Good morning. I'm Aldo Bisio, Chief Commercial Officer of Vodafone Group. Welcome to the third of our virtual investor briefing series for this year. In this briefing, we'll be looking into how we are continuously deepening our customer relationships through new services across our different geographies and customer segments. As you will see today, some of these digital services and capabilities are maturing, others are scaling fast, and others are earlier in their development. All of them contribute to strengthening the bond between customers and the Vodafone brand. I have the pleasure of talking you through how we are strengthening the relationships we have with our consumer customers by deploying and scaling shared digital platforms.
I will explain the suite of digital services we have developed for consumers that not only present a compelling opportunity in their own right, but importantly, have a significant impact on improving the loyalty of our customers in our core connectivity products. My colleague in the group executive committee and CEO of Vodacom, Shameel Joosub, will present the work his team have done to build the leading fintech platform in Africa today, and the exciting plans they have to extend their advantage. The Vodafone Business team of Vinod Kumar and Erik Brenneis will present a deeper dive into the IoT business, which is the leading IoT connectivity provider globally. As the team and I talk you through the materials, please also look out for the red play icon.
These are links to supporting case study videos where you will hear from more people on the team on a range of areas, such as our approach to always-on digital marketing, our AI assistant, TOBi, and the launch of our VodaPay Super App. Earlier this year in May, Nick outlined the next phase of our strategy: to become a new generation connectivity and digital services provider. In this briefing, we are focusing on the deep and trusted relationship we are building with our customers through having the best connectivity products and services, leading innovation in digital services, and through outstanding digital experiences. These three areas are all focused on consistent revenue growth in both Europe and Africa.
When supported by our group scale and expertise, we convert this revenue growth into mid-single-digit EBITDA growth, which underpins our overarching financial ambition, which is to improve our return on capital to at least our weighted average cost of capital. The relationships we have with our customers are the foundation of our financial performance and strategic ambition. Over the last three years, we have delivered on our promise to deepen the relationship with our customers, and we're now proudly number one or number two in net promoter score in 13 of our markets. Looking ahead, the needs of our customers continue to evolve, and this gives us an opportunity to further engage with our customers. Firstly, through our brand, which remains of paramount importance. We recently refreshed our positioning to reflect the work we have undertaken over the last couple of years on our purpose.
Secondly, we have made good progress on our multi-product strategy, but we can do significantly more to build out relationships further beyond individual connectivity to full household connectivity. Thirdly, we have developed an integrated suite of digital-first platforms to manage the end-to-end customer life cycle. These platforms are not only significantly more efficient than traditional channels, but most importantly, they are faster and easier to use for our customers. Lastly, we are creating adjacent digital services to complement our core connectivity offering, which I will turn to now. At our last virtual investor briefing in June, my colleague Johan discussed our technology plans and the work his team is doing to enable and support our product roadmap ambition. Connectivity undoubtedly remains core to everything we do across Vodafone. There are a series of additional growth opportunities that we are focused on.
I will focus on five key product areas for our consumers. Firstly, Vodafone TV. It is one of the largest television content distributors in Europe, with over 22 million customers across 11 markets. Secondly, we have all seen the dramatic changes to our working and personal lives and the increased importance of our homes with our digital lives powered by connectivity. Thirdly, whilst Vinod and the team will discuss our large IoT operation in Vodafone Business, I will talk you through our IoT offerings for the consumer market. The fourth area is device life cycle services, which is how we support customers from their initial device decision and purchase, through to the point they are looking to upgrade and recycle their products. Finally, we will look at the role of loyalty platforms in engaging customers further with Vodafone on our digital touchpoints.
As I mentioned, Shameel will cover our exciting plans for fintech in Africa in further details later on. I wanted to highlight here the scale of our business today and the size of the opportunity available to us. Since the launch of M-PESA as a money transfer service in 2007, we have built the clear leading fintech platform in Africa. We have almost 60 million financial services customers that transact over $25 billion every month. We have strong positions in each of Vodacom's markets and through Safaricom in Kenya. We also see great opportunities for our fintech platform in our leading connectivity business in Egypt. We have been recently awarded a license to build another connectivity business in Ethiopia, Africa's second largest market by population.
In addition to extending our geographical reach, we have a unique opportunity to build our presence further in fintech, insurance, e-commerce, and e-services. These areas have a total addressable market of well over $50 billion. The financial services business is also now of real scale and importance to Vodafone. It contributes $1.3 billion of revenue and 17% of their profit before tax. Earlier this year, in March, Vinod and his team introduced Vodafone Business to you. Around EUR 10 billion of our group service revenue is from our business customers. Of this, around EUR 900 million is from our IoT operation. We are the largest IoT connectivity provider globally, and we connect around 130 million devices.
Our scale in this area is essential, as it means we can disproportionately invest in technology platforms and end-to-end solutions while still delivering double-digit service revenue growth and a strong incremental return on capital. Our consistent focus on this emerging opportunity over the last decade has led us to being consistently recognized by Gartner as a leader in managed connectivity for the last seven years. You can also see from the chart the clear advantage we have built over our competitors for both the ability to execute and the completeness of our IoT vision. I hope this introduction to our digital services investors briefing has sparked your interest, and that you will now spend time with us to explore the content further. Just over three years ago, we began the first phase of our strategy to be a stronger connectivity provider.
A core part of the strategy was a systematic approach to deepen the relationships we have with our customers to ultimately deliver a more consistent commercial performance. Whilst we still have much more to do, we have made significant progress and are now proudly number one or number two in net promoter score in 13 of our markets. We have achieved this by being a multi-product company, from mobile to fixed to TV, and offering conversion propositions. By launching value brands. We have a separate case study video exploring our coordinated approach across Europe on value brands. By upgrading our base to unlimited data plans, and by becoming much more digital in all our customer interactions. These actions have had a direct impact on a series of measures. 23 million homes are now on our next-generation broadband infrastructure. 10 million customers have upgraded to unlimited data plans.
Almost 6 million customers have chosen our second brands, and over 40 million customers are active on My Vodafone. This deepened relationship has translated into a consistent reduction of mobile churn over the last three years and a consistent increase in Vodafone's group digital NPS. Whilst we have made good progress, we cannot stand still. We need to embrace some of the new and emerging customer trends. All of our customer research points to the importance of engaging customers in multi-product experiences on both mobile and fixed. The more they use different Vodafone products, the more satisfied they become, typically representing a 10-point increase in NPS. We can also see a clear difference in NPS for customers that trade up to our larger data allowance plans. Let me comment on network quality in particular.
For home broadband, this research by Analysys Mason points to a higher satisfaction as customers upgrade from DSL to next-generation broadband. It also highlights that fiber and cable technologies achieve the same levels of satisfaction. This is also our experience in Germany, where customers are not able to distinguish which technology they are using, but they can very well feel the experience difference as they upgrade out from DSL. The COVID pandemic has also accelerated some longer-term consumer trends, the need for value and simplicity in our core connectivity products. Our commercial strategy remains to be price competitive against our reference competitors, but also to look at value beyond pricing. Value is also about the quality of our networks being recognized. It is about the quality and simplicity of the experience that customers will receive and the breadth of services they can benefit from.
Second trend, the importance of purpose in driving loyalty. At Vodafone, we have seen a clear increase in NPS throughout the pandemic when customers have relied even more on our service and have seen our commitment to digitalizing society, ensuring that no one is left behind. Our Keeping the U.K. Connected program has resonated very well with customers and has been a key component of Vodafone regaining the number two spot in NPS in the U.K. after many years of being behind the pack. Customers have become more digital, and their expectation is simply for excellent digital experiences. While we aim for great digital-only journeys, we still need to leverage our assisted channels as half our customers are transitioning to multi-channel journeys. Finally, the importance of the home. With 49% of our customers having experienced working from home, the home is now an environment where connectivity is paramount.
On average, nine devices are connected per household, and some very digital households have over 20 devices connected. I believe Vodafone is very well-prepared to win from these longer-term trends. We have a fantastic brand, refreshed in 2021 with the launch of Together We Can, a purpose-led positioning. We have growth opportunities in offering fully converged connectivity. We have the industry's leading capabilities in digital channels to engage customers, and we are building a range of complementary digital services that will further create loyalty in our customer base. I will address the first three of these now and then cover digital services in part two of this virtual briefing. The Vodafone brand has evolved over time. Our brand's positioning, Together We Can, reflects our deep belief in a more meaningful role for technology in our digital society.
Recent proof points include the success of our partnership with DreamLab in using our network to help cancer and COVID research, and the announcement that Europe's largest digital connectivity network is now 100% green. I recommend you see how we are using this positioning in our latest TV commercial in Vodafone Germany, the green gigabit network. We have strong assets in both mobile and fixed connectivity networks. In mobile, our opportunity is to continue upgrading our base to unlimited data plans, which currently represent only a third of the addressable base. In home broadband, our opportunity is to upgrade customers from legacy DSL infrastructure to next-generation experiences. Another growth opportunity is to cross-sell to our mobile-only customers or fixed-only customers and increase customer loyalty. Vodafone is present in over 65 million households in Europe. This is tremendous scale.
In a large portion of these households, we still only sell 1 product. This represents a significant cross-selling opportunity. In Germany, with the integration of the KDG and Unitymedia cable assets, we are in a position to converge our customer base. To do so, we are replicating our experience from the Dutch market, where convergence is not about price discounting, but cross-benefits that customers value. For example, additional data or a higher speed. In Spain, a highly converged market, our Hogar Ilimitable proposition retails at EUR 100 per household, which is 5x a standalone mobile ARPU and achieves less than half of the market churn levels. I would now like to take more time to describe to you Vodafone's advanced capabilities to engage customers at scale in Europe. With more than 130 million European customers, our channel and base management strategy is highly digital and highly automated.
Our capabilities have been created around four core shared technology platforms, which are aligned to critical phases of the customer life cycle. We begin with an always-on and digital-first approach to find potential new customers. We are then optimizing our digital and traditional retail channels underpinned by a shared analytics platform and unified data ocean. Once someone has become a Vodafone customer, we are then increasingly automating our interactions with the customer through our AI-based assistant, TOBi. Finally, to ensure a longer-term and valuable relationship for both the customer and Vodafone, we are automating and standardizing our approach to customer base management to further reduce churn and extend customer life cycles. We have consistently deployed a marketing tech stack across Europe to optimize the efficiency of our marketing campaigns to prospect customers and existing customers.
Our technology, built in partnership with large tech brands, enable us to leverage our own and third-party data to have very efficient targeted campaigns and to move from mass marketing to very targeted real-time delivery of personalized messages. These tech capabilities put Vodafone in the top 1% of brands in terms of digital marketing capabilities. Having insourced all our digital marketing operations across Europe and using a single tech stack has accelerated the efficiency and effectiveness of our marketing spend. To help dive into this area in more detail, we have prepared a case study with our group marketing director, Nikos. We have over 340 million customers across our group, and we interact with them across a suite of channels from mobile apps, web, and assisted channels.
We are building shared group-wide technology platforms to ensure a consistent and simple experience for our customers while also improving both the efficiency and effectiveness for us. To put it simply, many customer journeys across Europe are the same: Purchasing a new mobile contract, topping up a SIM card, booking an appointment for a field technician. Instead of replicating development efforts and optimizing these customer journeys 15 x in every market, we are unifying these experiences. These standardized customer experiences across our channels are powered by a shared group-wide analytics platform, which is in turn built on a unified data ocean to run our data models. TOBi, our digital assistant, is our most visible execution of a single platform strategy.
Originally designed as a chatbot to respond to frequently asked questions, TOBi has developed with shared capabilities offering cognitive conversations on chat and voice across all our touch points, on My Vodafone, online, on WhatsApp, and in our call centers. Our vision is that 100% of our customers will engage with TOBi when contacting Vodafone. Today, we already process 30 million conversations per month, which makes TOBi the busiest AI-enabled digital assistant in Europe. The single architecture for TOBi is yet another example of the benefits of scale to reduce the cost of conversations, to also increase the data pool from which the AI can learn and improve the quality of its answers to customers. Originally focused to respond to customer queries or problems, TOBi is now expanding into active selling in Italy and Turkey.
This is another interesting area I could spend a lot more time on, so please take a few minutes to explore our supporting video case study. The last step in our digital-first approach to customer life cycle management is ensuring our customers want to stay with Vodafone as their initial contracts expire, and extending the number of products and services they buy. Behind all the channels and ways to contact customer is an advanced base management capability, offering always-on marketing. We pull together data of individual customers and of households, and let our real-time algorithms recommend the best possible action for each and every unique customer at any point in time. We now have over 200 data scientists who develop advanced models from churn management to new product recommendation. This proactive and digital-first approach of base customer management generates immediate and tangible value.
In Germany, we can attribute over 10% of our annual service revenue to our base management activities. Deepening our customer relationship is our main commercial priority in Europe. A loyal customer base is the foundation of economic value creation. Fixed-only or mobile-only customers present good incremental economics, with a high contribution margin, reducing commission intensity, and improving NPS. However, when that fixed-only or mobile-only customer becomes a converged customer, we can see an improvement in NPS, lower churn, and significant reductions in commission intensity. This all adds up to the lifetime value of that customer being at least 3x higher. When the customer then also takes on a digital service such as TV, security, or IoT, we see further improvements in NPS, commission intensity, and the value of that customer to us over time.
To deepen this customer relationship, we have built the right capabilities at scale, which helps us transition from an analog-only world to a highly digital engagement with our customers. This drives further productivity gains, as the cost of digital acquisitions and engagement is significantly lower than traditional ways of engagement. You can see the examples we have here in the U.K., where the proportion of customers buying exclusively through our digital channels is increasing, and in Italy, where over 60% of our customer interactions do not need to involve human assistance. It is these initiatives, plus many more, that are enabling us to transform our operating model, which translates to both significant reductions in operating expenditures and the systematic improvement in customer loyalty I have spoken about. Thank you for taking the time to watch this first part of our digital services investor briefing.
Please join me in the next section where I will discuss our plans and progress in developing complementary digital services for our connectivity customers.
Hi, I'm Tanja Reineke. I'm Vodafone's Global Head of Marketing. Today, I will speak to you about our second brand strategy and approach. Why have more than one brand in the first place? Well, everyone knows the main Vodafone brand. It's big, bold, it's red, and it stands for premium and convergence. It's exactly that premium positioning, alongside with our very large customer base, that makes it hard for us to react to changes in the lower segment of the market. This is where second brands come in. We have three principles for launching a second brand. First of all, competing in the low value of the market while not diluting the Vodafone brand. Second, to defend against a market disruptor. Third, to improve our performance in a specific segment, mainly the youth segment.
This lack of customer base in that specific space, plus the ability that we can do everything digital first, enables us to move at speed. We get our fair share of the market, but we do so rationally, as we don't want to lead the market down. These value customers want simpler propositions. They worry less about connected devices, exotic roaming destinations, or complex convergence propositions. We manage everything digital first, and that allows for a much lower cost to serve. This works particularly well as Vodafone's leading in digital. Let's hand over to Loly to talk to us about the Spanish market context in which we launched a second brand, Lowi.
Hello, I'm Loly Marín. I'm Lowi Director in Vodafone Spain. Spain is a complex telco market with intense and fragmented competition, with upwards of 20 brands competing in the value segment, with most offering mobile and convergence. This level of competitive intensity is unique in Europe. The traditional high-end maiden brands are focused on quality, technology, retail presence, content, devices, and added services. Whereas the new entrants and value brands focus mainly on price. This is why in 2014, we launched our first second brand, Lowi. Lowi is positioned as a simple and trustworthy brand with a value for money proposition, focused on the value-seeking segment. There is also no commitment, as these customers appreciate freedom, but we give our customers very good reasons to stay with us. We make it simple for them through Mi Lowi app as the core touch point. We are simple and transparent.
In this sense, all customers automatically get the benefits a new customer receives, and we tactically use promotions to encourage loyalty. For example, our summer promo regularly delights existing and new customers with extra gigas. Lowi is digital-first. Our obsession is to build consistent and easy journeys in the web and app for customers. There is nothing more powerful than user experience and recommendation, and in this category, our community is the key asset. 15% of our gross additions are driven by recommendations. Second brand enable us to be a lot faster. When a competitor moves in the market, it takes us on average just 48 hours to respond, driven by a flexible pricing architecture. They understand we are fast, and we don't just sit back and lose market share. Lowi and Vodafone reach two discrete customer segments.
The Vodafone main brand, represented by the color red, stands for quality, reliability, and superior service, characteristics important to the premium segment of the market, while Lowi is clearly positioned to communicate best price, simplicity, and transparency, characteristics important to the digital-savvy, low-value segment. Don't just take my word for it. Here is what our customers have to say.
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As you can see, our brand Lowi has been a success and allowed us to defend market share. We now have second brands live in six markets, and we've built a clear operating model that we can lift and shift from one market to the next by replicating marketing approaches, by replicating digital capabilities that we've built, such as chatbots and apps. Here are some of our main second brands, ho. Mobile in Italy, SIMon in Germany, just to name a few. They have all been designed with a specific target segment in mind, being great value, digital first, and very simple. To recap, second brands allow us to serve all segments and to get a fair share in those segments that we're after in a rational manner.
Second brands come with a different cost structure because all of the offerings are simpler and digital. That way, we get to lower unitary economics. Last but not least, we can be really quick. We can launch and adapt second brands, so we can be even faster in the market with our second brands.
[Presentation]
Hello and welcome everyone. My name is Nikos, and in this short video, I will take you through our digital transformation journey in the marketing, media, and advertising space. Let me start with some context and consumer insights that inform our strategy and plans. There are four big forces and trends that are exploding, especially post-pandemic, because of smart device penetration and internet usage liberation, both on mobile and fixed. The first one is around customers generating loads of personal data that brands can use to do better, more targeted marketing. Traditional marketing organizations using layers of agencies struggle to collect, consolidate, and utilize all those data in a holistic way. They rely on third-party data and agency-operated digital channels. The second trend is about traditional macro segmentation breaking up as consumers expect real personalized treatment from brands.
Traditional marketing has no way to go down to the segment of one. The third one is about content, context, and relevance. Consumers today are bombarded with an average of 5,000 messages per day. Human attention span is reducing. The fourth one is about channels and journeys blending. They are not linear anymore. Some interesting data points here is that 50% of consumers will start in one channel and will switch to another, while 85% will be browsing in stores while checking reviews and prices on digital. Traditional marketing organizations with less control on channels, journeys, and lack of data will struggle to adapt. Let me now explain why Vodafone is uniquely positioned to respond to those insights and trends and create competitive advantage in the marketing space.
We have a unique advantage with our global footprint and reach that gives us a huge wealth of scaled first-party customer data. Hundreds of millions of customers and prospect profiles, behaviors, and trends, with an average of about 150 data points per profile, are collected from all our campaigns around the world. We also have a direct and close one-to-one relationship with our customers, averaging a personal contact per customer every three days. Three to four billion personalized messages are sent per year across our one-to-one channels, the app, the web, SMS, and social. These messages are produced real-time by our globally designed and deployed machine learning, artificial intelligence algorithms, and big data models. These models are constantly trained to produce highly effective, personalized experiences.
Our centrally designed marketing and advertising technology has capabilities to personalize content real time, run A/B testing using creative assets from across our markets, and optimize at scale, also taking a lot of contextual factors into account, like location, customer mood, weather, et cetera. Finally, we have control distribution channels. We have 70% control of purchase journeys and channels and 100% control of in-life journeys and channels. We design, optimize digital journeys and assets globally. We deploy with adaptations across our geographies. This created the appetite and the ambition for Vodafone to lead the telco industry and beyond in transforming marketing from traditional to a fully automated global digital platform, deliver revenues and cost benefits, as well as competitive edge versus other telcos. This transformation started three, four years ago. It was based on three key pillars and is now completed in all our markets since summer 2020.
The first pillar is around tech. Since 2017, 2018, we decided to break away from agencies, take direct ownership, and implement in all our markets a proprietary Vodafone marketing and advertising technology. These are globally selected and Vodafone-customized products from the best MarTech, AdTech partners integrated in a unique Vodafone blueprint that we call the Martini Glass. Billions of data points a day flowing seamlessly in our big data lakes hosted on the cloud. Those data are used to feed our in-house machine learning and artificial intelligence models, informing in real time all our campaigns and channels, touchpoints on prospects and existing customers. Adobe is the biggest and most strategic partner in designing and optimizing our MarTech and AdTech. Let's hear from Paul how Adobe sees Vodafone in the marketing and advertising technology space.
Over 10 years ago, Vodafone came to Adobe to help design and create and deliver marketing technology that drives relevance, personalization, and creativity at scale and at speed. Vodafone is truly a pioneer in what they do. What truly sets them apart is how creativity is informed by a deep understanding of the needs of their customers. Ours is a unique partnership where nothing is off the table. Our partnership goes beyond the pure supply of software as we co-create and we co-generate ideas around what will deliver amazing digital experiences for Vodafone's customers. Using Adobe Marketing Cloud, Vodafone taps into data to see what customers are doing and what they're responding to, and then creates seamless digital experiences across every digital touch point.
With millions and millions of customers operating across 21 different markets, Adobe Software has given Vodafone the ability to adapt campaigns while they're live and to modify that content or change the product's positioning to suit a different audience. That has been transformational for the Vodafone business. It's enabled a faster route to market. It's enabled mature usage adoption across all the different scenes. Being free from that outdated technology and those lengthy processes, it means that Vodafone can roll out engaging real-time experiences like countdown offers and targeted deals based on customer behavior. Our relationship with Vodafone has also meant that it's not just about the software. Vodafone works with Adobe on our roadmap, an active participant in our customer advisory board, which means that Vodafone gets access to early product innovations. Crucially, this has meant that Vodafone is leading the way at delivering scale at speed.
Vodafone has always been bold in their thinking and quick to adapt to the changing marketplace and technology, putting them at the forefront of the marketing technology space. This need to evolve and adapt has never been more important to brands than it is today. We have gone from living in a world that has digital in it to truly a digital-first world. Vodafone should be very proud of its sophisticated approach to digital marketing. It's flexible, it's responsive, it's fit for today's age, and we are truly proud to be a partner.
Second pillar is around skills. Starting 2019 and following the insourcing of tech, we also took in-house and away from agencies the operations of our marketing and advertising technology. By summer 2020, we hired 250 highly skilled digital media professionals and trained 1,200 digital marketeers on analytics, targeting, and marketing automation. Those 1,500 colleagues are now the global digital marketing community operating and constantly optimizing our campaigns across search, social, and programmatic. Our new media agency, Dentsu, was a key partner in this transformation and keeps managing our traditional media buying needs, delivering global economies of scale. Let's hear from Peter how Dentsu sees Vodafone.
Rarely do businesses have such a clear vision for media, data, and tech of where they are on their journey and where they want to go. We often see clients focusing their transformation on either a specific channel, market, or brand in their portfolio. Rarely do we see companies with a rounded global vision and plan who've also consistently delivered on it. Dentsu has the strongest digital profile of all the agency groups, but even so, delivering with flexibility and speed at the scale that you are asking for inspired our entire network and, to be honest, has supported the acceleration of our own transformation. What you have done is a phenomenal achievement and sets a new standard in telco. Congratulations on that performance, and we look forward to continuing to partner with you on this journey.
The third pillar is global marketing partnerships. Leveraging our global scale and the in-sourced digital marketing operations, Vodafone is the only operator that has direct media buying contracts with all the global digital marketing brands like Google, Facebook, Amazon, TikTok, et cetera. This is giving us an additional unique advantage to be first and in the forefront of all new innovations, tools, and capabilities released by our global marketing partners. We have joint business plans focusing on constantly testing, learning, and adapting our data-driven marketing decisions ahead of competitors, as well as continue improving by benchmarking ourselves with the best digital brands beyond the telco industry. Let's hear from Matt how Google sees Vodafone in the digital marketing space.
Thank you for the partnership and the progress we're making together, in enabling the sort of progress in digital maturity, whether it be looking at omni-channel retailing, driving store footfall, in Germany and the Netherlands, some great examples there. Whether it be on automation in Italy and Greece, getting that stuff live so that teams can really focus on the strategy and the machine can focus on the execution. We're seeing strong results as the world's changing fast from using automation to help marketing. Also measurement, which is making progress in sophistication everywhere. Really important to understand what's working and how could we refine things together. Looking forward to working with you, to achieve that across the region. Thank you.
Let's hear from Nicola how Facebook sees Vodafone in the digital marketing space.
As one of our key partners, it's been absolutely fantastic to be able to work so closely with you. Your desire to take your data and move it with the Facebook data, bring it together, really will deliver smart communications to your customers. Now, delivering data-driven targeting and automation and using first-class measurement and attribution, well, that is just the gold standard of partnership. I'm thrilled to see how our teams have been working together all over the world. Now, bringing your biddable teams in-house, well, that was just a game changer and giving you a real competitive advantage. I think together, it's created a seismic shift to allow us to work more closely together, to be able to plan, to test, to be able to adapt your marketing. We do it quickly and at speed, and I'm happy to say with very little friction.
I'm looking forward to us continuing to strengthen our partnership together, to exploring new opportunities, and to continue to build on the fantastic success that we already have together.
This was a big transformation that has changed Vodafone, and it has already delivered EUR 30 million-EUR 40 million of cost synergies per year and a 20%-30% improvement in conversion rates, helping to drive top-line growth. The journey continues with three upcoming transformations in the next 12-18 months. The first one is around insourcing, automating, and optimizing digital creative assets with the use of Adobe Marketing Cloud capabilities at global level. The second one is evolving our segmentation strategy to understand and effectively personalize propositions, offers, and communication at a household level and beyond connectivity to entertainment and new digital products and services. The third one is establishing a culture of constant experimentation by enabling thousands of live experiments in our digital marketing platforms, the results of which will be used by all markets to constantly optimize marketing decisions and improve revenues.
We estimate that those three initiatives above have the potential to deliver significant service revenues benefits, media efficiencies, and another 25% reduction on our cost per acquisition, while continuing to improve our marketing competitiveness and position Vodafone in the tech space along other big tech brands. Thank you very much, and see you all next time with great stories and insights from marketing at Digital Vodafone.
Thank you for introducing yourself, TOBi. TOBi is a key driver of our digital-first strategy, providing our customers with service 24/7 through a channel of their choice and in a personalized way. Improving TOBi means not only do we respond to our customers faster and with much more consistency, but at the same time we are saving costs. TOBi is responsible for handling around 30 million conversations a month, and 67% of those he resolves completely by himself. That's over 200 million conversations a year. He is our busiest agent and truly world-class. Today, TOBi is live in 15 markets. What he offers varies from simple FAQ-style responses to really advanced functionality.
In Vodafone Turkey, TOBi has been handling customer inquiries for now two years and have developed some advanced capabilities for our chat interactions, whether they may be on the Vodafone website, My Vodafone app, or WhatsApp. He can deal with all the usual queries, such as billing and account questions, but he is also highly proactive. In the digital experiences, TOBi impresses his customers by providing the information they need with images, interactive cards, not just by text. Because TOBi is integrated with our other systems, he can predict intention and be proactive in anticipating needs such as potential upgrades, network issues, and new sales opportunities, which we launched earlier this year. Overall, TOBi handles around six million conversations per month with strong customer sentiments of over 50 points, even stronger than our human teams. We're really excited to see what the future will hold for TOBi.
It's great to see what TOBi has achieved. This year one of our big focuses is improving TOBi in the voice channel. Let's hear an example from TOBi in Italy.
[Presentation]
Developing TOBi in the voice channel depends on new components in our technology platform, and our ambition is to rapidly evolve TOBi across all of our markets. Let's hear from one of our platform experts.
Now you have seen the advanced capabilities that TOBi can offer to our customers. Driven by our technology team, we're standardizing such capabilities across the group as we continue to integrate all markets into a single, centralized, cloud-based global TOBi platform for all chat and voice interactions. This means all relevant local and external systems will be plugged into our global platform to enable our teams of bot designers to apply the latest advancements in conversational AI from the top global technology partners to improve customer journeys once centrally. One great example of this is our integrated speech recognition and speech synthesis services, which gives TOBi its unique and personalized voice in each market across languages from English to Hungarian. These partner services were integrated into our central TOBi platform once and then easily deployed to each of our markets.
A leading feature enabled by our uniquely flexible platform is our integration with cognitive translation services. When a customer in a market such as Albania asks a query in their local language, it is translated into English in real time so our TOBi model can understand it, and then TOBi's response is translated back into the respective language. This all happens in real time, ensuring the customer conversation is fluid. This is an example of how we enable support for markets where language support is not offered by vendors off the shelf. What does this all mean? This means we're recognized as a world leader in the deployment of conversational AI.
To recap, TOBi handles 30 million customer interactions a month today, including some really advanced capabilities, solving complex customer issues in some of our markets. We are working to standardize our TOBi experience across all markets, leveraging our central platform, driving scale, and accelerating our ability to continuously improve. Through his connection to big data, TOBi will be more intuitive and proactive. He will predict intentions and alter his conversations accordingly. He will be the agent of choice for our customers. This will enable us to increase the scope of TOBi. We hope to be handling 100% of inbound conversations in the future, freeing up our agents to focus on really complex issues or sales. With TOBi, we will also make buying products even easier.
Through the credibility and trust that we are building in him today as a service agent, he will deliver over one million sales in the next 12 months. We want TOBi everywhere, always available, fast, simple, personalized.
Welcome back, everyone. In this second part of our briefing, we shall share with you growth opportunities beyond connectivity in Europe. I'll take you through four areas. First, the compelling opportunities we have. Second, the capabilities we have to deliver on these opportunities. Third, a deeper look at the services themselves. Fourth, the economic model that drives these opportunities. It's important to set out early on here that whilst these digital services opportunities have attractive models in isolation, the real value is the impact they can have on the core connectivity business through lower churn and lower commission intensity. My colleague, Johan Wibergh, first presented this slide at our last investor briefing in June, where he was discussing the operating model transformation that we are conducting in order to deliver on these commercial opportunities.
My key area of focus is to deepen the customer relationships in Europe within our consumer segment by selectively expanding into adjacent markets on top of connectivity. We have identified five key portfolios of services which we bring to customers and which are currently in different stages of development. TV content, home services, consumer IoT, device lifecycle services, and loyalty platforms. The total addressable markets of these five digital services are all large and are all growing, albeit at different levels, closely correlated to the maturity of each market. Vodafone's right to play and right to win in these services is based on our customer reach in-market and across Europe. For example, in TV, where we already have over 22 million customers. It's based on our expertise that is necessary in the technology side in particular.
For example, it is very relevant in the case of the home and consumer IoT portfolios. It is based on our scale that supports better cross-market economics, particularly in the case of device insurance and loyalty. To successfully capture these opportunities, we balance in-house product management and platform development with strategic partnerships. Our product management teams have end-to-end accountability for developing innovative products that will make a real difference to our customers' lives and their relationship with Vodafone. Strategic partnerships are an essential element of our overarching group strategy to ensure we can deliver the very latest in content, in technology, and solutions to our customers, but at an investable economic level. This is particularly important for Vodafone TV, which I will discuss shortly. These shared and scaled capabilities at a pan-European and pan-African level are complemented by our deep reach into each local market.
It is this matrix of shared capabilities and local expertise that is the core of our new operating model. We have deep functional expert whose responsibility is to build pan-European capabilities, products, and platforms. This scale approach enables us to attract specialized talent for these new digital services. We complement that by local operational and marketing teams that bring these products to life for our customers, taking into account local customer needs and competitive dynamics. They remain in charge of the go-to-market of our services and the integration in the local marketing mix. We are already a significant player in each of these portfolios. Today, over 20 million unique customers are already engaged in any one of our suite of products. Of course, many of these customers are highly engaged, so are already subscribing to more than one of our digital services.
Our aim is to engage over 50 million monthly active users in these digital services in order to deliver mid- to high single-digit growth in service revenue. Given the relatively low capital burden in our strategic partnership model, these platforms can contribute positive double-digit return on capital as we scale and apply a consistent operating model. Remember back to my central messages of section one earlier. These digital services also have a significant impact on customer loyalty, leading to lower rates of churn and lower commission intensity. Across Europe, we serve over 22 million customers with our Vodafone TV platform.
This scale and access to customers is a key strength in our relationship with content partners, as they contract only once with Vodafone and technically integrate once with our Vodafone TV platform to access all of Europe. As an example, we are launching Facebook Watch to our installed customer base across many markets in one go. This scale also enables us to develop cost-effective in-home devices with leading brands like Devialet, Bang & Olufsen, or Amazon. Vodafone TV is an important asset in our drive for convergence. It increases base loyalty and drives differentiation versus connectivity-only players. Our case study on Vodafone Portugal at the end of this section exemplifies how to be successful in TV without the heavy financial burden of exclusive sports rights.
We also have a more detailed case study video I hope you can take the time to watch, particularly for those of you in the U.K. or in the U.S. who don't have access to our platform as a customer. We are present in over 23 million homes with our next-generation network broadband, and we are expanding our home services to deliver the best possible and most secure Wi-Fi in the home. Five out of 10 customers are not able to access Wi-Fi in every room. Our unbreakable internet promise relies on Super Wi-Fi, a set of physical extenders and cloud-based software to bring Wi-Fi wherever you are in your home. Eight out of 10 customers are worried about their data privacy and security. Secure Net is a network-based capability to filter incoming traffic from viruses and malware.
Nine out of 10 customers have tried to find their own little fixes when facing home connectivity issues. With home tech experts, we offer a paid-for service to provide assistance at home, over the phone, or in person to leave no one unattended. These new technologies also provide Vodafone deep insights in how individual households use their home broadband. Our service, Wi-Fi Doctor, in Italy, for example, automatically diagnoses the actual Wi-Fi experience of a customer and optimizes both the Wi-Fi and network settings to individual usage. In Italy alone, we perform 16 million auto-optimizations every day. The world of consumer IoT is rapidly growing as consumers discover new use cases on how connected devices can simplify their lives. Our Neo and Curve product ranges are designed specifically to take customers on board this journey of discovery.
We have another case study video for you, which details the design journey and customer use for our latest Curve devices for cyclists. Alongside our range of connected devices, we provide a one-stop shop for third-party device connectivity and distribution. Watch manufacturers in particular, but smart speakers or other hardware can integrate once with Vodafone's network capabilities and immediately benefit from pan-European reach. The recent Samsung Watch, for example, is powered by eSIM and uses our OneNumber feature, where customers' smartphone number is replicated on the watch to take calls and browse the internet. With 10.5 million devices shipped last year, Vodafone is a leading distributor of handsets in Europe. Whilst traditionally, we have simply distributed devices, we can now play a larger role in the life cycle of devices through a range of complementary services.
At the time of purchase, we now offer financing, old device trade-in, and new device insurance capabilities. With repair and diagnostic services, we can extend the life cycle of devices, offering refurbished devices to our customer base. These services require a unique blend of scale technologies and a deep integration in the sales flow of our connectivity services. Vodafone UK's EVO proposition brings these capabilities to life for customers, who can now flexibly upgrade their smartphone over a one to 36-month installment and trade in their old devices, thus lowering their monthly bill over a longer period of time. This is all entirely customizable for each and every individual customer. For Vodafone, this results in more attractive acquisition offers with lower hardware investments, while also extending customer contract periods and the overall customer lifetime with us. Our last focus area for adjacent digital services is our loyalty platforms.
A great example of a digital service that leads to higher customer satisfaction, to more engagement, and more spent with Vodafone over a sustained period. We have loyalty capabilities in most of our markets, where we engage customers in gamified experiences for free benefits, which strengthen our value perception. For example, the Scratch to win program in Ireland or Hediye Çarkı in Turkey. We are now expanding to rewards programs, where we offer third-party brands the opportunity to access our customer base by offering discounts and special offers. This is the case with Vodafone U.K.'s VeryMe service, or in Italy, where we have started monetizing this service through a premium version called Happy Black. Vodafone Turkey has been leading the way in the evolution of our in-house platform. We are now going one step further and enabling third-party brands to access our customer base through a marketplace capability.
Vodafone is credible in these services because of our large reach in Europe. 41 million active customers on My Vodafone and our big data models that are able to recommend relevant and valued products to our customers. We have chosen these new digital services very precisely to respond to customer pain points, to leverage our strength and credibility versus new entrants, and to target mid-term returns with low capital requirements. Each digital service has attractive standalone economics. Our mature Vodafone TV business is growing at low single-digit levels, but has low incremental capital needs, delivering high incremental returns. By contrast, our nascent consumer IoT business is growing at significantly faster rate, but given our end-to-end strategy, it does have relatively higher capital investment needs, leading to slightly lower but still good incremental returns.
Beyond their value as standalone businesses, they all contribute to our main commercial objective, to deepen customer engagement and thus positively impact core connectivity loyalty. Thank you again for your time in getting to know more about the importance of digital services and the impact this can and does have on our core connectivity business. Please also join my colleagues, Shameel and Vinod, as they explain their opportunities and plans for fintech in Africa and IoT for our business customers. I then look forward to answering questions from our equity research analysts in a live video Q&A session.
Hello, I'm Luís Lopes, Director of Fixed Entertainment here at Vodafone. Consumers love TV, spending more than 4.5 hours per person per day in 2020, and this is expected to continue to grow. Vodafone is already providing TV services to over 22 million households across 11 markets, making us one of the largest operators in Europe. Our ambition is to transform this business that still depends to a large extent on traditional linear pay TV viewing to become the entertainment platform of choice for our consumers. To achieve this vision, we have a strategy driven by two key pillars: delivering the best experience on a new generation cloud-based TV platform and offering the widest and best content choice. Proliferation of over-the-top content, video services, and the shift from linear to non-linear TV creates an opportunity to solve consumer pain points around content discovery and aggregation.
To address these pain points, together with our technology partners, we've been developing a new generation TV product. We called it Vodafone TV. It combines OTT over-the-top content with traditional linear TV, creating personalized experiences, simplifying content search, and managing multiple subscriptions of OTT services. VTV works not only on our bespoke hardware but also on many smart TVs, Fire TV, Apple TV, internet browsers, and of course, it has a companion mobile app for when you're on the go. With our hardware, we went further and also wanted to create the strongest viewing experience. Combining in one box 4K native quality video, Dolby Atmos sound quality, adding amazing voice search capability, this becomes the center of home entertainment. Our second strategic pillar is ensuring that best content is available to our customers.
Our European and African scale enable us to have strong, meaningful relationships with the full breadth and depth of content partners in the market. This spans from curation of local TV channels through the deep integration of major streaming players like Amazon Prime, Netflix, Apple TV, Disney+, and Discovery. This content can be accessed directly via our platform today. Don't just hear from me. This is what they have to say.
Hello, I'm Kasia Kieli, the President and Managing Director of Discovery EMEA. We have been in partnership with Vodafone for many years. Earlier this year, in January, we have signed a new deal, long-term multi-platform partnership that will see bringing our content, both our best-in-class linear channels as well as our unique streaming service, Discovery+, to all Vodafone subscribers across Europe. We will be available in TV, broadband, and mobile platforms. It is a truly exciting partnership. By integrating our app into the Vodafone ecosystem, consumer will have a very easy access to best-in-class content. Vodafone Reach will allow us to further grow Discovery+ in Europe. I would like to thank Vodafone team.
It is a very complex and multilayer partnership, and we saw fantastic collaboration and a true spirit of partnership with getting this deal done, the same as we have felt when we were launching into our first market, the U.K. Thank you very much.
We really appreciate the feedback from such a valued partner. Importantly, being a one-stop shop for entertainment and content aggregation also empowers other business opportunities. Through the data we are collecting, we can address targeted advertising, which we've just started exploring. The European market, where our initial focus will be, is estimated to be worth EUR 46 billion in a decade, with 20%-35% of linear TV advertising shifting to targeted advertising. In summary, we continue to believe in the future of TV and entertainment businesses, and we are very well positioned to lead the transformation from the traditional linear pay TV to entertainment everywhere and anytime.
I'm delighted to welcome you to this product launch. Our vision is to improve everyday living through the magic of Smart Tech, and we've built a world-class in-house team of experts across design, product, and customer insight to help us do so. Over the last year, we've pioneered a range of smart devices, combining leading industrial design with global connectivity to help people connect to what matters most. Today, I'm excited to introduce the third pioneering product in our Designed & Connected by Vodafone range, Curve Bike light & GPS tracker. The heartbeat of everything we do is understanding our customers and their needs. We've spent hundreds of hours talking to commuter cyclists across Europe. We know that they worry about their safety on the roads and bike theft, which is why we've built a device that helps them stay safe and ride with confidence.
With record numbers of us hitting the roads on our bikes and looking for new and more sustainable ways to commute, it's the right time to launch Curve Bike light & GPS tracker. Here it is.
One, take one.
Best place to start. I'm Tom Guy, Chief Product Officer for Vodafone Smart Tech. I'm here to show you the latest product from the Designed & Connected by Vodafone range, the Curve Bike Light & GPS Tracker. To get started, there's a quick start guide, and all of the instructions are also in the Vodafone Smart app. There's three main parts to the product. There's the bracket that goes onto the bike seat post, the brains of the product, which is a GPS tracker and siren, and the intelligent bike light. When attached to the siren and tracker, it automatically turns on. The first thing to do is select the correct rubber adapter to make sure that it fits snugly, and there's five in the box to choose from. Now let's install it on a bike.
You find the rubber adapter that fits onto the seat post. You put that into the bracket, put that around the seat post. You put the tracker connected to the bracket. There's a special screwdriver in the box where you just tighten the screw to the seat post about halfway down. The next step is just to attach the light to the tracker itself. You just line up the two lines, fix it on with a quarter turn. The light will come back on to the last mode that you put it on. With the light on, there's a button that you can control the modes of the light. You've got solid, flash, and pulse. There's also a smart brake light that when you slow down, the light intensifies, showing drivers behind that you're braking.
We've included ultra-bright lights on the side to increase the field of view so you can be seen from anywhere. It's really easy to charge it. You just take the light off, you charge the light, and you'll see a USB-C, and leave the rest of the product on the bike. When you put it back on in the morning, that charges the rest of the unit. To activate security mode, you just twist the light off, and as you can see, the red warning light comes on. If anyone starts to tamper with your bike, the siren will go off. Now it's all installed, the product really comes to life in the Vodafone Smart App. Curve Bike light & GPS tracker has been designed by cyclists for cyclists.
It's packed with the features that commuter and weekend cyclists told us they most wanted to see. Just open the Vodafone Smart App to view your bike's location. Curve Bike tracker is connected to Vodafone's global network via the built-in Smart SIM. If you can't remember exactly where you've parked your bike, use the app to make the device play a sound. If someone tampers with your bike, you'll get an alert to your phone, and the siren will sound as a deterrent. You can receive alerts via push, text, and even an automated call. You are in complete control. You can turn the security mode on and off from the app. Curve Bike light & GPS tracker comes with a built-in impact detection, meaning friends and family are notified when you might need help.
They'll get an alert or automated call to let them know where you are and can view your location. Ride Insights automatically tracks every ride and are shown in your app, so you can look back over when you're finished. With Bike Passport, you can store important information about your bike, like the make, model, and add photos to make it easier to identify if you need to. That's the end of the Curve Bike light & GPS tracker demo. I hope you enjoy it as much as we enjoyed designing it.
Hello, everyone. It gives me great pleasure to share with you today some of the new and exciting products that we have launched at Vodafone Financial Services, both for our consumer and small merchant segments. You will see that our focus this year has been on digital first, mobile first. To keep the presentation interesting, I've included a few user videos so that you're all able to get a real feel of what the product experience is for our customers. I'll start with VodaPay, our lifestyle companion app. This will be the first super app of its kind on the African continent, launched on the back of the world-renowned Alipay technology.
The app will service consumers as well as merchants and is really a massive ecosystem from which users will be able to transact, pay, lend, save, invest, insure, as well as gain access to an entire e-commerce experience where they can purchase from a host of online merchants who will come onto the app as mini programs or mini applications. More can be seen in this pre-launch video. Really slick and very cool. Another slick and cool product is our Voucher Advance product that we have launched this year. It is essentially a buy now, pay later product, which has been built on the back of our very successful Airtime Advance product in South Africa, where currently 45% of all prepaid airtime goes through Airtime Advance with a bad debt rate of less than 0.5%.
Utilizing the same credit algorithm, we have now launched Voucher Advance, which allows us to advance other products and services besides airtime at a zero interest charge to customers. This next video will take you through the user journey, which is currently live in the My Vodacom app. Users click on vouchers, review some educational content on the product telling them what it is, and then get started. They first see what the credit limit is that they have been pre-vetted for before selecting the type of product that they are interested in purchasing or advancing. In this case, our customer is interested in a food product from Nando's. She selects the voucher, selects whether she would like to purchase the voucher at a discount or take the voucher on credit. Selects the repayment period, which in this case is 14 days.
Accepts the terms and conditions, which allows her to proceed. Reviews the summary page, and if she's happy, concludes the transaction. The voucher code is then sent to the customer's mobile phone for redemption in store. This next video demonstrates how easy it is for a merchant to apply for a VodaPay point-of-sale device from Vodafone in a fully digital experience. All KYC and FICA requirements are catered for in the user journey using the best technology. Finally, in this last user journey, we will demonstrate how easy it is for a merchant to track, manage, order, and grow her business all through the VodaPay Super App. The app allows the merchant to easily transition between their personal and business accounts, all in one seamless experience.
The merchant can also access third-party mini apps, example, Xero in this case, which is an accounting software program which the merchant can download if they choose. Users are able to view their daily sales and payment transactions, both in the online as well as the physical store environment through the physical point of sale device, which is also provided by Vodacom. Merchants can also track daily performance of channel sales through a very user-friendly dashboard. In the Suggested for You section, merchants are offered additional personalized propositions, in this case, a business loan. In the app, the merchant can also access the trading platform page, which allows the merchant to do a myriad of things. In this example, the merchant is viewing daily specials from suppliers, which also provides large FMCG companies an opportunity to advertise to their merchants on a daily basis.
Merchants can view the specials, order immediately, and pay all in the app. In the My Product section, the merchant can also access a dashboard of current products which they may have with us, example, business loans or insurance. In this instance, the merchant has a few funeral insurance policies for her employees, which she can monitor in terms of the number of policies, the employees whose lives are being insured, et cetera. For businesses who need access to funding, our business lending product can be accessed all through the same in-app experience as the merchant has already been pre-credit-vetted and potentially approved. This is done fully digitally in three easy steps. During the process, the merchant can also view the repayment breakdown for how the loan will be settled.
Upon approval of the business loan, the funds will be transferred immediately into the merchant's VodaPay store value account. That in a nutshell is a sneak peek into some of the exciting capabilities that our new platform affords us, and we now look forward to executing on this in the coming months. Thank you for listening.
Good day and welcome. I'm Shameel Joosub, the CEO of Vodacom Group, and it gives me great pleasure to present on our financial service business. My presentation will cover four sections, starting with the platform we have built and concluding with our strategic roadmap for growth. Vodacom Group is Africa's largest telecom and fintech operator by market capitalization. Our group addresses a massive population of over 400 million people, with Ethiopia recently added to the portfolio. South Africa is the group's largest contributor, representing 74% of our operating profit in financial year 2021. In addition, we have leading market share positions across the rest of our portfolio, which includes the DRC, Tanzania, Mozambique, Lesotho, and Kenya. We operate in Kenya through our 35% associate holding in Safaricom. Vodacom has a strong track record of innovation and execution.
From the first telco globally to launch prepaid in 1996, we now contribute around 30% of Vodafone's operating profit. We see an exciting growth path ahead for Vodacom, supported by our core mobile services and accelerated by our new services, which include financial and digital services, IoT, and fiber. Financial services is integral to our purpose-led business model, our commitment to improving lives, and is a clear strategic differentiator. Before we dive into financial services, I thought it would be useful to provide some context around how it fits into the overall group strategy. Our strategy, which comprises eight connected pillars, sets out to deliver exceptional value to our customers. We implement our strategy through our system of advantage, which is designed to grow with our customers as we strive to be a strategic partner of choice in an integral part of their lives, homes, and offices.
In this slide, we set out our consumer system of advantage. As you can see, it incorporates a multi-product approach. Our future of the home strategy integrates our customer propositions, embedding Vodacom in the lives of our customers as we strive to go further together. Core to our business is driving data penetration. This is supported by smartphone adoption, which we are accelerating through partnerships with global tech firms and innovative financing solutions. Our 5G leadership in the space enhances our customer proposition. Complementing our data penetration strategy is our progress on the reasons to consume, which we support through our digital platforms. These span across the entertainment verticals with a number of strategic partnerships providing exciting future growth path. As we unlock our growth potential beyond mobile, our focus on financial services is extremely important.
As we set out, in the slides to come, we are intent on leveraging our existing scale to capture significantly more addressable market share. Pulling all of these services together is our big data capability and the 360-degree view of our customers. This view provides us with more than 760 unique customer insights, and when coupled with AI, allows us to personalize to the segment of one in mobile and in our new products and services. We call this capability our global recommender, and it will support the generation of next best activities for our customers, both in mobile and in financial services and in digital services. Our behavioral loyalty program cuts across our products, incentivizing and rewarding engagement. Since its launch in September 2020, the program has attracted 24 million unique customers in South Africa who earn, bank, and spend their VodaBucks via our My Vodacom app.
We have given away a retail value of over $500 million in lifestyle rewards to our customers. Financial services has been an integral part of the group's strategy for many years. In fact, we launched the iconic M-PESA service back in 2007. Our unrelenting focus on the customer proposition and innovation has seen us constantly add services and value to customers over the years. Today, we are honored to be Africa's leading fintech player, measured by customers, revenues, and transaction values. As at March 2021, we had 58 million financial service customers. This number continues to grow meaningfully, and we recently announced that M-PESA customers have reached the 15 million customer milestone when also including Egypt and Ghana. Adding on our 13 million-14 million financial service customers in South Africa, we are closing in on 64 million financial services customers across Africa.
From a transaction value perspective, we process $25 billion per month across our platform and generate $1.3 billion of revenue in the last financial year. This scale, combined with the compelling economics, which I will talk more to later, means that it already makes up 17% of Vodacom Group's profit before tax. Our financial service business is built on a compelling customer proposition. The key pillars of this proposition were, and still are, trust, simplicity, depth, and value. This slide shows how we enable these pillars and some of the remarkable KPIs we've achieved. The ubiquity of the M-PESA platform should not be underestimated. We have 500,000 agents across our footprint who enable a vibrant ecosystem. Enablers of our success have also supported meaningful financial inclusion. For example, we have facilitated 15 million first-time borrowers and collapsed barriers to inclusion through nano products.
This concept of nano is also a major strategic and competitive advantage versus traditional financial institutions. We are able to facilitate millions of transactions a day with loan denominations of less than a few dollars at a time. This is very important across the markets where we operate, as the majority of our customers earn and spend on a day-to-day basis. This nano product capacity is supported by our class-leading big data and machine learning capabilities. These capabilities allow us to manage risk. Interestingly, and I will elaborate more on this later, our day-to-day low-income customers present less credit risk to us than some of our better off postpaid customers. This slide provides a high-level view of our key financial service revenue drivers. When M-PESA launched in 2007, it was premised on basic mobile money services such as cash in, cash out, and peer-to-peer payments.
As highlighted earlier, the ubiquity of our agent network, low transaction costs, and our simple and secure USSD interface has supported sustained growth in transactions and users. For example, in the last financial year, each M-PESA customer in Kenya transacted 20 x per month. This was up 35% year-on-year. Money transfer services in aggregate make up almost 80% of the M-PESA revenue base, with digital payments and new financial services such as microloans making up the balance. In general, we make a fee on each transaction linked to the transaction value. Our financial service business in South Africa primarily generates revenue from our Airtime Advance and insurance products. In both respects, these products are big data-led. Our Airtime Advance service provides airtime loans to customers at a modest fee. The airtime loan and fee is repaid when a customer tops up at their convenience.
Our insurance business offers include both short-term and long-term products. Our short-term products include home and road assist and device, while our long-term products include life and funeral cover. These insurance products leverage our own insurance license, which when combined with our big data capabilities, provides very attractive economics. Our claims processing is done in five minutes, while our claims ratios are truly class leading. We see financial services as a platform for growth. As part of our response to COVID-19 relief efforts, we stimulated platform economics by facilitating free person-to-person transfers for M-PESA. In the most recent financial quarter, transaction volumes reached $25 billion per month, up 64% year-over-year, and annualizing at a staggering $300 billion. To put this into context, U.S. listed payments company Square is annualizing $170 billion. From a volume perspective, M-PESA is almost double the size that is of Square.
From a contribution perspective, M-PESA across our international markets and Safaricom makes up 28% of our service revenue. This revenue contribution was supported by scaling new services onto the platform, including international money transfers, loans, and savings. For example, in the previous financial year, we facilitated nano loans of $3.3 billion through our Fuliza and Songesha products. When we say nano, these loans are on average $4 per ticket. This concept of high volume nano products is a function of the platform we have built, a clear competitive advantage, and a good segue into our South African business. Following strategic reset of our South African financial service business five years ago, it has grown at an impressive 32% revenue CAGR. The strategic reset focused on how the business was managed, how it incorporated into our system of advantage, and how it leveraged our best-in-class big data capabilities.
We now have over 13 million customers in South Africa, up 15% in a year. In the insurance space, we have 2.1 million policies and are South Africa's fifth-largest insurer by profitability. In addition to our success in the insurance space, our big data-led model has supported strong growth in our Airtime Advance product. On a daily basis, we advance 5 million airtime loans to our customers, which are repaid when they top up. These loans equate to $0.50 per ticket, so a truly nano product. Our data-led model is also critical to managing bad debts. For example, we know that on average, people who wake up between 4:00 A.M. and 6:00 A.M. are more creditworthy than people who wake up at 7:00 A.M. Our average bad debt on these 5 million advances a day is just 0.5%. In my intro, I positioned us as Africa's leading fintech player.
In the chart on the left, we compare the scale of our financial service business to African telco peers, fintech pure-plays, and a leading digital bank in Africa. A similar, if not even more pronounced comparison emerges on a revenue basis. Scale is important as it not only supports the economics of the standalone business, but also provides for improved partnership models with global tech and payment companies. Switching gear to regulation, which is summarized on the right-hand side of the chart, our scale also means we work closely with central banks to empower digital economies and drive financial inclusion. Unlike traditional deposit-taking banks, our mobile money services do not require capital. In Kenya, by way of example, their base of float is held in trust, with interest on the float used for charitable causes. In South Africa, we are a fully licensed insurance provider.
To our knowledge, this is unique across the telecoms industry. As a licensed operator, we are able to capture the full return of our innovative insurance products, which are guided by our big data capabilities. We are seeing some very exciting growth opportunities ahead for our financial services businesses. We're further to go with penetrating our money transfer and basic services across the portfolio. Notably, our financial services penetration is still below 60%, and we see no reason why this can't reach the same or above the levels of penetration in Kenya. Over and above this, Ethiopia, with a population of over 100 million people, provides a transformational opportunity for M-PESA when we are granted a mobile money license. Of course, from a Vodafone perspective, Egypt, another 100 million population market, provides further upside as it scales post-COVID.
In addition to the penetration opportunities across our footprint, we believe our expanding product set also unlocks a rapidly growing addressable market. Research providers share our optimism and predict CAGR growth rates of almost 30% for fintech over the years to come. Growth drivers include digital payments and personal finance. In addition to the fintech opportunity, we are seeing significant scope to grow in the insurance space, both in South Africa and across our footprint. Insurance is a massive market at $44 billion, and we make up a very small fraction of this revenue pie today. Our existing platforms, big data capabilities, and investment into class-leading consumer and merchant digital products positions us to capture significant upside from these addressable markets. To capture more share of the addressable fintech and insurance markets, we need to lead in the digitization of financial services in Africa.
We are doing just this and have developed a comprehensive suite of financial products, which provides a compelling proposition to both consumers and merchants. We see the merchant play as a critical part of the fintech value chain. Our enterprise resourcing tool called VodaTrade facilitates ZAR 200 billion per annum of transactions between merchants and FMCG organizations. On the payment side, we have launched our own Android-powered physical point-of-sale devices in South Africa, complementing our already scaled M-PESA till service. The payment ecosystem provides insurance and lending opportunities such as invoice financing and SME lending. Pulling our merchant and consumer capabilities together and launching them into the next realm is our super app approach. In South Africa, this is named VodaPay. While across all our markets, we will retain the iconic M-PESA brand.
Our South African lifestyle super app, VodaPay, is supported by the world-class technology of Alipay and zero-rated for consumers. The app offers services ranging from loans and savings, international money transfers, seamless QR, and person-to-person payments. It also has entertainment and personalized shopping experience. The shopping platform is supported by South Africa's leading retail brands across all key verticals. When saving rather than shopping, the platform will provide a marketplace of investments and saving options, including fractional ownership for nano investing. This functionality will be replicated across our M-PESA footprint, supported by Alipay's mini app capabilities. To capture the growth opportunity in fintech, we need to execute with a balance of speed to market and adapt our product. To this end, we have set up an efficient corporate structure to support our new commercial model.
At the heart of our M-PESA commercial model is M-PESA Africa, which coordinates and implements our strategy, driving product expansion and leveraging best practice across the portfolio. Products and services are created in the hub and then deployed to the operating companies. Similarly, when global tech and payment companies want to explore partnerships, M-PESA Africa maximizes the opportunity across the portfolio. A good example of this coordination role is the international money transfer hub we have set up. This hub approach guarantees partners scale and our customers the best value proposition. The same is true of our financial service business in South Africa, which facilitates a nimble and innovative approach to market. From a legal standpoint, Vodacom and M-PESA businesses have been separated from the telco.
This ensures that we have the dedicated strategic and management focus required to maximize our organic growth opportunities, while also making it easier for shareholders to track our progress and determine the see-through value of these assets going forward. Our financial service business also receives all the capital and operating investment it needs, given the higher margin we can generate alongside the capability and development benefits of our technology partnership with Alipay. In order to maximize the value creation opportunities for our shareholders, we are currently focused on delivering our strategic ambitions. Along this journey, we will consider portfolio optimization options as these arise and if the value of this unique business is not fully reflected over the medium term. Mindful of this, we will also give consideration to the optimal longer term legal structure of our fintech assets at the Vodacom Group level.
Earlier, I called out that including Safaricom on a 100% basis, our financial service portfolio generated EUR 1.3 billion of revenue in the 2021 financial year. To enhance our disclosure on financial services, we've also provided some color on a proportionate basis, which accounts for minorities and associate holdings. This is especially relevant when comparing fintech valuations to market cap. The low capital intensity profile of financial services means that it generates a higher profit margin and ROCE than our core mobile businesses. In fact, 17% of our group's proportionate profit before tax comes from financial services at a margin of around 40%. This equates to ZAR 4.4 billion, or close to $300 million. In addition to the attractive economics of our financial service portfolio, it plays an important role in our purpose-led business.
From payments to lending to savings, our products support financial inclusion and key United Nations sustainable development goals. From this year, we've also incorporated financial inclusion into our remuneration scorecard, impacting long-term incentive awards. From our 57.7 million customers at March 2021, we are targeting 72.6 million financial service customers by 2024. In the previous slide, we showed that our existing financial service businesses is scaled and generates attractive economics. This is largely a core function of our core payment services, which is volume-based and orientated towards a largely feature phone market. As we move into the digital space, which is orientated more towards smartphone users, our commercial model has adapted to providing products across the fintech value chain. This approach is supported by our own product development through Vodacom South Africa and our M-PESA South Africa innovation hubs, but also through partnerships.
This hybrid or marketplace approach to product development ensures scalability. We add in the power of the super app and the opportunity and economics becomes truly compelling. The super app gives us the ability to open up the system from a few partners to thousands of service providers. It removes the barrier of physical limitations for both consumers and merchants, which can then expand beyond their geographical boundaries. Put simply, as the transactions compound, we take our cut, a bit like a iOS or Google Play store. The super app also gives us the ability to aggregate the digital shopping mall experience with entertainment and our broader fintech services like money transfer, lending, and savings. The consumer experience is further enhanced through our big data-driven personalized offers and loyalty that helps shape behavior.
From each of these components, there is a revenue opportunity, which in some cases can be compounded by combining services. For example, on an e-commerce transaction, we can generate revenue from the merchant on listing and payment fees, and where credit is provided, commissions on the loan origination. From a returns perspective, we already generate a 40% PBT margin on financial services, and we see our push into digital services creating more reasons to keep the money in the system. This provides further upsize opportunity for margins with cash in and cash out making up 80% of our direct costs. There's also a benefit for the telco business with lower churn, retention, and acquisition costs. The higher margin and ROCE profile of financial services is further supported by its low CapEx intensity.
We expect this to remain a feature of our financial services business as we leverage the best global tech partnerships and our own centers of excellence. My presentation up until this point discovered the financial services business we have built, the business we are building, and the exciting economics on offer. What is left for me to do is to pull these threads together into our strategic roadmap. Our Vision 2025 strategy aims to meaningfully scale the contribution of new revenue streams while contributing to increasing the penetration of our core connectivity services. Financial services is core to the strategy of our system of advantage, which is set up to deliver exceptional value to our customers. We see scope for financial services businesses to grow at least 20% CAGR over the medium term.
We believe that by combining the best of tech with the products that span across the financial services value chain, we will remain Africa's clear fintech leader. Finally, I wanted to reconcile our Vision 2025 growth roadmap with our medium-term service revenue target and the shape of our business in the years to come. In the top row, the green bubbles show the evolution of our new services, which include digital and financial services, IoT, and fiber. On a consolidated basis, we see this beyond mobile service revenue contribution increasing from 17% today to around 25%-30% by financial year 2024. By 2026, there's scope for these revenues to exceed a 30% contribution to our consolidated service revenue. Delivering on these targets will support our core purpose, which is to connect customers for a better future.
Financial services is integral to our purpose-led business model, our commitment to improving lives, and is a clear strategic differentiator. Thank you for your time today.
The last one year has been one of our biggest years in M-PESA. We formed M-PESA Africa, consolidating our roadmap across the entire continent, putting in new capabilities, standardized platforms, as we begin the journey of looking at M-PESA as one unit. Now, I'd like you to take a look at a short video, and please enjoy it, of the new M-PESA app.
My name is Robert Gathogo. I'm from Korogocho. I am a teacher, I'm a businessman, and I'm a community social worker. My business is mostly majorly for recreational purposes. I have a gym. We have a DJing school. We have a PlayStation. I am a teacher by profession, so I have little time to be around my business. All the M-PESA business transactions usually come directly to the M-PESA business phone. Even when I'm not in or around the business, I'm able to know that so-and-so has paid up for a service. My businesses majorly are services, service providing. When I want to buy maybe stock, maybe like printing papers for my cyber, or I want to buy spirit for my kienyeji. It helps me when I want to purchase anything.
Even I want to pay my employees, I can pay them directly using the business till app instead of giving them cash.
Log on to www.m-pesaforbusiness.co.ke.
Hello, everyone. My name is Vinod Kumar, CEO of Vodafone Business. It's good to see you again. In our last section for today, we will provide a more in-depth look at our leading Internet of Things or IoT business. This is a really exciting space at the moment, especially as we help industries, government, and society rebuild after the events of the last few years. We are seeing strong structural growth across a range of verticals. This is not just in connectivity, where we continue to grow at around two million connections per month, but also for our own innovative solutions. This section is split into four parts. First, I will talk to you about our history in IoT and how we built the leading IoT business.
Erik Brenneis, the Director of IoT here at Vodafone, will talk to you about the market opportunity and why it is so strong. Erik will then talk to you about how we're capturing this opportunity through smart, scalable products and services that are unlocked by our group scale. Finally, I will go over where we are investing our capital and our best-in-class economics. At Vodafone, we have a long history of IoT. In fact, our history predates the name IoT and goes back to when it was called machine-to-machine. We created our IoT division back in 2008 and started development on our platform in 2009. This means we've had well over a decade to understand the market and improve our ability to serve it. We've done this through the continued evolution of our platform, which now handles over 130 million connected devices.
We have not been playing catch up with anyone. We were recognized as a Gartner leader in our managed connectivity back in 2014, its first year, and we have continued to be recognized as a leader ever since, continuing to push the boundaries forward. Our IoT business consists of three parts: connectivity, hardware, and integrated end-to-end solutions. We continue to grow our leadership in connectivity. We see a big opportunity in the IoT solution space and aim to be a leader in integrated plug-and-play solutions that will drive the adoption in IoT in businesses both big and small. We call such solutions end-to-end solutions. An example of an end-to-end solution is a logistics firm that no longer wants just connectivity but wants insights. They want to understand where all their vehicles are and how they can save fuel or reduce insurance premiums.
We've been building our knowledge of the space through targeted acquisitions of leading IoT startups such as IoT.nxt and grandcentrix. Our business is, of course, underpinned by Vodafone's strong network position across Europe and Africa, alongside our international partnerships. These enable us to serve customers in 190 markets and 570 different networks globally. We are the world's leading global IoT connectivity business. We are seeing strong growth. We have nearly doubled our connections in the last three and a half years to 130 million as of Q1, and it is accelerating. In Q1 of this year alone, we added 7 million connections over 2 million per month. Data usage growth has also been strong, typically around 60%-90% per year, except for FY 2021, where there was a temporary slowdown due to COVID-19.
Data usage is now accelerating, partly driven by increased connections, but this is primarily the result of our smart commercial approach, which unlocks new use cases and new demand. We think this data growth is only the beginning, and that many more data-demanding use cases will materialize across multiple sectors. As you know, everything is increasingly software-based today, cars, industrial machinery, supply chains, and life-saving equipment in hospitals, just to name a few. This makes the need for reliable and ubiquitous connectivity ever more important. Overall, service revenue in Q1 was very strong at 22%. It is important to call out that this growth on an underlying basis is around 11% as we benefited from annualizing a weak quarter in the prior year, resulting from the initial and temporary COVID-19 slowdown.
This underlying growth also strips out the benefit we've had from software upgrades, which will repeat in the future, but with a hard-to-predict phasing. I will cover how we are growing across each of our product classes, connectivity, hardware, and end-to-end solutions later in this presentation. Our strong growth is broad-based, coming from all of our key verticals, automotive and insurance, healthcare, energy and utilities, logistics and transport, and a growing range of other industries such as manufacturing, security, and financial services. We really have scale in each of these verticals and work with the largest companies in these spaces. For example, in automotive and insurance, our fast-growing and largest vertical, we are the supplier for eight of the 10 largest global automotive brands. We have deep expertise on all aspects of their value chain. We integrate IoT into their factories to improve industrial efficiency.
We embed IoT SIMs directly into the control units inside their vehicles, showing how critical connectivity is for them. It is no longer just an add-on, but a key requirement. Once the car leaves the factory, we enable over-the-air software updates, fleet management solutions for enterprise customers and insurance providers, and then internet in the car for consumers. Healthcare has also seen a rapid growth in connections this year, in part driven by the pandemic, with governments and health authorities rolling out field hospitals and managing vaccine distribution. Looking forward, we also see structural growth as these authorities look to digitalize and improve effectiveness through remote medicine and patient monitoring solutions. We have real leadership in this area, thanks to our center of competency, Innovus, which Erik will tell you about later.
Energy and utilities also continues to grow as these companies plug IoT into their existing grids and networks to identify faults and reduce wastage. Logistics and transport companies on the whole saw increased demand for connections driven by the pandemic as supply chain management increasingly became a focus for firms. Given recent supply shortages in some sectors, this growth is expected to continue. We see increasing use cases across a wide range of other industries, such as industrial automation, connected payment services, security, and a whole lot more. Vodafone is the largest international IoT company. We have the most connections of any provider outside China, over 130 million, which is nearly two-thirds more than the next largest player. Not only do we have leading scale and connections, we have the ability to connect devices everywhere we want to in 190 markets globally.
In other words, we serve customers everywhere apart from certain sanctioned markets. We know we have the best global reach, driven not only by the strength of our partnerships, but also our deep regulatory experience. We are the only provider that can sell across all the highly regulated markets, such as China, India, Russia, Brazil, Egypt, and Turkey. This is a moat that is tough to replicate or cross. Only the strength of the Vodafone brand and the regulatory teams allowed us to navigate these processes, and only the strength of the Vodafone technology team and the flexibility of our platform enabled us to meet these markets' requirements. We're not just a leader in terms of size and connections. Let me give you a few more reasons why companies come to us first. We have leading expertise in our verticals through leveraging our centers of competency.
IoT has to be right first time, and companies don't want to take a risk when it comes to connectivity. Vodafone is a trusted brand in this space. A lot of companies are also embarking on their own digital transformations. As you know, we are a leader when it comes to multi-access edge computing, being the first to launch in Europe with AWS, and in mobile private networks, where we have 20 live networks today. This leadership means that we know how to take their plans for IoT to the next level, integrating IoT into our other solutions as required. Our scale enables us to have a large channel ecosystem of more than 3,500 indirect sellers across the globe. Complementing our generalist IoT sales teams and 250 IoT sales specialists.
We also use our scale for procurement and logistics, enabling us to procure hardware and manage customer devices at strong economics. Our leading platform, which we built and continuously evolve and enhance, is a key advantage. It gives us leading economics, the ability to link third-party services easily via APIs, and enables us to integrate security from start to finish. Our platform also allows us to scale and create leading analytical capabilities centrally. Our technical capabilities are underpinned by our leading technology team, which has over 500 developers working to create products and improve our platform and portals in an agile way. I've spoken a lot about our leadership, but now you can see the proof. Our NPS is at a record high at 57 as of FY 2021.
On the right, you can see that Gartner recognizes us as a leader in the Magic Quadrant, and have done so for seven consecutive years. This is the most important industry benchmark. When customers want IoT, the first thing they do is refer to this quadrant. We are clearly at the top, both for the completeness of our vision and for our ability to execute with a large gap to the competition. We don't want to rest. We continue to improve our capabilities year over year, pushing the boundaries ever further. There is no doubt that we are the global IoT connectivity leader. Over to you, Erik, to talk about the market opportunity.
Thank you, Vinod, for highlighting the scope, scale, and strengths of our business. Hello, everyone. I'm Erik Brenneis, the Director of IoT at Vodafone. Now I'd like to tell you a little bit about the addressable market for IoT. First, let's look at some customer research to see why customers use IoT. These recent findings highlight the potential for Vodafone. First, the data shows that IoT adoption is growing rapidly. This supports our ambition to deliver even more solutions to customers over the coming years. Adopters experience significant operational advantages. The majority adopt IoT to achieve operating cost reductions and to better understand how they can reduce their CO2 emissions. Other use cases are, for example, to gain valuable insights to improve employee productivity and customer loyalty. These benefits create a virtuous cycle, leading to even more IoT projects. A vast majority of adopters, over 80%, are spending more.
Finally, today it's mostly large national or multinational enterprises that have adopted IoT, and we're great at serving these customers. SME and SOHO firms also present a large opportunity for Vodafone. We have strong pre-existing relationships with these customers, and we're helping them to access the EU Recovery Fund opportunity. How big is our market? The total addressable market for IoT is worth EUR 10 billion. This is a mix of connectivity, hardware, and end-to-end solutions in Vodafone's geographic footprint. We expect this EUR 10 billion to increase to EUR 16 billion by financial year 2024, which means a 16% annual growth over this period. This growth is spread across all our markets. Germany represents the largest single market opportunity because of the strong automotive and manufacturing industry, which is rapidly transforming.
We also expect Spain to grow strongly because there's a significant part in the EU Recovery Fund for smart cities and meters. Africa and other, which represents all of Vodafone's other markets, will grow at 29% over the next few years. A massive opportunity. This is mainly driven by South Africa, Turkey, and Egypt, where we see really strong demand and are well established. We also expect strong growth potential in both the U.K. and Italy. Let's now have a closer look at the EU Recovery Fund. It aims to make Europe greener, more digital, and more resilient. It will be a significant driver of IoT growth going forward. In total, there is EUR 750 billion available over the next few years, and we're already starting to see the benefits today. In Spain alone, we've already won smart city developments funded by the EU Recovery Fund in four cities.
For example, in Ibiza, we won a one tender through our ability to offer not only connectivity, but also end-to-end solutions that solve problems which these cities face. We provide lots of solutions. For example, early fire detection, measuring seawater quality and monitoring other environmental indicators, managing traffic, and controlling beach capacity. Where a problem is identified, our platform alerts island officials who will then take appropriate action. For example, sending the fire squad. Furthermore, a lot of the insights are available directly for tourists and residents to access through a mobile and web app. This is just the beginning. We expect most EU Recovery Fund-related tenders to start from 2022 onwards. Another big part in the EU Recovery Fund will go into solutions which will help reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Over 10% of global climate change emissions result from deforestation. We've already built innovative solutions today, such as our smart forest solution in Romania, which enables forest rangers to identify where illegal deforestation is taking place through solar-powered IoT sensors placed on trees. We see many more opportunities in the fight against climate change as companies, cities, and regions take recovery funding to reduce their environmental footprint. We see the largest opportunity in e-health, and we're ready for it. In Greece, we have an amazing e-health solution. Greece has hundreds of remote islands, making doctor visits really expensive. We partnered with the Vodafone Foundation and the Greek health authorities to develop remote monitoring solutions that enable doctors to oversee patients and patient medical devices remotely, automatically flagging any adverse indicators. Today, we have conducted over 50,000 remote examinations and over 500,000 citizens are covered by our solution.
Our IoT subsidiary in Greece, Innovus, who developed this solution, is now our global center of competency for healthcare, and we're deploying this leading solution to other markets. We've just seen how much the addressable market will grow in the coming years. This growth will be fastest in end-to-end solutions. Let me now take some time to explain how we're building these solutions efficiently in order to capture this opportunity. As you've heard a few times in our previous briefings, we build once and deploy globally. We've done this through creating a scaled solution industrialization factory, which makes use of our leading IoT platform. Let me tell you how this factory works. We do not develop things market by market. We develop in our five global centers of competency, which you can see at the bottom. These centers of competency have deep expertise in their area of specialization.
They develop leading solutions, and where we see good traction, we industrialize them. We set up a specific team which has the legal and regulatory knowledge required to execute across markets. Together with the Vodafone procurement company, we set up central procurement contracts at the group level. We've created a software platform which enables us to quickly deploy these solutions into our markets. We create central marketing materials and price the product centrally. Finally, we create a central team responsible for after-market support. When a customer needs help, they get straight through to a dedicated world-class expert. We can sell these solutions across each of our markets and an increasing number of our partner markets as well. This gives us many times the scale of competitors who are usually only present in a single or a few markets. We don't just industrialize our own products.
We also take winning partner solutions and industrialize them in the same way and sell them in our operating companies. Let me give you an example of one of our self-developed new solutions. You may have experienced it on your way into work today if you're in the office. We've created a safe return-to-office solution, which is a part of our wider smart buildings solution set. A thermal camera screens people for high temperatures, a sign of infection, as they enter the office. If someone has a high temperature, it automatically sends an alert to them and reception personnel, which reduces the chance of infection spreading. This camera is integrated into our smart buildings platform, which includes other social distancing solutions such as desk booking, which employees can access via a simple and easy-to-use app.
For property management, we have more tools, such as people counting, air quality control, and temperature control. This all helps improve employee safety. Our solution set will continue to be useful post the pandemic as it saves cost, reduces environmental waste, and improves employee productivity. Our safe return-to-office solution is now live in three markets and a further five will go live by the end of the year. We also have large well-known customers already. We're deploying the solution into our own buildings. This solution is also very profitable with a strong contribution margin. It is high return as well as there are limited customer-specific costs. On average, each new project pays for itself in under a year. These are the sort of solutions we're investing in. They have real demand and are highly scalable.
Now, I will hand back over to Vinod, who will take you through more of the economics.
Thanks, Erik. Hello, everyone. Good to see you again. Vodafone IoT has strong economics. Let me talk to you about how we are investing our capital in IoT and why it is an attractive economic model. The single largest area for our CapEx is platform evolution. This investment is leveraged by the breadth of our geographic markets and some of our partner markets as well. We continue to add capabilities such as improved management portals, advanced analytics, and improved ability for our portal to interface with other technologies. This means we're creating APIs enabling further and simpler integration with partner services. The next large allocation is platform capacity and maintenance. This includes investments to meet future demand. The maintenance portion of this is mainly a fixed cost, so it provides us with attractive economics as we scale. We come to end-to-end solutions.
These are the solutions such as smart buildings that Erik walked you through earlier. We build solutions once where we see real demand from customers, and we know we have the capability, and then we deploy them across our markets. Given the growth opportunity, we're currently investing a lot into this segment. The next biggest area is customer-led investments. Really, this is an output of our sought-after capabilities driving customer growth. Finally, only a very small percentage of our CapEx goes towards IoT-specific network investments. We have a symbiotic relationship with the larger business, primarily utilizing the existing network as it is. Now I've talked to you about our investments. Let me talk to you about the revenues, margins, and returns that we see. Our IoT business generates over EUR 900 million in total revenues.
With its double-digit revenue growth rate, we will soon be a EUR 1 billion business. It has a strong contribution margin of 75%- 85% and a high ROC, which will only improve going forwards. Connectivity is by far the largest segment, representing the majority of revenues and growing quickly. Connectivity has a very strong contribution margin driven by leveraging Vodafone's existing mobile network and our own self-developed platform. This contrasts with our competitors, who pay per-connection fees for platform usage, and some of our partners pay us for our platform, further improving our economics. We also benefit from our pan-European and African scale and deep partner relationships, which reduce roaming costs. Our capital intensity is medium as we continue to invest into future-proofing the platform but benefit from utilizing the preexisting investments Vodafone makes into its mobile network.
Overall, we see a high return in this segment given the significant growth that we're capturing. Hardware is also growing fast. Every piece of hardware we sell then generates connectivity demand, and we make a solid margin driven by leveraging Vodafone's leading global procurement scale. Given we predominantly have a reseller model, hardware is a strong incremental driver of returns. Finally, moving to the fastest-growing segment of end-to-end solutions. The market here is growing fast as our connectivity customers evolve to wanting more insights and real-time control. This means although our revenues are small today, they're growing rapidly. This is because we are building solutions where we see real demand or are taking proven solutions, industrializing them, and then deploying them across our markets and sales channels.
Contribution margin here is strong as we also benefit from our self-developed platform and don't need to pay per-process fees like our competitors do. Capital intensity is high at the moment as we're in the initial investment phase and have yet to realize the full revenue benefits from deploying these solutions in multiple markets. The incremental ROC on these products is high, as our strategy is to build once and deploy everywhere. We also onboard and industrialize proven partner solutions and sell them through our sales channels. Over time, this may reduce our contribution margin percentage, but it will drive strong incremental returns due to a very limited CapEx investment. As you can see, IoT is a strong business for Vodafone, leveraging existing assets to drive competitive advantage and improve ROC for the group. To recap, first, we are leaders in IoT.
We built and evolved our platforms over 13 years and continue to extend our leadership. We have leading international reach. We can serve customers everywhere we want to and where others can't due to our deep regulatory and technical capabilities. Our leadership is recognized both in our NPS and by external market research firms. This enables us to be the largest international IoT provider with over 130 million connections growing by around 2 million per month. Second, the addressable market for IoT is compelling. We see the market growing by 16% compounded annual growth rate over the next few years. This growth is broad-based across all our markets, but especially significant in Germany. We are ready for and capturing the Next Generation EU opportunities today. This is only the beginning, and these benefits are expected to flow from 2022 and onwards.
Third, we are investing in a smart and capital-efficient way. Build once and deploy everywhere is our mantra, and that's what we're doing through our solution industrialization factory, leveraging our five global centers of competency.
Finally, we have highly attractive economics. We leverage the existing mobile network investments across Vodafone's markets. We have our own platform, meaning our economics are scalable, and we benefit from Vodafone's scale, unlocking economics that our competitors can't. IoT is a key driver for incremental returns at Vodafone.
Digital connectivity and the Internet of Things has the potential to solve many of the world's largest problems. One of these emerging problems is going to be agricultural production. Farming accounts for over 90% of everything we eat, and it also employs over 25% of the global workforce. It also consumes 70% of the freshwater resources, and increasingly, its impact on the environment is coming under scrutiny through its use of land, herbicides, and pesticides. The challenge for agriculture is twofold. One is, how does it boost productivity to meet an increasing demand from a global population while at the same time reducing its impact on the environment? This is where IoT comes to the fore by enabling you to connect a wide range of different sensors to measure things like water quality. You can measure humidity. You can measure crop growth.
By using advanced sensors which use video and video analytics, you can even start to detect pests and disease in the crops at a very early age. By using IoT devices within farming, not only do you get a much better view of the farm, but you can also cut the use of things like fertilizer by up to 50%. By being able to detect disease early, it can go a long way to reducing some of the 40% of crops that are lost every year. Vodafone have brought all this together in a single platform called MyFarmWeb. MyFarmWeb brings together this range of IoT sensors with other data sources on the farm, from combines or tractors with geospatial information to create a 360-degree view of the farm. This enables you to monitor the production on the farm on an acre-by-acre basis.
Now, MyFarmWeb is used by over 6,000 farmers in America, New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa, and together, they're using this wealth of data to optimize their crop selection, optimize their production, and minimize their impact on the environment. MyFarmWeb takes agriculture into the digital age. It's going to help farms increase productivity, reduce their impact on the environment, and become leaner, greener, and meaner.
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My name is Lawrence, and I'm here in the Carpathian Mountains in Romania to help stop the illegal logging and poaching that goes on in this area.
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This is the actual guardian device. This is the device that will be recording the sounds of the forest and then sending it back. This inside has the mobile device.
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We install the guardians in the canopy of the forest. This protects the guardian from the elements, from the wind, from the rain. The solar panels are designed in a really efficient way to maximize surface area and plug the microphone in. Here, put some protection on.
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The ranger has the ability to know where to go because each guardian is GPS located. When they receive their alert through their mobile phone, through the ranger app, it will say that the alert is coming from a specific location.
[Presentation]
Hello, my name is Klaus Wolf. I'm driving the Internet of Things business at Vodafone for Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Today, I'm very, very pleased to have Werner Lieberherr here with me, the Chief Executive Officer of Landis+Gyr. Landis+Gyr is one of our key customers, and we've been working with them for more than three years. Werner, could you please give us some more background on your company?
Hi, Klaus. Thanks for having me. Landis+Gyr is a leader in energy management solution, and this year we are celebrating 125 years of company history, we are pretty excited about that. In order to help manage energy better, we are working closely with utilities and other customers around the globe to provide leading smart metering, grid edge intelligence, and smart infrastructure solutions. Most recently, we have also acquired companies offering EV and cybersecurity technology and are in the middle of a digital transformation. With locations in over 30 countries, we are a truly global player and are proud to say that we have over 300 million devices deployed all over the world. Our services and solutions allow us, our customers, partners like you, and entire communities to manage energy in a more informed and sustainable way.
For us, it's a real key market where you're operating, Werner. It's a great story. Why did you choose Vodafone as a partner?
We are proud to partner with Vodafone. You are enabling meter and sensor communication through cellular technology, and as such, elevating our smart metering and grid edge intelligence portfolio. Your international presence gives our customers seamless access to more than 570 networks in 190 countries using a single subscriber identity profile. That's a pretty big deal. This is made possible by your single connectivity platform, which allows us to utilize multiple technologies. For example, the partnership delivers unprecedented Low-Power Wide-Area technology capabilities today, with the ability to seamlessly transition to 5G networks where and when these networks are available. Combined with the long-term service contract, the solution provides unprecedented coverage to ensure longevity matching the life cycle of utility assets.
Let me say that I've been very impressed by the personal commitment of everyone at Vodafone, so thank you for that. Together, we are supporting utilities around the globe with leading connectivity solutions and scalability.
Werner, if we look a little bit more deeper into that, what are you personally most excited about this topic?
We are excited to continue to push the envelope to offer the best possible service to our customers. As part of that, we are embedding connectivity into Landis+Gyr hardware, and Vodafone is supporting end-to-end integration, for example.
At Vodafone, we really feel the good collaboration between our two companies. How is your feeling on that?
I would say overall, very positive. Vodafone is a valued partner, and we appreciate the customer-centric approach and global mindset that you offer. Your global partner network and the fact that you're a technology leader are key points here. Last but not least, it's of course also the personal relationships. That starts at the top with Erik and you, Klaus, and goes all the way through the technology teams.
Werner, if we look a little bit on other topics which are very important for our world, yeah, what's your feeling or what do you think, how can we contribute to make the world a little bit more livable?
Managing energy better is certainly a big part of creating a more sustainable future for all, and that's exactly what our products do and where your connectivity solutions come into play. Also, sustainable impact is one of our company values, and it is what we look for in partners as well, to support sustainable impact in everything we do.
Thanks, Werner. We have here the absolutely same spirit. Thank you so much for partnering with us and for your time here in this interview. Here, bye-bye, Werner.
Klaus, I feel the same way. I thank you very much for discussion. I wish you a very good day and look forward to seeing you very soon. Thanks a lot. Bye-bye.