if you, as a consumer, have a consumer finance agreement, a loan, and you're either happily repaying it or you're having difficulty, it actually doesn't matter.
If you go through your agreement and you find an error in the agreement, and it could be a tiny error, so not a critical error, it could be any error, but if you, if you find an error, you can go back to the finance company and effectively repudiate the contract and get free credit. My understanding is it would involve having to repay all of the interest already paid to the customer or by the customer. You can see that one could be particularly difficult. Now, what I would say is we have a great track record in terms of dealing with regulatory change. We really have a very good track record. In some instances, we had to make really difficult decisions about coming out of countries like Finland or Slovakia, because we do manage our capital very effectively.
Our track record in adapting to reasonable regulation is very good. My concern here is there are so many items on the agenda being discussed across multiple countries at the same time, and under a stopwatch scenario, I can't commit to you that we will convince everybody of what reasonable looks like across all of these. I'm hopeful we will get there on most of them, and we will keep you updated. It's just to say that because the countries are behind in terms of the timeline, there's now a big rush on to get this done very, very quickly. We'll come back to you on this. The final thing I wanted to talk about is the evolving security landscape in Mexico.
This is a very late entry slide in our deck today, and it's obviously because of the death of the head of the Jalisco cartel that I'm sure all of you have either read about or seen videos of on the news. What's fair to say is that Mexico is, at the moment, as a result, is reasonably unstable from a security point of view. It's not the whole of Mexico, but there are particular states that are being badly impacted. Our number one concern is always for the safety and security of our colleagues and our customer representatives, so Estrellas, we call them in Mexico.
We've taken the decision in three particular states to close our branch network, tell our colleagues not to come to work, and to also advise our colleagues and our Estrellas not to use the highways because the highways are particularly vulnerable. Now, it's very hard to say how this pans out from here. It could all die down or quieten in the next day or two. It could escalate. We can't say. I want to repeat, our primary concern is for the health and safety of our team, and so we've taken that decision. It impacts about 10% of our customer base in Mexico. I am very hopeful that the situation calms down very quickly and that the impact in our January, or sorry, February results, will be de minimis. I'm not in a position to say that just yet.
We need to see how this plays out. A difficult situation for our colleagues there, and we empathize with them and everything that they're going through. With that now, I'm going to hand you over to Gary, and Gary's going to take us through the trading results in a lot more detail. Gary, over to you.
Thank you, Gerard. Hello, everybody. As you heard in our introduction today, we have delivered another good set of results in 2025, with profit before tax increasing by 4% to GBP 88.6 million. This result was delivered through disciplined execution of our Next Gen strategy and continuing robust credit quality across the group, which actually offset the short-term impact of increased growth. You can see on this slide here that second half profits were GBP 38.7 million in 2025, broadly in line with the GBP 37.9 million in the second half of last year, despite a much larger receivables book.
This is entirely consistent with the guidance we provided at the interim results in July and reflects the impact from the IFRS 9 impairment drag on increased receivables growth, as well as additional sales-focused costs relating to our new growth initiatives, such as credit cards, short-term loans, and partnerships. As Gerard mentioned earlier, we are stepping up our expenditure as we support the additional growth initiatives, enhance the foundations of the business, and drive improved efficiency. Firstly, given the success and momentum we are seeing from our new products and distribution channels, we now plan to invest a further GBP 5 million per annum through the P&L account over the next two to three years. This additional expenditure will be through additional marketing and brand building costs, enhancing our colleague capability, and also the upfront IFRS 9 impairment charges we will incur as we refine our credit scorecards.
We expect market expectations to adjust for this additional investment. Secondly, having stepped up our investment in capital expenditure by GBP 10 million to GBP 35 million in 2025, we are increasing it by a further GBP 15 million in both 2026 and 2027 as we look to accelerate the transformation of the business. We expect Capital Expenditure to reduce to a more normalized annual run rate of between GBP 25 million and GBP 30 million from 2028 onwards. Finally, on this slide, we incurred exceptional one-off costs of GBP 3.3 million in 2025 relating to the potential acquisition by BasePoint. Now on to customer growth.
It was very pleasing to see that 2025 saw the group return to meaningful customer number growth for the first time in over 10 years, and there is really good demand for both our core product set as well as our new products and distribution channels. Overall, we delivered a 4.7% increase in customer numbers to 1.729 million, with all three divisions delivering growth. Particular highlights in the year include Poland returning to growth, with 10,000 new customers added in the second half of the year. Romania, with its expanded product set, also adding 10,000 customers over the same period.
In Mexico, we added 46,000 customers in the second half, 24,000 of which came from our digital businesses, which continues to grow strongly, and 22,000 coming from Provident Mexico, which is now firmly back in growth mode following the disruption from the IT upgrade in the latter part of 2024 and early part of 2025. Let's look at lending growth. We delivered really good group lending growth of 12% at constant exchange rates in 2025. Provident Europe delivered 13% overall lending growth. In Poland, whilst we had a slower start to the year than we expected, lending grew by 20%, with the credit card offering continued to regain really good momentum as the year progressed.
Romania delivered equally strong growth of 18%, supported by the continued expansion of partnership and hybrid digital channels, both of which are delivering encouraging results. Hungary and Czech delivered solid growth of just over 4% combined, backing up the strong lending performances they achieved last year. Provident Mexico delivered 7% lending growth in the year. As expected, the growth rate accelerated in the second half of the year to 13% as the business recovered from the IT upgrade I just mentioned, as well as continuing with the geographic expansion with the opening of two new branches. IPF Digital continues to deliver very good growth in both customer numbers and lending, as demand for our fully remote credit solutions continues to rise. Year-on-year customer and lending growth were 16% and 13% respectively.
Mexico and Australia were again the best performers, delivering lending growth of 32% and 19% respectively. Mexico is now actually serving 130,000 customers, and that's up 40% from last year. We remain very excited about the growth prospects both in Mexico and Australia, and we're continuing to invest in both the brand and product proposition to maintain the growth momentum and capture the strong growth opportunities that we have in both of these markets. On to receivables. Our receivables have now surpassed GBP 1 billion and are at a level actually last seen in 2017. The improving momentum in lending growth is flowing nicely through to receivables growth, and we delivered 14% or GBP 130 million year-on-year growth on a constant currency basis.
Actually, the growth rate is a little lower than the ambitious target of GBP 150 million of receivables growth we set ourselves right at the start of the year, with the shortfall being shared between Provident Poland, Provident Mexico, and Mexico Digital. However, whilst we didn't achieve our target, it's really important to note that all three businesses have very good momentum and have still delivered good year-on-year growth. In Provident Europe, we delivered receivables growth of 16% to GBP 575 million. All four countries delivered good growth, with Romania being the standout performer with 22% growth. Poland's receivable book now stands at GBP 195 million, with growth of GBP 25 million in the second half, and higher-yielding credit cards now represent approximately 50% of the overall receivables book.
Czechia also delivered good receivables growth of 16%, and Hungary, which, as I'm sure you're aware, is our most highly penetrated market, also delivered really solid growth of 9%. In Provident Mexico, receivables showed good growth of 11% to GBP 191 million, with nearly GBP 25 million of that receivables growth added in the second half of the year. In IPF Digital, we delivered receivables growth of 12%, which reflects that consistent delivery of our digital strategy across all our markets. It won't surprise you that Mexico and Australia led the way, with strong receivables growth of 16% and 23% respectively. Our other markets in the Baltics, Poland, and the Czech Republic delivered combined growth of 7%. Turning now to the progress we're making against the core KPIs of revenue yield, impairment rate, and cost-income ratio.
Before I go into the individual metrics, consistent with the approach at the interims, we have set out our KPIs both on a fully consolidated group basis, as well as on a group basis, excluding Poland. This is due to the major impact which the ongoing transition in Poland has had on our KPIs and their comparison to our medium-term targets. The trends I'm gonna talk you through are in line with our guidance and expectations, and therefore, from our perspective, the key to achieving our medium-term targets is to continue to rescale our Polish business through increasing the distribution of the higher-yielding credit card proposition. Starting with revenue yield. In Provident Europe, the yield reduced by 1.7 percentage points to 44.8%. This was due to three factors.
Firstly, the flow-through of lower rate caps in Poland, albeit we expect the Polish yield to begin to recover as we continue to expand the credit card offering that I just mentioned. Secondly, we saw a slight moderation in yield in Hungary due to the reduction in the base rate linked interest cap. Thirdly, we also saw a reduction in the yield in Romania due to the introduction of the new total cost of credit cap in the fourth quarter of last year, which is now fully embedded into the receivables book. In Provident Mexico, we saw a reduction in the yield from 85.9% - 83.5%.
This is wholly due to the flow-through of the reduction in new customers we saw through September last year to March this year, as we focused on serving good quality existing customers rather than new customers during the IT upgrade. As I'm sure you're aware, new customers tend to be served with shorter duration, higher yielding products compared with our existing customers. In IPF Digital, the revenue yield was broadly stable at 42.8%, with the impacts of reductions in base rate linked interest rate caps in the Baltics and Australia, being offset by the growth in the receivables book in Mexico, which carries a higher yield. Overall, the group's revenue yield has reduced from 54.7%- 52.5% over the last 12 months.
However, if we exclude Poland, the revenue yield was 56%, which is at the bottom end of the group's target range of 56%-58%. Improving the revenue yield remains a key focus for the whole business. We expect the ongoing shift to high-yielding products through our credit cards in Poland and the growth in our Mexican businesses to help improve the revenue yield over the coming years. Despite some volatility in macroeconomic conditions in all of our markets, customer repayment behavior has remained really good, and the quality of our loan portfolio continues to be robust. Together with a strong debt sale market and a further GBP 8 million reduction in the group's cost of living provision, this has resulted in a 0.6 percentage points improvement in the impairment rate to 9%.
This result was achieved despite the impact of increased growth and the associated higher upfront IFRS 9 impairment charges. Excluding Poland again, which until the second half of this year, had seen a significant contraction in receivables, and therefore a very favorable impairment position, the group's impairment rate was 13.3% in 2025, and that's just below the group's target range of 14%-16%. We expect the overall group impairment rate to trend back up toward the target level over the next two years as we regrow Poland and continue to grow our receivables in Mexico, which carry a higher impairment rate, but also carry a higher revenue yield.
The strong repayment performance and further reduction in the cost of living provision has resulted in the impairment coverage provision, reducing from 32.9% last year to 31.1% at the end of December. The cost of living provision stands at just GBP 1 million and is not expected to be a feature of the group's results going forward. We continue to maintain a focus on efficiency and cost control, which resulted in cost growth of only 3.3% in the year, compared with receivables growth of nearly 14%. The group's cost-income ratio of 61.1% is actually little change from last year, mainly due to the reduction in revenue in Poland.
If we exclude the Polish businesses, the group's cost-income ratio was 56.2%, and that's modestly up from 55.7% last year, with the increase due to the reduction in revenue yield as well as the investment we've made in our growth initiatives. We remain heavily focused on growing the lending portfolio whilst maintaining tight discipline over the investments made in building scale and expanding our capabilities in order to improve the group's cost-income ratio to our target range of 49%-51% in the medium term. Moving on to the shareholder returns that we are delivering. Our pre-exceptional return on required equity was 14.9% in 2025, just below our target level of between 15% and 20%.
The reduction from 15.7% in 2024 is due to the investment in growth, both in respect of receivables and new growth initiatives, and is consistent with our guidance at last year-end and the interim results. We expect our returns to moderate further in 2026 as we continue to invest more heavily in growth before seeing returns begin to improve in 2027. The group's return on equity based on statutory earnings and actual equity was 10.7% in 2025, down from 12.6% last year. This is mainly due to the exceptional tax credit of GBP 17.4 million, which we took in 2024.
Our pre-exceptional EPS increased by 5.6% to GBP 26.3 , which is slightly higher rate of growth than the 4% growth in PBT, and that's due to fewer shares in issue following the completion of the share buyback in the second half of last year. The effective tax rate in 2025 is 35%, which is consistent with the rate achieved in 2024. It's actually lower than the 38% we used in the first half of the year, due to a reduction in U.K. losses. Finally, on EPS, our reported EPS reduced by 9.2% to GBP 24.8 in the year, and this is, again, mainly due to the exceptional tax credit in 2024 that I just mentioned.
The board has proposed a final dividend of GBP 0.09 per share, which represents 12.5% growth on last year. Together with the interim dividend of GBP 0.038 per share, this brings the full year dividend to GBP 0.128 per share, an increase of 12.3% compared with 2024. The dividend payout ratio of 49% is above our target of 40%. It is consistent with our stated desire to maintain a progressive dividend policy as we rescale the business and deliver consistent returns in our target range of between 15% and 20%. Before I hand you back to Gerard, I'd like you to talk through our strong funding and capital position, which underpins our growth ambitions.
At the end of December, we had total debt facilities of GBP 750 million, comprising GBP 483 million in bonds and GBP 267 million in bank funding, including GBP 55 million of new bank facilities raised in the year. Net borrowings at the end of the year total GBP 621 million, resulting in the group having funding headroom of GBP 129 million. In respect of debt capital markets, our credit ratings remain unchanged with both Fitch and Moody's, and they both continue to maintain a stable outlook for the group.
Our strong funding position enabled us to repay the residual 2020 EUR bonds early in the first half of the year. In the second half of the year, we took the opportunity to successfully secure SEK 1 billion of unsecured senior floating rate notes due in 2028. That's the equivalent of around GBP 80 million. These notes carry a floating interest rate of three-month STIBOR, plus a margin of 5.75%. Really encouragingly, our blending cost of funding has reduced from 13.3% - 12.2% in the year, benefiting from both lower interest rates, but also reduced hedging costs. Onto capital, our equity to receivables ratio stands at 51% at the end of the year. That's down from 54% last year.
The reduction in the ratio reflects the acceleration in receivable growth during 2025, partly offset by a foreign exchange gain of GBP 47 million taken to reserves, as the majority of our currencies have strengthened against sterling. Our year-end capital position supports the group's growth plans and our progressive dividend policy through to the point at which we are delivering our target returns and operating closer to our 40% equity to receivables target. We now expect this to be in 2028, following the additional GBP 5 million of investment we're making in the P&L each year. To sum up, we've delivered another great set of results in 2025. Credit quality remains robust, there's good growth momentum through the group, and we have a strong funding and capital position to support our plans.
On that note, I'll hand you back to Gerard to take you through the outlook. Thanks, Gerard.
Thank you, Gary. Okay, Gary's just given us a really detailed run-through of the performance of the business over the past year, and as you heard, things are good. Very, very solid. In terms of a wrap-up and outlook, what are we pleased with? Well, first of all, we see consistent demand across our markets from our customer segment, and we believe that we're gearing ourselves up in terms of products, distribution channels, price points, to serve those customers effectively as we go forward. We've got good momentum as we come into 2026. The balance sheet, as you've just heard, is in a strong position, and credit quality is very good. We continue to see that as we put more money into Mexico and Australia in particular, we're looking to grow those businesses over the next few years. That all feels very good.
What are the things that maybe we're not concerned about, but, yeah, thinking about? Well, first of all, it has to be CCD2, for all the reasons I outlined earlier. There is simply just a lot going on, and it's all going on at the same time, and we're not going to know for a number of weeks or possibly months exactly how this plays out. We've got a good track record, we just have to figure out how many conversations we can be engaged in at one time. The second thing is, similarly, the cost of running the business. I think we've done a fantastic job of managing inflation in our costs, but it's clear from the numbers that we talked about earlier, that the cost of technology for us has increased quite significantly.
Give or take, GBP 25 million in 2024, GBP 35 million in 2025, moving up to GBP 45 million, and then possibly GBP 50 million. All of that with very good reason. It just means that whilst the balance sheet can cope with it, we have the funding, we have the strength in the balance sheet, there is a drag on earnings as all of that gets amortized over time. You know, what we need to do then, is make sure that we bring that cost back down, and that the investment we've made delivers in terms of better service for customers and a bigger business. In total, we're in a good position. We have a solid business, but most important of all, we are fulfilling our purpose, and that is to build financial inclusion for those who are less well off than we are. That's it for now.
I think we've gone further than the 40, 45 minutes I promised you at the start, but hopefully it was worthwhile for those of you who are new to the business. With that now, we'll go to Rachel, who is going to, I think, hit Gary and myself, hopefully, with quite a lot of questions. Guys. Welcome, guys.
Morning.
Have we got some questions, Rach?
We do, yes. I'll start with the first one. We've got a question from one of our investors, Freddy. Highlighting the strong receivables performance, he wants to know, will this turn into a higher PBT in 2026? Can you give some guidance on this, please?
Can I have that one? Obviously, I can't give specific guidance. I guess there's probably three things to note there. In terms of receivables growth, yes, it was really good. Actually, as you probably just heard, we were a little bit below plan, actually. We set out to deliver GBP 150 million receivables growth in the year, we delivered about GBP 130 million. Now, you know, that was a little bit down. I guess in the year, the offset to that was better impairment performance, that probably mitigated the fact that we had a little bit less receivables. That's just on receivables specifically.
I guess in terms of what is consensus at the moment, if you looked into 2026 consensus before today, and that's before today, it was GBP 97 million PBT, and then I think it was about GBP 115 million PBT for 2027. How that will change, I can't say, but clearly what we've guided to today is extra investment in GBP 5 million pounds per year in each of those years. you know, that's probably as far as I can go in terms of guidance or expectations.
Okay. Thank you. Now we've got another investor, Doug. Given how much of your share register is now held by the ARB community, are you worried about what might happen if they dump the shares in the event that the vote fails on the potential offer?
Oh, okay. Well, the first thing to say is that we, as a board, are strongly supporting the offer, so that's out there in the public domain. We are cognizant of the change in the makeup of the share register. We do recognize that, I think, over 30% are now with ARBs, but I don't think it's for us to speculate as to what they would do. Our view is shareholders should probably support this offer at the new level. We think it's a really good offer and good value.
Great, thank you. Moving on to a question here on regulation. Is the financial effects of CCD2 already reflected in your outlook?
No, because, I guess, as you saw just a few minutes ago, what I put up was a whole menu of items, none of which are fixed.
Mm.
As I said, I'm hopeful that we will get sensible answers or regulation on all of those points.
We can't determine what the outcome is, so we can't put anything in there, is the short answer.
Okay, thank you. This one moves on to the fact that we mentioned the GBP 5 million of additional investment in growth impacting market expectations. However, given that you won't see the benefit of the cost of living provision releases going forward, are you significantly increasing CapEx, which you say will come through as much higher depreciation? Sorry, got that quite a little bit wrong. Are you expecting consensus to be revised down for these as well?
Okay. Again, as I mentioned, just shortly ago, clearly, a feature of 2024 and 2025, the profit before tax was the cost of living provision, which in 2024, we reduced it by GBP 7 million, and in 2025, it was GBP 8 million. If you want to strip those out, PBT was around GBP 78 million in 2024, and it was around GBP 80 million, excluding that, in 2025. You know, I guess those movements have always been built into what the market expects. In terms of the extra investment in CapEx, and it's right, I mean, we're putting through GBP 60 million more CapEx over 2024 to, sorry, 2025, 2026, and 2027. You know, GBP 60 million, that will lead to 10-plus more amortization per annum going forward.
Now, clearly, what we are looking at doing is scaling up the business. You know, that's the GBP 5 million P&L impact that we've talked about for the next two to three years. Increasing receivables growth, so we can absorb, obviously, the extra amortization that will come through. Now, clearly, as well as that, you know, the CapEx investment isn't just about growth, it's about, you know, a lot of foundational change, efficiency, et cetera, that we are looking to deliver over the next few years. So, you know, there's lots of hard work to do, a lot of hard work, and there's a lot of change going on in the business, but we wouldn't expect or we'd look to be mitigating, or getting benefit from those three.
Those, that capital expenditure, you know, when you look out in the, in the longer term.
Certainly a drag on the P&L.
Yeah, is to offset it.
Is to offset as much of that as we possibly can. I mean, the investments are very sensible for all the reasons we've talked about over the past hour. Our role now is to make sure that those investments pay us back.
Yeah.
Okay. We've got a question here from one investor, Lucy. The number of customers has been stable in the last three changes, small ups and downs. What is a number of customers you'd like to see and consider as achievable in the next three years or so?
We have a more medium to long-term target of two and a half million customers out there, and if you think about it, we're currently at 1.7 million, which is a good customer base for our infrastructure. Two and a half million is quite a sizable increase. The investments we're making are designed to deliver that. It's over quite a long period of time. The short answer, two and a half million would be our long-term target.
Yeah.
Great. That's all the questions that we've had so far this morning.
Oh, okay.
Thank you.
Thank you, Rach, and thank you, Gary. Well, just to wrap up then, you've heard us over the last hour talk about the business. We performed well in 2025. We have a very strong balance sheet. We have good prospects in 2026. We do have some headwinds. You know, I think the regulatory one is a particular concern, but we're just gonna have to deal with that. I am concerned about Mexico. We just have to see how that plays out. The portfolio quality is good. The drag from the investments is quite serious, but, you know, as I said, it's for Gary, and me, and the team to figure out how we effectively pay for all those things, and it doesn't drain the P&L. All in all, I think a good set of results.
I'd like to finish just by saying a huge thank you to all of my colleagues because this is a big business, it can get reasonably complex, and we're making it more complicated by adding new channels, and new products, and new services because we think that's what our customers want and need. That takes a fantastic amount of effort on the part of 5,500 colleagues and 16,000 customer representatives, who work for us every day of the year, trying to deliver good results for our customers. A huge thank you to every one of you out there. Thank you, guys.
Thank you.
With that, I'll close the webcast for now. Thank you very much.