Good morning, everyone. I am thrilled to be here today with my team and yourselves. I've had nine months on this job now. You know what they say about time flying when you're having fun. It's my very own chapter two here at Cembra after about three and a half years in the early 2000s. We set this up as we discussed at the half year results to really just get a chance to get to know each other a bit better, right? Myself, my team here, and that's the spirit of the day today. We've also taken a fair amount of time over the last months really reviewing how we're positioned in the market and how we're gonna take this great business and position it for success in the future.
Deep dive on our strategy, and we're excited to be able to talk to you about this today. We're aware this is a much anticipated event, not least given the announcement around the termination of the Migros relationship, so it's really a great opportunity for us to walk you through the story in detail and in its entirety. The theme of today is Reimagining Cembra. What do we mean by that? As I've said many times before, right? This is a very strong business with incredible substance at the core. At the same time, we all know our markets are changing rapidly, and they have been changing rapidly, and that pace of change isn't gonna go away, right?
This is all about taking this business, taking all our strengths, adding to it and repositioning it for continued success in the marketplace and leadership going forward. This is what we'll walk you through today in this sequence. It starts with our strategic ambition, which really combines leadership in consumer finance with leadership in technology to deliver intuitive, compelling solutions for our customers' needs here in the Swiss market. We'll explain how we're gonna do this on the back of our Cembra DNA at the foundation, which is really our fundamental strength. You know, what defines us. At the core of that, it starts with what I call the credit factory, and the people who make all this happen and who've allowed us to build these leadership positions over decades.
There are four strategic programs which we'll walk you through today. First one is Operational Excellence. This is about simplifying what we do. It's also about transforming our technology stack to become future-proof and deliver both significantly further improved service propositions for growth and, importantly, meaningful efficiency improvements with over CHF 30 million of cost savings over time per year. I've said on several occasions before that we have to get our commercial aggressiveness back. We will show you today as well how we're gonna do that. This is number one about our core businesses and how we accelerate growth in these businesses. In personal loans, we're gonna simplify our operating model, we'll differentiate our product set, and we will enhance our digital journeys both for customers and partners.
In auto, we have a couple new messages for you because this business has somewhat been sort of a non-event in a sense. The new message here is we're gonna reposition this business for growth as well. We're gonna build a new platform, which will be a step change in servicing performance, allow us to expand market reach and new partnerships, and drive meaningful efficiency in this business as well, setting ourselves up for growth. Cards, of course, a topic everybody's interested in. We're gonna launch our digital engagement layer in the first quarter of next year. Very excited about that. We'll grow our partner universe, and we'll also expand our product offering into a new innovative B2C value proposition to return to pre-COVID levels in assets and revenues by 2023 in this business.
That's the core businesses. We're also looking at new growth opportunities. We're super excited. I'm super excited about what we can do in embedded finance and particularly with our payment technology subsidiary, Swissbilling, in Buy Now, Pay Later, and more on that later as well. Finally, all of this is underpinned by cultural transformation. We have an incredibly strong, committed team, and we want to become even more customer-centric, more agile, embrace learning, environment of trustful collaboration for all of our associates. These actions in combination will deliver the continued financial performance that you should expect from us. As we've said, our yield will be temporarily reduced in line with previous guidance based on recovering from the Migros situation as well as investments into technology, and then back to 15% or more from 2024 onwards.
Our plan also includes a dividend of CHF 375 for 2021, the same or more next year, and growing from there on, supported by EPS growth as well. With that, I'm pleased to be able to introduce my partners on the team with us today here. We've got Pascal Perritaz, our CFO. I think you all know him. We have Volker Gloe, who I think also many of you will have interacted with, our head of risk, Chief Risk Officer with over two decades of experience in managing risk and analytics functions. We have Niklaus Mannhart, our Chief Operating Officer, leading operations and technology. And over two decades of experience in the field, both with a large bank and also with a leading top-tier consulting firm. I'm also very excited.
To welcome Peter Schnellmann back to the team. Peter and I go back, what? 15, 16 years? Yeah, 16 years. He was with us before, and I'm thrilled to have him back. He's got deep expertise about the market. He's probably as good a sales leader you can get in consumer finance in Switzerland. Thrilled to have him back, and he'll be joining us on the stage later on today. With us also from the Management Board, Emanuel Hofacker, our General Counsel, great safe pair of hands, over 15 years with Cembra. Also in the room we have, of course, Marcus Händel, our Head of Investor Relations. We have Alain Moroni, Head of Strategy and M&A.
We have Carsten Jochem, who heads sales for the cards business, and he's been with us in that business since its inception. That's the team in the room here today. The next couple of hours, this is the agenda. I'm gonna start with a strategic ambition. We're right in that already. Volker will talk about our Cembra DNA, then we'll hand over to Niklaus for the operational excellence piece. We'll take a Q&A, short break, then we come back to the commercial section. Peter and I will talk about accelerating growth in our core businesses. We'll talk about the Buy Now, Pay Later opportunity that I mentioned.
Then Pascal will bring it home, telling us how all this is reflected in the financials and drives the performance that you're looking for and that we're gonna bring. We'll wrap it up and take a few more questions, and that'll be the day. Look, before we dive into the meat, allow me to just take a step back and just share a few simple facts about our leading businesses here. Nothing you see on this page happens by accident, right? Not the 1 million customers, not the leading positions that we've had the privilege of holding for decades, and certainly not the 15.9% ROE on average since the IPO, and neither the annual dividend growth of 4%. Nothing happens by accident, right?
All of this happens because of who we are, because of our deeply embedded capabilities, because of the customer intimacy we've built and our teams have built, and the passion our thousands associates bring to work every day. Nothing and no single event can take that away from us. I just wanted to start with that. You know, look, when you think about strategy, you ought to start with what's going on in the market, right? As I've said before, there's a ton of stuff happening. I thought we'll just highlight the top three, four things that we're seeing because they're relevant to us, relevant to what we do here in our market in Switzerland. First, I think it's fair to say this continues to be a very attractive market, right?
It's high GDP per capita. It's very broadly distributed across the population, which implies great market depth, coupled with a balanced regulatory framework. It's a great foundation for us to grow in this market and develop in this market. It's also, I think, an excellent way to invest into one of the strongest consumer economies in the world. Digitization is everywhere, right? Everywhere you look, there's digitization. You know, whether it's integrating digital and mobile channels into seamless experiences and journeys for customers, intuitive customer journeys. This is critical as more and more of our business also shifts into digital and online, right? Already today, about half of all personal loans are taken out via digital channels.
In payments, the share of mobile payments over the last 12 months has more than doubled to over 10%, right? So this is clearly a trend that we're looking at. On the back of this, we see operating models changing rapidly as well, right? Where we used to be in heavy, monolithic, hard-coded systems, impossible to make changes in the near- term, and now things are moving into software as a service, cloud-based, et cetera. Let me give you an example. In one of my previous roles, I was, amongst others, overseeing a large consumer electronics retailer. We, in the past, had everything hard-coded in SAP.
If you wanna offer as simple as you would as a retailer, buy one, get one free, we'd have to wait for the next SAP release six months down the road. That's not a good place to be, right? You move that into a modular architecture with open APIs, and you can do these things, these changes overnight. The same applies in financial services, the exact same. What does it do? Increase release frequency, which is a meaningful benefit to the customer, significantly drives efficiency and huge cost cut opportunities. Lastly, and this is something we haven't talked so much with you about, but I'm quite excited about, is the trend towards integrating payment and financing decisions directly and more seamlessly into customer journeys.
This really is a meaningful growth opportunity, and let me just tell you a little bit more what we think about the next couple pages. I first joined this business in February 2003, and I remember, you know, one of the typical customer journeys for us was a customer comes into a branch, applies for a personal loan, go through the underwriting process, assume they get approved, right? Then they come back at some point, and then they get their money in cash. They put that cash, CHF 50,000 , into a bag, they get on a tram, they go to the next used car market, and they buy a car. Right? That was one of the standard customer journeys we would have served. By the way, we still serve this occasionally today, but clearly that's the minority, right?
The world has really changed rapidly in terms of these journeys, and we observe a shift of financing decisions very much from pre-purchase to at purchase and post-purchase within the customer journey when they buy something with the money that they're looking to borrow. The customers demand flexibility and seamless experiences along that journey. Technology allows actually for that to take place and for that to be provided. That is what we call embedded finance, right? Which is really embedding financing directly and conveniently into the customer journey around the product, the process and the product they wanna buy. For example, this has already been the case in a sense in our auto leasing business, right? Where we are integrated at the point of sale with the dealers.
That too is shifting as some of these distribution models are shifting more into online. In cards and invoices, you see this going into mobile applications, right? It's important too, to note that this trend transcends traditional product markets, right? We're illustrating here which products we see increasingly being applied, where in these customer journeys and purchase processes. In a sense, you know, consumer finance is finally delivering on its promise and name, which is it's centered around the consumer and not primarily around the product. That's what we find exciting here. Now, the good news from our perspective is as Cembra, we're very well positioned to win in this space. We've illustrated this on the right in terms of our existing capabilities, and we're already present in all of these products, some more than others.
That is really something that differentiates us as well from the competition. This matters because if you look at where growth comes from in the market in the future, a large chunk we estimate is embedded finance space to grow 12% per year, up until 2025. It's a meaningful increase. Now, at the same time, I wanna reassure you there's also growth to be had in our core markets, particularly given the absolute amount that's in here. Let me just recap real quick these trends that I talked about, right? Attractive market, digitization, operating model changes, and embedded finance, integrating financing into customer journeys. What does all that mean for us? Well, it tells us what it takes to win, right?
These are our core beliefs, and this is really what guided the programs that we put together to win in the market that we'll talk about in a minute. I'll just walk you through this quickly. The first one is excellence in our core. This is our DNA that I talked about, asserting leadership in our foundational capabilities, risk management, customer intimacy, our people. The second is, with everything that's happening around customer behavior, we have to get even much closer than we are today to our customer. Really focusing on customer journey, focusing on customer outcomes, and provide solutions precisely where and when the customer is looking for them and can use them. Third, simple business models win. There's no question, right?
With the dynamics in the market, and again, the changes in customer behavior and the expectation in customer behavior, you have to be agile, you have to be flexible, you have to be able to react quickly to these changes. Scalability, adaptability, all required for sustained leadership. Last, it's something I said before, fundamentally, if you wanna be a leader in consumer finance in the future, you have to be a leader in technology. One will not come without the other, right? This is really how we think about, you know, what it takes to win for us in the market. It defines the strategic programs that I talked about before. You've seen a different version of the page before. I just wanna walk in a little bit more detail through this here.
Starting with our Cembra DNA, and at the heart of that, the credit factory. Look, Volker, I apologize at the risk of stealing a little bit of your thunder later on, but I would challenge anyone in the room to go and find a consumer finance business with a flat NPL line through the worst financial crisis of our living memories, through the pandemic and other histories, other hiccups in recent history. We really know the art and the science of risk management, and that is a basis for our stable loss performance and also our strong ratings. The operational excellence will build a state-of-the-art simplified operating model with a future-proof tech stack that will deliver over CHF 30 million of annual savings and also deliver strong cost income performance. Importantly, will position us for sustained growth in all markets.
Accelerating growth in our core business will improve customer experience, differentiate our products, and grow our market reach. We'll talk about that in more detail later as well. Together with the opportunity you talked about in embedded finance, particularly Swissbilling, this will provide growth both on the asset side and an outsized growth on the fee side. Last but not least, cultural transformation. To make all this happen, we'll refresh how we work together as a team, and more on that in a moment. Overall, this will deliver over 15% ROE after the temporary reduction that we explained. Continued strong capital position, stable dividend, subsequently growing, based on strong EPS growth. Cumulative EPS growth we see through 2026 of 20%-30%.
I'll just be brief on this page, but I wanna pause on this, culture and why. Look, you can't find this in the P&L, obviously, but our confidence to deliver, as in the past and the future, is based on the strong culture that we have, and moving this culture as well to the next level. As we look at the challenges and opportunities ahead, there's a great opportunity to build our strengths, focus on starting everything we do with a customer-first mindset. We wanna create a more agile organization that's focused on learning, collaboration, and mutual support. We have a roadmap in place to do that, and I'm excited to be tackling this together with my team as we go into the new year. Secondly, structure follows strategy, so we're also making a few organizational adjustments.
To ensure we execute as one team, we're essentially splitting the commercial area into two functions. One is sales and distribution, which will be delivering our top line this quarter, next quarter, and the year, and product innovation, which is really more developing tomorrow's propositions along customer journeys that we see. Think about the commercial run and the commercial build. That will do a few things for us. It'll ensure more customer-centric versus product-centric approaches. It'll also ensure that we can pool relevant resources along these function lines. Importantly, it will also enable building platforms, which Nik will talk about in more detail, particularly in terms of technology and systems across the entire business of Cembra. Then lastly, the product organization will drive cross-functional collaboration to design customer experience, customer journeys on an ongoing basis.
Now, given the importance of the card business and the pivotal year ahead of us there in 2022, with all the challenges but even more with all the opportunities that we see, we're gonna bundle the activities in the cards business. That will report directly to me. In addition, we'll put a transformation team together with a transformation leader who will make sure, in partnership with us on the leadership team, that we're 100% on track with the changes in technology, with the commercial programs, with the culture transformation that we talked about. With that, let me hand over to Volker, our Chief Risk Officer, and, you know, roll up your sleeves 'cause he will take you to the shop floor of the credit factory. Volker, over to you.
Thank you, Holger, and good morning, everyone. Yeah, the Cembra DNA describes some of our core competencies. It describes who we actually are. There are three areas that I want to cover under this chapter. The first one is, as Holger just mentioned, the illustration of Cembra as a credit factory. The second one is, yeah, a short update on ESG topics. The third item is then to highlight the passion of our employees to perform and to serve our customers. Let's move into the first part, the illustration of Cembra as a credit factory. We chose this image as a credit factory because on the one hand it, yeah, illustrates that we are mass business. We have more than 1 million customers. It also indicates that we are very process-oriented. With high efficient processes, we deliver high-quality output.
It's probably also a short indication that we do not perceive ourselves as the stereotype of traditional banking, but we are consumer finance experts, so very operational and very hands-on. What I can say, and what's very, very clear, this credit factory has been delivering a consistent set of numbers over many, many years. We are illustrating it here on the top right with the loss rate. The loss rate since the IPO, if we exclude one-offs, has always been around 1%, so very solid performance, very stable over time. The same also goes for the NPL ratios, non-performing loan ratios, which has been stable for more than a decade.
Especially when you compare that with benchmarks in other markets and with other banks, where there has been always volatility depending on the macro stress in the environment, we do not see that in our book. It's a very resilient business model. We have a high quality of assets, and therefore, the NPLs is also very stable over time. It's probably also a consequence of the market that we are playing in. We are Swiss pure play. This is our market. We are the biggest player on the market. We have decades of experience, and as mentioned, more than 1 million customers. We have a certain risk diversification that is actually inherent in the business model because of our size. We are using several products in the space of consumer finance. We are using several distribution channels.
We are going to the market with several brands, and that all leads into a certain risk diversification. Probably it's also worth mentioning that the Swiss consumers are very risk-aware and generally have a good payment morale, which actually brings me to the processes in the credit factory. There are four processes that we want to highlight here in detail. One is the customer selection, so who are actually the Cembra customers? The second one is the underwriting, so how do we make sure that we understand the credit risk that we are putting on our balance sheet? The third one is then the portfolio management, so once we have an asset on the balance sheet, how do we control risk? The fourth process is in cases where customers might fall in arrears, how do we then service these customers? How do we deal with collections?
I've been briefly mentioning already Swiss consumers, which leads me actually into the first process of the credit factory, the customer selection. There are two messages that I want to give on this slide. One is that Cembra is not only exposed to a specific segment. We are broad on the market. We are covering the whole market. The second message that I wanna give is when it comes to the profile of Cembra customers, it's actually very similar to the profile of Swiss consumers in general. We picked out a couple of demographic variables to illustrate that. On the upper left, you can see the age distribution, the bars illustrating the Cembra distribution, and in the background, the gray area illustrating the population. You can see that we have two areas where Cembra customers are underrepresented. It's the young customers and the old customers.
Why is that? The main driver behind is simply affordability. In the young customer group, young people typically do not have the necessary capacity to service debt. Therefore, we are obviously very cautious in granting credits in this group. If we grant credits, we grant an average smaller credits so that there is the affordability to also repay the credit. Affordability is probably also explaining the other end of the distribution, the other tail of the distribution, where it's more about the older customers. There, typically, affordability is very good, but it's probably so good that the demand for credit is decreasing. Otherwise, beyond kind of these two tails of the curve, it's pretty much a reflection of the overall population and its affordability driving the differences. Talking about affordability, I mean, what's driving affordability?
It's typically the income situation, which we illustrate on the upper right. Also here, it's a continuation of the same story. We are underrepresented in the segments of the market with low income because people would not have the capacity to service debt. We are obviously, as a responsible lender, not granting credits to these people. What's worth mentioning, I think, is that typically there is this prejudice that consumer finance is targeting low-income customers or low-income consumers. This is something when we look into our databases that we simply cannot evidence. We cannot see that. Look rather at the right of the scale, there is actually a group of customers with very high income. Nonetheless, there is demand for consumer finance products.
It's probably driven by the fact that the kind of reason for taking up a consumer finance product is not solely need for money. It's also an aspect of convenience. Holger earlier on used the term embedded finance, so embedded in the purchase action, embedded in the consumption itself. I think that's a reflection of it. One needs to be very close to where consumption actually happens, and consequently, we also get to a profile of Swiss consumers on average. I mean, we just wanted to use a few demographic attributes to illustrate that, but obviously, with more than a million customers, we have a lot of information, a lot of data about customers, which actually is an asset for us.
This asset is something that we certainly use in the next process of the credit factory that I want to go into, and that is the underwriting. In the underwriting, again, two messages that I want to give up front. One message is, as I just highlighted, the importance of data and analytics. The second message is that we do and run this process in a very thorough way. We want to understand the credit risk that we are putting on our book because we understand it as a part of our responsible lending approach. A certain part of the underwriting is actually determined by the Consumer Credit Act in Switzerland. It's always complemented by a set of internal rules that we are applying.
To give you a data point there, if we look, for instance, into personal loan applications that we are declining, where we don't grant the credit, about 40% is just simply due to internal rules. Internal rules target more the creditworthiness of the customer, not so much the affordability. Here you can think about all the scorings that we are using. For the scorings, I mean, we illustrate here on the upper left a so-called distribution of credit grades, and they are based on scorings. It's a categorization of credit risk in the end of the day. The level of credit risk is probably not so important. It's more important that it's stable over time.
Because this stability and the risk appetite, this consistency that we maintain over time, is actually what generates then also pretty constant risk metrics, as we saw earlier on loss rates and on NPL ratios. The scoring is very important for us. We have a lot of expertise in the area just because of the factor that we have such a big database, so many customers, and also so much history. It's not only about demographic variables, it's also behavioral information that we have. We know the spending pattern of our credit cards customers. We know, and that's probably from a risk perspective even more important, the repayment pattern of our customers. We can use that for optimizing our underwriting strategies. Data is an asset for us.
Later on in the presentation, Niklaus will actually talk more about an investment program where we invest into new systems and new applications. Just keep in mind, they all produce data. They all generate data. This is obviously something where we also can become more and more important. There is kind of in the more recent past, a lot of buzz around the topic of data. You might have heard about big data, machine learning, and all these kind of things. We have it obviously on the radar screen. We are looking into that. It's probably not only relevant for risk management, it's also relevant for improving the customer service, the customer journeys, CRM activities. There are many kind of use cases in this area. Let's also be real.
The true evidence of success needs also be done, because there is this simple saying that there is no better predictor for future behavior than past behavior. We have a lot of past behavior in our databases that we can already use today, and we certainly do. There is one more item that I want to mention before I actually leave the page on underwriting, and that is the pricing for risk. Because an underwriting decision should not only deliver decisions that says yes or no, we grant a credit yes or no. It should also first of all determine the size of the credit, so the credit amount, but it should also generate the correct pricing for this risk that we are taking.
We have been two slides before talking about the loss rate of 1% on average over the last couple of years. The 1% doesn't need to be a holy grail. There might be segments where we actually want to increase our risk appetite to, for instance, 2% loss rate. The precondition is that we get priced for the risk. At the end of the day, it's a profitability calculation in total. We need to understand the risk, and we need to price for it. This is something that we already do today. We try to illustrate it here on the bottom left with kind of verification of our cutoff strategies that we also do profitability basis.
This is also an area where we still can become better, to be more tailored to every single customer segment and identify the right pricing for these. In underwriting, it's a lot about the topic of data, and data is actually also a topic that builds the bridge now to the next process in the Credit Factory, the portfolio management. Here we are obviously monitoring the risk that we have already on the balance sheet, and in case something unexpected would happen, we would swiftly react. On this page, I also want to cover one other topic, which is the consideration of sufficient allowances for losses for future losses. Let's go into the first part, monitoring of portfolio performance and swift reactions when necessary. What we display here is our reaction to COVID.
When COVID came in the first quarter of 2020, it's a crisis situation, and there is a set of tools that you can then apply in risk management. It's actually not very complicated. It's three basic rules that you need to apply. One is maintaining the business operations. The business needs to continue to run, simple as that. The second is make sure that the customers are still paying. The cash flow cannot stop. Also this, by kind of focusing on the collections activities, was then also focused on. The third area, that's the one that I wanna display here, is try to restrict further exposures to segments that are hit by the pandemic or its macroeconomic consequences.
We restricted some segments, and here you can think about people that are working, for instance, in the restaurant and hotel sector, because it was, with a lockdown, very visible that they might have an impact on their own income. You can see on the graph on the upper right, what we are measuring afterwards. As soon as we have restricted, it was kind of in hindsight, absolutely the right timing, the dark blue line indicates that the risk level has been increasing right afterwards. We were obviously doing the right things, which is also based on decades of experience, so we know what to do in these situations. As mentioned, there is one other topic that I would like to cover under the area of portfolio management, and that is around the reserving, so the allowances for losses.
Today, we apply an incurred loss concept in line with US GAAP. This gives us a reserve level, a reserve coverage, that's the allowances divided by the receivables of 1.4%. Actually, over the last couple of periods, it has rather been increasing, which I believe is the appropriate thing during a pandemic to be rather conservative there. The NPL coverage, that's the allowances divided by the NPLs, is on a level a bit north of 200%, so a very healthy level, probably also driven by quite conservative write-off procedures that we are applying in the business. This conservatism or this prudence in the reserving approach is also something that we continue with when we move from an incurred loss concept that we currently have into the so-called CECL standard.
CECL stands for the Current Expected Credit Losses. This will become applicable for Cembra in the beginning of 2023 under US GAAP. This is a more forward-looking concept, so it takes into account all the expected losses through the whole life of a loan, and it also contains some macroeconomic components, so a weighting of macroeconomic scenarios for the future. What it also would mean is that the reserve level, being it reserve coverage or NPL coverage, are expected to increase in the beginning of 2023 because of the application of the CECL standard. The quantitative impact of it, the estimated quantitative impact of it, is already taken into consideration when we later on look into the financial outlook for the outer years.
It's in the numbers there, and there will also be a few more details shared on that. We have been now running through three processes of the Credit Factory, and all of these processes have as a target to somehow limit the credit risk that we are taking on the balance sheet and avoid that customers are defaulting. Because when a customer defaults, it neither serves the bank nor does it serve the customer, this is what we want to avoid. Nonetheless, we are not always successful with that. There is always a residual risk that a customer becomes overdue, for instance, because of a change in the personal situation. Here you can think about unemployment, sickness, divorce. These are still our customers, and we need to service them well.
That is what we are doing in our collections process, the fourth process in the Credit Factory. Here again, two messages up front. One is that, the process in collections itself moves from the early phases in a very industrialized way to a more individualized approach on late collections processes. Then I also want to highlight that the collectibility of assets in late collections is still quite good. Let's start with the early collections process. As soon as a customer becomes overdue, we try to obviously find solutions for the customer so that the repayment capability is enabled by rearranging payment schedules, for instance, or deferring payments. This is, as mentioned, a very industrialized approach. It's also kind of falling into a Credit Factory approach, and we are tightly monitoring and measuring the processes.
We try to be as efficient as possible because we do not want to waste our resources. We only want to take contact with customers where we actually need to do it. We don't wanna kind of get in contact with customers that just forgot to make a payment. Here we obviously are very much focused on automation. We use an automated dialer to make these calls. We use text messages to remind customers to pay. We also, in this area, we use a lot of scoring and segmentation, so a lot of analytics to really target the right customers here. Obviously, if a customer is in payment difficulties, we also want to apply tools. Here also we illustrate what happened in the beginning of COVID. On the top-right graph, you can see that.
The demand for tools, collections tools to support the customer with, rearranging the payment schedule, increase in demand for a very short period of time. You can see here that it went up to 500 accounts that actually used tools like an extension, like a deferral of a payment, which probably might sound a lot, 500 accounts, but we need to put it in relation. We are talking about the whole personal loan book here with more than 100,000 accounts. It's in total, the payment morale was still kept also under the COVID crisis, which probably also explains the very solid loss performance that we also see this year. In the late collections process, the industrialized approach moves more into an individualized approach because these are customers that have more severe payment difficulties.
Obviously, we use our most experienced employees to find here really individual solutions for the customer because we understand also ourselves here as a responsible lender, and we need to find a responsible solution for these customers in these situations. Nonetheless, collectibility is still very good. We illustrate it here on the bottom left with so-called vintage recovery graphs. They are measuring after what period of time we have collected what percentage of the written-off amount. To read the graph, you can see it on the right end of the curves. After four years, after the write-off moment, we have nonetheless collected 50% of what has been written off. Collectibility is still intact somehow. That's kind of the four processes of the credit factory that I wanted to highlight.
I think what goes across are two topics. One is data and analytics and the importance of it, and the second is we are a responsible lender. Responsible lending is also a topic that in the context of ESG is important. Let me run you briefly through ESG and give you a short update there. We look at sustainability topics not as a temporary focus area. We actually look at it as a possibility to evidence the robustness and resilience that we have in our business. We have put ourselves targets in place. Let me briefly run you through this E, S, and G components of it. On environment, we have already been reducing our direct emissions, and we have put ourselves a target in place to continue with that. You can read it out here.
By 2025, we wanna decrease by 75%, so pretty ambitious target. On the area of social, and that's probably also where the whole area of responsible financing and responsible lending falls in, we have put ourselves a target on NPS, the Net Promoter Score. It's a metric for measuring customer satisfaction, customer loyalty. We have been measuring it for quite a while, but now we also put here a target in place. We are also of the belief that we need happy employees to have a good service for our customers. We also put ourselves a target on the Trust Index in the Great Place to Work context. We want to be a Great Place to Work for our employees, and we are actually certified.
In the area of G, governance, this is a traditional strength area that we have, and we want to continue to be strong in this area. Since last year, we have a sustainability committee that is actually chaired by our CEO, by Holger. We have also linked sustainability into the executive compensation. We also intend here and have put ourselves a target that we are among the first smaller Swiss companies where we get externally reviewed on our sustainability report. I will not go through all the recognition on the right-hand side. I think we are very proud of that, and we are very committed to this topic. I want to go into one more element, and that's around our employees.
Because I've been talking about the credit factory, and you can probably understand the credit factory as a bit of the hardware. But we need the employees, the people to run it, which is more of the software. This is obviously very important for us, and we have a very diverse workforce. It's a very experienced workforce. We look at them as ambassadors. They are very passionate about performing, passionate about serving our customers, and they are also very close to our customers. Consequently, we get from our customers very positive feedback. I mean, I was actually, a couple of weeks ago, sitting in a meeting with a cooperation partner, and I'm probably not quoting it exactly now, but basically the message was, "You and Cembra, you do not always have the lowest prices in the market.
You and Cembra do, you do not always immediately implement the latest technology, but what you have are the best people." I think there is very much truth in that. I might have exaggerated now a bit, but this is kind of the key of the message. But it's probably also not so good if you hear this message and the feedback from our customers from me, but if you hear it directly from the source. This is what we have prepared. If we go into a short video where you can then hear about the feedback from our customers.
Since 2004, I have personally been involved with the business development with the then GE Money Bank Genworth Financial relationship. Our product range of payment protection products not only provides Cembra Money Bank with a substantial revenue stream, it also lowers the default rate of the end customer. Cembra Money Bank is a valued and trusted partner of [AXA in] Europe. We are looking forward to what we will be able to achieve in the future and are already excited about what we will be able to achieve together.
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Excellent. You've heard it directly from our customers, right? Just a quick recap where we stand. Volker talked through the Cembra DNA, our credit factory, our people, our customers. Volker, I have to say, your words coupled with these persistently flat NPL lines always give me a great sense of comfort. With that, let me shift gears here into operational excellence. Nik will present this. Two key messages here, simplifying what we do and renewing our tech stack. Nik, over to you.
Thank you, Holger, and welcome everyone. I'm delighted to be here to present to you Operational Excellence Program. The Operational Excellence Program aims to radically simplify our operating model and transform our technology landscape to improve efficiency and to pave the way for profitable growth. We aim to achieve this by reducing our costs annually by CHF 30 million, at least CHF 30 million. The investments to realize these cost savings are CHF 55 million. With a greenfield approach, we lower the execution risk and speed up implementation. I will now explain in detail how we address Operational Excellence. The full benefit will be realized by simplifying our operating model and transforming our technology landscape. In our new operating model, we continue to focus on customer value with stronger focus on digital interactions and self-service. We will redesign our processes to make them standardized, simple, and user-friendly.
This is a prerequisite to integrate new partners faster with a digital customer experience. Our organization will become more flexible to respond to customer needs and market trends. This new operating model is based on our new technology landscape. Seamless mobile experience for our product and maximized efficiency through automation will lead to an excellent customer experience with speed and scale at optimal cost. The new solution is based on future-ready technology and the strengthening of our core capabilities. The idea of the greenfield approach is to reduce the execution risk to get stuck in the middle while transforming from our current operating model and IT into the new world. Instead, we fundamentally simplify our processes and build the new landscape from scratch. In doing so, we will be able to implement the solution much faster and break up with our legacy structure.
As a result, we will be able to realize the benefits much earlier. This approach also lowers the execution risks as our current IT landscape with the current operating model continues to run until the new one is set up. We will implement our new solutions product by product in order to enable future growth and realize cost reduction gradually starting from year one. To give you a sense what we mean with a simplified operating model, I will give you some examples. The next level of technology will unlock new opportunities for us. Let me start with customer experience. Our customers experience us mostly with paper and limited online and mobile experience. Depending on the channel, our customer experience has a different look and feel as well as different processes. In the future, customer experience will be very different.
It will be based on mobile solutions with unified user interfaces and seamless integration with our online solutions. Concretely, our customer can start applying for a new product in a mobile solution, and at any time, switch to the online channel and continue the process there. Of course, the other way around is also possible. Let me go to processes. To reach this new customer experience, we have to get rid of complex, often paper-based processes. Today, we print thousands of papers, send 10,000 letters, et cetera. In the future, we want to reduce this paper and aspire to avoid paper wherever we can. Therefore, we need to introduce simplified, standardized, and highly automated processes which will reduce our costs substantially and give our customer a faster response experience. We have many data available, and use them heavily, as Volker has explained in the previous section.
However, we collect this data mainly for reporting. In the past, it was okay when during an onboarding process a decision for a new product took hours. However, COVID-19 has accelerated the usage of digital channels, and therefore, real-time decision-making is necessary. We are going to introduce real-time decision-making and personalization. This enables us instantly onboard customers within minutes and support event-based personalized marketing. To give you an example for a credit card, imagine you're in a retail store and you want to apply for a credit card with the retailer's loyalty program. You take your mobile phone, you scan your QR code, you type in the required information, then you do a self-onboarding by taking your passport or ID. You scan with your camera one side, the other side. You scan your face.
Shortly after, you download the app, and you can start using your credit card instantly. This, we're going to launch in Q1 next year. The demand to interact with our partners digitally and real-time is increasing. Our answer to fulfill this demand are standardized API interfaces. This solution reduces the effort and implementation time to connect with partners. With the same technology, we can also integrate third-party services. Scalability. To cope with volume variations very cost-effectively, we need fast scalable solutions. We realize this by moving from a client server and host-based architecture to cloud technology services and hyperconverged infrastructure. Thanks to this technology, we can easily, and at lower cost, try out new solutions and profit from available third-party capabilities. At the beginning, I introduced our simplified operating model and our transformed technology landscape. Of course, the realization goes hand in hand.
Whenever we replace a system, we also change our operating model. Next, I will explain how we are going to implement our transformation. Our transformation is structured into three streams. First, customer value and experience. We launch our new credit card mobile app and onboard all our cardholders. Stepwise, we will integrate all Cembra products with the advantage for the customer to have one app for all the products. Expansion of self-service increases the customer experience and reduces our costs. Finally, we built the capabilities for event-based personalized marketing to increase customer and business value as Holger and Peter will explain in their sections. This stream will contribute CHF 3 million-CHF 5 million to our cost reductions. Simplified operating model. In the second stream, we simplify our operating model by radically redesigning our processes and establish a new digital operating model.
The leasing business will be the first on our journey to establish the digital operating model. All other products will follow a few years later. Our core banking solution will leverage third-party core banking services for implementation and operation. In combination with our simplified and automated processes, the digital experience is highly scalable, reduces costs, and increases efficiency. Overall, this stream contributes CHF 20 million-CHF 25 million to our cost reductions. In our third stream, future-ready technology, we build a new future-ready IT infrastructure. The new data center follows the approach of a hybrid cloud setup, which allows us to gradually benefit from services available in public clouds while keeping the core under tight governance. We will also leverage our data by establishing a real-time data analytics environment.
This enables us to generate event-based customer value, in other words, engage customers at the right time to generate value for them and for us. This stream will contribute CHF 3 million-CHF 5 million to our cost reductions. To give you the comfort that we deliver on operational excellence, we are revealing more details on our journey. I will now explain in more details about our roadmap and milestones to complete the transformation by 2025 and realize net savings of more than CHF 30 million, more than CHF 30 million in 2026, with a positive net savings in 2024. On the left side, you find our three streams that I have explained before, and along the timeline, you find our major milestones. The implementation will be done in a stepwise approach. Each year, we are going to introduce new solutions, realizing the benefit in the following year.
This avoids huge upfront investments over a longer period before any benefit is realized. We have already started our journey with four strategic initiatives. The mobile app for credit card, our self-service extensions, the new leasing platform, and our IT infrastructure transformation. I will focus on a few milestones and explain them in more details now. Let me focus on 2022. In Q1 next year, we will deliver the new self-onboarding and mobile solution for credit card, as I have shown you before. At the end of the year, the new leasing solution will be launched. Currently, we are testing our new mobile app for credit card with selected customers to get feedback and further improve our app. Beginning of Q2, we launch our self-onboarding and mobile app for IKEA. Next, we are going to roll out our mobile app to all customers.
In Q2, we will extend the self-service capabilities to increase customer experience and start reducing our cost. Of course, this is an ongoing process as over time, new requirements from customers and partners will be implemented. In our second stream, simplified operating model, we are in the preparation phase for our new auto leasing platform. In Q1, we will start the implementation together with the service provider. Over the next 12 months, we build an end-to-end auto leasing platform based on software as a service. Our processes will be completely redesigned with the goal to introduce simplified, highly automated digital processes. Beginning of 2023, we start doing new business on the new leasing platform. On top of the reduced cost, the new leasing solution enables us to offer services to third parties, for instance, captives, through our standardized API interface.
In our third stream, future-ready technology, we already have initiated our cloud technology and hyperconverged infrastructure transformation project. In Q1, we will start the implementation by moving our locally managed data center into a third-party data center to avoid major required investments. This new setup is the base for the hybrid cloud technology setup we are targeting for. In 2023, our journey continues. We migrate our leasing contracts from the old systems to our new systems and start replacing of our saving systems. This replacement is a prerequisite to start decommissioning for our legacy platform to reduce IT costs. In parallel, our new data center is cloud integration enabled. This means we are prepared to integrate other cloud solutions.
In 2023, we also establish a real-time data lake that will form the basis for event-driven marketing and real-time analysis. In 2024, all of our products are covered by the unified mobile app. Our customer will use only one app for all our products. Once this is completed, we are prepared to leverage from all the embedded finance capabilities we have developed. We will complete our new savings system as well as loan system, and we'll start the replacement of the card processing system. In the last year of this program, we complete the implementation of the new credit card processing system and the decommissioning of the remaining parts of our legacy IT systems. The transformation over the next four years reduces our cost base by at least CHF 30 million. At least CHF 30 million with a positive net savings in year 2024.
Pascal will further comment on the numbers in his section. Ladies and gentlemen, it has been a short introduction to our operational excellence program on which I worked with the leadership team for quite some time, and we are keen to implement. Let me summarize. The goal of the program is to radically simplify our operating model and to fundamentally transform our technology landscape. This will require investments of CHF 55 million over the next four years. As a result, we aim to achieve annual savings of at least CHF 30 million, gradually increasing after year one and fully effective in 2026. We pave the way for accelerating our growth.
All right. Quite some detail here on the technology roadmap. Look, we wanted to make sure that we give you a sense for what we're doing here, right? And give you the comfort that there is a game plan around the investments and the returns that we're seeing in this. You know, it is. I can tell you there's a number of pages behind each of these arrows on the page here, but hopefully that gives you a sense how we think about this. We're now at the first sort of round of Q&A here, and then we'll take a short break before we dive into the next section. I'd like to ask if we can please limit the questions to the topics that we've covered so far.
We'll have plenty of opportunity to talk about product, auto, personal loans, cards, et cetera, later on. Just wanted to take a short break and see if there's any questions on the sections so far, and happy to take them from here. Let's dive right in. We'll take the question in the room first.
Hello, good morning. This is Daniel Regli from Octavian. I have quickly two questions to Volker on the loss performance. One is on page 16. Just if you could explain, obviously, with the line for personal loans, and sorry, it's pure technical question, but this 30+ delinquencies seem to trend up since end of 2018. I would have rather expected the opposite, given that you have acquired the Cashgate portfolio during this time, which is or was labeled as higher quality than your existing portfolio. If you could explain this to me. Then the second question is about the loss rates also, or in particular, during the pandemic, and how far was this supported by, let's say, government support programs, and what is your expectation for the loss rate going forward when these government support packages are fading out?
Thank you for the questions. On the first one, it is actually a pretty technical explanation that I give now. The increase that we see on the 30+ delinquencies, and it's actually also visible on the NPL ratio for personal loan, is driven by a change that we implemented at that time when we moved the timing of when we charge off an account from the balance sheet from a timing after 120 days to a timing after 180 days. This is something that was also disclosed at that time, and we did that in order to align the collections processes better with the write-off processes.
Because we observed that especially on long tenure personal loans, we would actually write off the accounts from the balance sheet without having actually proven their collectibility because we would not have even initiated the legal procedures on these loans. Therefore, we adapted that. You will see, I mean, in the recent reports that we published, we also made a correction for that, so we kind of excluded these. If you would take that into account, the line is actually flat. It's kind of no worsening behind in the portfolio. On the second question, a very good question. I think there are many elements that contribute to a strong loss performance during the pandemic, and one is certainly the governmental measures that were taken.
Unfortunately, I'm not able to break it actually down what contributes to what, because we also did some restrictions on our end, as I highlighted, and we also strengthened some collections activities in order to maintain the cash flow that is coming in. When we see this mix of things that has been applied, it's always then hard to say what contributes to what. I think what we could expect for the future is. I mean, over the longer term, the business has always had a loss rate around 1%. We have always been consistent in our risk appetite and we plan to be consistent in our risk appetite.
When governmental measures are reduced, I would actually expect that the loss rate gradually probably comes back to this level of 1%, because one should also respect that the tightening measures that we put in place during the pandemic, we have now lifted them again because we are now optimistic again about the future. Therefore, it would make sense to gradually go back to around 1% as a level, but it will not happen from one day to another. It will creep in over time. For, I mean, we will see later on in the financial section, the projections for the future. For the loss rate, we are communicating there that we expect a level, yeah, less than or equal to 1%.
I guess for next year, it's probably rather less, and then it becomes more equal.
Good morning, this is Martin Rausch from UBS. I have two questions, please. First on perhaps still for Volker on risk, and that is really on CECL. Firstly, can you confirm that the below or at 1% loss rate already reflects the CECL change? This is indicative for the next couple of years. Also, if I may ask, would you expect a bit more volatility and procyclicality in loss rate as a result of the transition to CECL? Then finally, have you done any backtesting, perhaps on 2020, how the loss rate would have looked like under CECL? That would be my first set of questions.
Mm-hmm.
The second area I'm interested in is on cost savings. The CHF 30 million or at least CHF 30 million cost savings. Is that a net figure? And is that on absolute basis, if you could confirm that? I.e., should we expect the cost base to move from, let's say, CHF 247 million-CHF 249 million to around CHF 215 million-CHF 219 million by 2026? Thank you.
Thanks, Martin, for the question. We ha ve, indeed, Volker will start. Glad we brought you along, Volker. Good question for you. Yeah. Then Pascal will take the second question.
Actually, a very good question. Thank you for that. On CECL. CECL is a change in the calculation of the allowances for losses, so it's more of a balance sheet than a P&L item. Since, I mean, the majority of the changes are driven by the fact that the reserving will be done for the full life of a loan, which basically increases the reserve balances, increases the allowances, which would mean that it not automatically changes the loss rate, because the loss rate is obviously a loss provision on a P&L metric.
We would expect that the allowances go up while the loss rates are hardly affected. You have certainly a point there when it comes to the volatility. Because since the reserve balance is higher, every percentage change on a higher base obviously also means a higher impact in absolute numbers. I think we have evidence over the past years that we can manage the loss performance pretty well, which also kind of leaves us in a situation where we are quite comfortable in predicting the loss rate going forward. As mentioned, we will highlight that in the financial section of the presentation, where we communicate that it's, we expect it to be less than or equal than 1%. Yes, when it comes to the backtesting, we have been doing some backtesting.
Actually, the modeling we have put in place literally now in this quarter, and we intend to use the next year to find exactly more out about the volatility before we then implement at the beginning of 2023. Pascal?
I'll get back to the second questions. The CHF 30 million in net savings, recurring savings, and I will further comment later in my sections. We will disclose separately in the future how we execute on these net savings. Regarding the second questions, absolute or not, at the end, as well, we will also guide on the cost-income ratio to take into consideration the development of both, as well the costs and the income. We say, so for the 2022/ 2023 should be stable, around stable compared to where we are in 2021. Then a gradual reduction of the cost-income ratio up to 2026, below 39%.
Thanks.
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Thank you again. Daniel Regli from Octavian. Sorry, another follow-up question on the loss rates you talked about, Volker. Can you please put this 1% in perspective to the Cashgate acquisition? Obviously, this should have had an impact on your overall loss rate. Pre to the acquisition, obviously, it was rather 1.1%, and after it was rather 0.9%, and now you're guiding us towards 1% again. Do you expect an increase in the loss rate overall, correctly?
Yeah. On Cashgate, I think the loss rate of Cashgate is pretty much comparable to what we have been seeing in Cembra also before. Because there is also a certain product mix in the Cashgate portfolio because it was personal loan and auto leases. Obviously the Cashgate prior to the acquisition, they were quite aggressive when it comes to the pricing element, which also meant that they could probably not take the same risk level, the same risk tolerance as Cembra has. They might be slightly under the average of Cembra, but not materially. The Cashgate impact is something that I would not necessarily read out of the changes of the overall loss rate.
When it comes to your question about kind of a potential increase in the loss rate going forward, I think also there it would not be Cashgate driven. It would be rather in the area of what I mentioned before, that currently during COVID times, we see a quite favorable loss performance probably also just caused by the fact that in a lockdown, customers and people cannot use their money for consumption, so they are probably more diligent on repaying credits. We obviously plan for a future where no further lockdowns are coming, where the pandemic is going over and therefore also normal consumption patterns would kick in again.
Overall, no material changes that I would foresee, but I would expect a gradual normalization from the situation that we are currently in.
Thanks.
Thank you. Andreas Brun, Vontobel. I'd be interested in from Nik a bit more of information about your partners in technology. Maybe if you can share who you plan to work with these projects. You mentioned third party platform. If you could tell us with whom you're planning to do all these technology investments.
On the mobile solution, we are partnering with Backbase. On the new leasing platform, we are currently in negotiation, and we disclose this once we have decided on it.
Perhaps, if there's no question in the room at the moment. Yes, please. Yeah, again.
Thank you. Kaspar Kennel from zCapital . Two topics. one, to you, Volker . It was very interesting to see, you know, the whole process and all these steps. Now, obviously, you know, cost of collection cannot be the key point, you know, if you compare with your competition and the advantages you have against the local competition. Which one of all the elements that you showed us of the four is probably the one, if you had to name one, which is the most relevant for you in comparing it to the competition and your, you know, obviously better NPL rates and so on and so forth?
Mm-hmm.
The second topic to you, Volker, I just wanted to, I mean, you talked about the, you know, embedded finance and the customer centricity that you wanted to have more and more. If I think about, you know, embedded finance, isn't it maybe even for the customer less and less of relevance who, you know, does the financing for their purchasing needs, but rather just it needs to be on the spot, it needs to be fast, to be delivered quickly, but not so much, you know, who's really behind that. How is customer centricity so important for you guys?
Sure. Volker will start, and then I'll take the second one.
Yeah, on the first question, which kind of what is the process where we see the competitive advantage? I think I would highlight the underwriting process, and the reason why is the availability of data and the history of data. I think that's where we have a competitive advantage, especially relative to new entrants in the market. Because when a new entrant comes into the market, they lack this history. Typically, they don't manage to maintain consistency in their risk appetite over time while we do, while we understand the risk that we are taking on the book.
In the end of the day, the people driving that, I think we have very good people that bring this expertise to analyze the data and make kind of tangible output of this data and run these processes also operationally that are actually doing the underwriting. I think that's certainly a competitive strength that we have in place.
Yeah. Thanks, Volker. Look, again, on your second question, and I think it's a great question. Look, in a sense, you know, we have a strong brand, right, today, and people know us for the brand. Firmly, I believe you're only as good as your product is today, as your service is today, as your customer is willing to take it, right? That doesn't change with embedded finance, right? In the end, it continues to come down to, and this is also why we're talking about these intuitive, compelling simplicity of the solutions where and when the customer is needed, right? I think it comes down to, do you have the right proposition that resonates and that the customer in the end is willing to pay for, right?
I think in a sense, it really drives that very notion of getting closer to the customer because their expectations are changing and the way they use the products are changing and their journeys are changing, right? Whereas in the past, again, this was mostly physical, and I gave you some examples. In the future, as it's integrated into mobile apps, into digital apps, directly into the journeys, I think the way to make a difference is to be there where the customer needs you with the right proposition and product, right?
I think the other thing I would add, which is sort of adjacent to this that sets us apart, is. You know, the experience we have in the market, both in terms of knowing the partner universes but also knowing customer behavior, which Volker talked about at length, I think also sets us apart, right? Because at the end, underlying all this continues to be credit. Right? There continues to be credit. That's the market that we play in. I think it's fair to say not many people know this market like ourselves, right? Those are the two, three things I would say to this, if that helps. Please, yeah.
Anne-Chantal Risold from Octavian. On page 25, you show a roadmap how you're going to implement your big landscape transformation. My question is, I see from 2024 to 2025, you expect to decommission your legacy system. If you had delay in this, how that would impact your cost saving if you cannot decommission as fast as you planned?
Do you wanna start, Nik?
Yes. I mean, the legacy decommissioning starts, of course, whenever we can. The first big thing is, as I've mentioned in my presentation, once we have the savings away, the reason for that is we have it on a similar, on a big old host machine, and we can start decommissioning that starting already end of 2023. That's the biggest contributor, also the whole legacy decommissioning. Of course, once the credit card processing, we can also decommissioning afterwards the second big one. All the others are just minor systems.
Yeah. I would just add to the same thing exactly. I think he's explained as well previously, right? That is precisely why we're staging this, right? Because we wanna de-risk, we wanna make sure that we have the execution lined up. As I said, there's a lot of work and detail that went into this, and we're comfortable that we have the right plan together here in terms of executing. Thanks for the question. Perhaps, operator, any questions that's come through on the phone before we go to the webcast here?
So far, there are no questions from the phone.
We have a question here, on the web. What do you mean by increasing yield and margin pressure across markets? Look, thanks for the question. Something we talked about at the half year as well, and in a sense, not something completely new, right? I started my explanation on the market trends with this is an attractive market. Well, an attractive market attracts other players who come into the market, right? That is something that we've always seen, we've always been able to deal with, but we see it as well today, right? Again, with technology enablement, you get different players that come into a market with different kinds of ambitions.
Some of them looking to make quick money. We're in this for the long game, right? We have... This is what we do. This is our core business. It's not something that we're not used to dealing with. That's really what drives some of this, you know. I would add to the earlier point, as well, that we've made. Volker has alluded to this, right? In the end, it's more than yield, right? It really is what we deliver at the bottom line, right? There's more than focusing on yield. We said before, the easiest way for us to gain share with our work by dropping price, but we're not gonna do that, right?
This discussion here really is around, and we'll get to that in the next section as well, how do we make sure that we have winning value propositions in the market so we can keep the margins where we want them to be? Any other questions here? There's something that's on the screen, but I can't read it. There you go. Let me just read this. Can you further elaborate on the rationale for the data center move? You mentioned high investments for legacy technology, but what can the data center provide that you can't, and who is the technology partner? I mean, all the legacy technology is already paid for. Let me lead in. I wanna make sure we understand the question correctly, right? Niklaus can talk about the data center here in a second.
I think you already responded to the question on partners. The element of legacy technology in this question is really around what Niklaus just explained, which is, right, as we set up with this greenfield approach, we will over time decommission older systems, right? That's the kinda legacy, if you want, term around that. Nik, would you add anything on the data centers and that move?
Yes. On the data center move, what we mean, we currently have in our building a small data center, and it is end of life, which means we need to renovate also in the building and invest heavily, and we avoid this investing by going out into another data center. It's currently also in negotiation, so therefore we're not disclosed to whom we're going to.
Thank you, Nik. I think there's one more question here, if we can scroll down a bit. Question regarding full product coverage in app. Can you use the same app for different cards like IKEA, TCS, et cetera? Or you need to relabel the app for each partner? The question is, will our app, and I presume this relates to the Cardsmore first app, be able to handle different cards? Look, I think we, for perhaps understandable reasons, we're not gonna want to disclose every feature in the app because we don't wanna give anybody a head start in terms of what we're doing. But what I will say is, the app will clearly be focused on significantly improving user experience, right? Yes, you can have your cards in there.
Yes, you can service your cards in there. Yes, you can do your onboarding, as Niklaus explained, and many other things. It's gonna be, I believe, a real game changer for us from interacting with customers and from customer use perspective. That's how I would respond to that. Is that all that we have on the web so far? Good. Good for now. Let's take a 20-minute break. We'll reconvene at 10:50 A.M., and then we'll get into the commercial section, and I look forward to continued discussion. Thank you so much so far. Great. Welcome back everyone in the room, on the phone, the webcast. Hope everybody got the chance to take a quick break, a bite and something to drink. We're onto the second section here.
We're now going into the commercial part of the discussion. We'll talk about business acceleration, our core businesses. Peter will kick this off in a second. We'll talk about embedded finance and Buy Now, Pay Later in particular, and then we get to the financial section with Pascal. A couple of words on the commercial section. Look, I think I've said this before a few times, right? We are a leader in our markets, and that says there's really only one way to play this game. There's only one way, and that's offense. You know, this is why I put in the personal loan task force when I started. This is why I brought back Peter. This is why we talked about the things we did this morning in terms of getting ourselves future-proof from a technology and business operating model simplicity perspective. Right?
With that, I'd say, Peter, I'm throwing you in a little bit of the deep end here, right? I recognize he's only just rejoining the Management Board, but I know he can handle it. Over to you.
Thank you, Holger. Hello, everybody. My name is Peter Schnellmann. I'm glad to be here. It's good to be back at Cembra and in the consumer finance industry where I actually spent most of my career, and I literally know everybody and a lot of players and people. Actually, it's pretty funny. In the last couple of weeks in my job, I met a lot of relevant players in the market. I recognize that I really know a lot of those. I've seen them starting their platforms, their businesses, even seen them starting their apprenticeships in the industry. I mean, we really have a deep cornerstone in this consumer lending business, and so do a lot of people of our business have. It's impressive to see how this business has developed over the last year, also digitized.
Nevertheless, impressive is as well how relevant relationships are, especially in these pandemic times, where the market definitely has been different than before. As the bank explained throughout the year, the market has slowed due to pandemic and uncertain consumer outlook. We have seen confidence coming back and expect seeing low single-digit growth going forward. The pandemic has also accelerated digitization in a rather traditional market, and this trend we expect to continue. This also goes with the consolidation that can be observed along traditional physical credit originators. This change comes with an increasing platform and ecosystem structure, as Holger has elaborated, powered by technology, but also by behavior of the market. As an example, while in the past, a customer spoke every one or two years to us about lending.
Today, we see him in many touchpoints over a year coming to us or to talk about lending. When Holger came in this spring and asked me to lead the task force and to look at the new pandemic reality, hopefully soon post-pandemic reality in consumer lending, we started a task force, cross-function the bank, roll up the sleeves, and started immediately looking at stabilizing assets, ensuring long-term profitability through actions like pricing, risk, operational adjustments, and to stimulate sales throughout these cycles of COVID. I mean, just imagine doing consumer lending, promotion, and business in an uncertain period of lockdowns, reopenings, people are insecure if they have a job or not. Even employees being in home office, quarantine or even sick. This was hard work. I mean, it's really been a challenge to manage that through this period.
Look, no matter what, we achieved the stabilized assets in the second half, and we are moving back in growth mode now. I think this shows you how strong this team and this network is. Today, Cembra is the undisputed leader in this attractive market. This is our home turf. Given our share, we serve customers across the segments and the needs, as Holger already touched in his section, how diverse this is. To continue to do this successfully, it takes a couple of things. More differentiated products and services with strong capabilities across traditional and new channels. Simple and intuitive processes are critical both for efficiency and also changing customer service expectations. In addition, to address partner professionalization, it is critical to be able to collaborate seamlessly with such distribution partner.
That's actually where we see digitization shifting the fastest, and I think this also has been elaborated by Holger and by Nik with the platform. Cembra is uniquely positioned to win in this market, and let me explain to you why that is. It will start with distribution. Given our history, scale, and market share, by definition, we serve multiple segments. This is a key strength of us, which we continue to leverage with our omni-channel presence. Excuse me. The mix and self-selection of channels by customers is moving so. Distribution is shifting more and more online, and particularly new customer acquisition comes increasingly through tech-savvy partners or digital channels. Branches, on the other side, are a strong complementary differentiator for our existing customer base. Our market and value sales team is a high-performance engine, both for personalized service and lending advice, which is driving customer loyalty.
I think also Holger has explained that, of course, data helps us here because we do have the data to talk to those customers and know what to do. This hasn't changed, even though customers may onboard or contact us more digitally. Our dual brand strategy is another cornerstone of addressing market segmentation and lending behavior. Cembra continues to operate as a leading value brand with a higher risk-return profile. Cashgate, on the other hand, is positioned clearly for online and do-it-yourself customers with less need for personalized service, mostly at lower price points. This enables us to play the full spectrum of customers today and tomorrow. To stay ahead of competition, there are three distinct actions we are currently driving. First, we will focus on simplifying our operating model and adapt to the changing needs for an effective digital distribution. We see that as key.
This means we strengthen and regroup our sales teams in the branches to focus on value-added personal services and one-to-one lending advice. In addition, we centralize and streamline servicing and onboarding of the digital customers to increase efficiency and speed. All that to deliver on customer experience in every channel. Second, we will further diversify our products and services for more differentiated offerings. One fits all is no more the right thing in this business. We will be segmenting our customers based on behavior and purpose of their lending to offer specific product and more relevant propositions. Today already, we are the only operator that offers the full suite of consumer financing products to our customers, including loans, cards, leasing, Buy Now, Pay Later, even savings. This again, allows us to have long-term relationship with our customers throughout the entire customer life cycle.
Third, given the shift in channel mix, we will speed up the digital journeys and the ease of use. We integrate ourselves more homogenously with our established and new distribution partners, such as banks, brokers, retailers, and platform. I'll give you an example. For us, it is key to be seamlessly integrated on a partner platform, such as FinanceScout24 or Comparis, that the loan origination can happen seamlessly for the customer. This is key to success, and that's also where embedded finance is going and our digital journey is going. Overall, this will ensure to future-proof our leadership position, return the business to growth in line with the market, and hold our market share while, of course, keeping returns stable. That was my deep dive on loans. Now over to auto. Auto is another anchor of our business. We love this business.
Our CEO comes originally from the auto industry and worked, of course, for a large German manufacturer, but also many others of our industry or of our bank come from the industry, like car dealers or importers. Like that, our auto business is since many years, a cornerstone in the Swiss car financing industry. In the past few years, this has been not much more than a repeating story with auto. Today, it's a bit different, and that's because we have a new message. This is growth. Through the strategic period, we want to grow market share, we want to grow receivables, and we want to grow returns. I will get to the how in a minute, but let me first briefly update on the market. The market here is very robust, with strong underlying fundamentals.
In spite of some temporary challenges related to global supply chains, we do see changing consumer behavior with subscription models slowly taking a share of the pie and online distribution increasing. That said, the key channel for distribution continues to be the network of dealers. At the core, this is very local, regional market-driven business where relationship matters. We know this business inside out. Some of our senior commercial leaders have spent 20 years and more with us. Thanks to this team and our strong distributed organization, with decades on-the-ground experience and relationships, we have established ourselves as a leader in this space. You've heard it from our partner on the video directly before. This network and this expertise will continue to be a central element of our success going forward. What are the key actions we are taking?
This is back to Nik's points earlier. Our completely new platform, which will go live in a year from now, will be a game-changer for us and for the customers. That can be said clearly. You know, in the past and in many areas today, the decision time on a lease application may have been okay to take a couple of hours or even a day. With sales moving online and even more mobile, that is changing rapidly. Customers demand decisions in minutes, if not instantly. Our new platform will deliver this and give us a step change in servicing existing customers, as well as strong proposition for embedded finance in online platforms. Our new technology will also power more product differentiation and product bundles. I think that's an interesting one. Think of an insurance or another added value service on it.
We will be able to offer embedded financing solutions across the entire value chain, from the importer or distributor to the dealership to the end customer, all seamlessly integrated within one system. Great value for customers and partners, and a significant expansion of the market. With this, we plan to acquire new importers, relationships, launch online subscription model partnerships, strengthen our core market share through stronger value propositions, add new services and product bundles, and increase operational efficiency. All together, delivering growth in market share, financing receivables, and return. In our opinion, a really good story. Handing back to Holger for the cards piece.
Excellent. Peter, thank you. Some of you have told me in the break you're looking forward to this section. Let me dive into it. The cards business. Look, I know this is a topic of interest to you, and it is a topic of interest for us for the obvious reasons. This really is, I think, you know, the day-to-day is a great opportunity to just take a step back and walk you through how we think about the entire story here, right? How we think about the portfolio, the profitability around the portfolio, how we think about retaining profitability from the merchant relationship, and what opportunities we see going forward in this business. Before, let me just briefly start a bit with the market here.
The good news is, we've seen a continued gradual recovery after the extended period of lockdowns. We spoke about that in the summer. That trend's continued, and it's also reflected in our performance. We're quite pleased with that. On a macro level, the further reducing use of cash continues to provide tailwinds to the credit card business. We're also seeing that. Look, in terms of retailers and our co-brand relationships, you know, we continue to see quite good interest from the retailing space in terms of combinations of credit cards with loyalty programs to really drive differentiation and bring customers back to the stores. As Cembra, I think we're really well-positioned in this market, right? Leader in the co-branding space.
In fact, if you think about it, we've really been in retail sales finance already since the 1990s. I remember my days in the early 2000s here when we were already in that space before we even launched credit cards. Then since then, over the last 15, 16 years, have built a strong position, really strong position, leading franchise in the co-branding space. Embedded capabilities into our teams. You know, we speak the language of our partners. We understand what they need. We understand how we can help them build and grow their businesses. And these deep relationships continue to be in place. Look, this is not only leading to strong partner satisfaction, but also to end consumer satisfaction, right?
This matters because, you know, every customer has, what, two, three-ish cards in their wallet. You wanna make sure that yours is top and gets used, right? Our market shares in volumes as well as contactless transactions does compare favorably to the competition. Now, let me kinda put the Migros relationship into this context. The Migros card obviously has been the key driver of growth in this portfolio for a while. It's also true, though, that since 2016, roughly, we've seen a slowdown in this growth, and the relationship does come with some strings attached, which we've talked about. There's exclusivity, right? Other food retailers are off-limits.
It is a great card product that receives strong reviews from consumers, but it's also a one-size-fits-all card product out there for 850,000 cards that we have. So no tailoring to specific segments, no tailoring to specific needs or behaviors from the customers. We also haven't been able to really effectively cross-sell and upsell on this portfolio, right? That's what we usually do. That's our machine. That's what we talk about in terms of the breadth of products that we have. We haven't been able to do this given the nature of the relationship. Then lastly, you know, you guys know Migros, they're in a broad range of activities. And so you're adding services, third-party services has been close to impossible for us. I think look at it this way, right?
Great partnership, and we'd love to continue it, right? We want no mistake. At the same time, I think the upshot here is that we now have significantly more degrees of freedoms, freedom in terms of what we do in the cards business going forward. Importantly, we have an in-house team that because of the history I just explained, the 25 or so years in retail sales finance, the more than 15 years in co-brand cards has the capabilities, and I can tell you from the energy that I get when I talk to the team, it's 100% fired up to prove that we can continue to win in this market. Confirmed, Carsten? Yeah. Thumbs up. There you go. Look, let me. We've explained before how we arrived at the guidance here.
I previewed this with saying, as we stand here today, sort of five months on from the initial announcement of this, of the pending termination, I'm actually more convinced about the guidance that we've given. The reason for this is because, as you may recall, we put a dedicated team onto this challenge, immediately when we had announced this. Since then, they've actually confirmed a lot of the hypothesis that was at the time, backed it up with data in terms of the customer profiles, customer segmentation, making really good progress in terms of new value propositions and other things. A bit more on this later. We can with assurance reconfirm the guidance.
Now, I've also asked for your understanding in the past that we can't go into a ton of detail on what we know about the customers. You know, we really don't wanna give the competition a head start, right? I do wanna highlight just one point here in terms of some points how we grow and retain profitability. We have well over a million cards out in the market, and they generate enormous amounts of data. I wanna share this one particular, I think, particularly powerful point with you see on this page. We know from the analytics that we've done that less than 50% of the customers across our cards portfolio make up almost 90% of the profitability.
We also know from the analysis on the behavior data that those customers tend to be among the more loyal customers, right? It's these kinds of insights and many more like this that we're using to design propositions, that we're using to design migration strategies, that we're using to design communication materials, that we're using to design what we're gonna do as and when this relationship comes to an end next summer. You know, I've also said before, we were looking to put in place a dedicated retention unit, which we have. They don't have much to do yet because I can tell you, we don't see any usage patterns changes by customers yet, right? Again, there's great continued demand for the product. It's sticky, it works well, customers like it.
Again, we're confident about the guidance here. Now, how does all this sort of give us that confidence? Let me illustrate that on this page, both on financing receivables as well as on net revenues. First, we've seen a sound recovery in transaction volumes and fees coming out of the lockdowns. You know, the asset base has really continues to prove to be very, very resilient. You know, there's obviously some continued uncertainty around COVID, right? But the general point, and we've seen this over again and over again coming out of lockdowns, things come back quickly, and we're quite pleased with that, and that gives us good confidence.
You also have seen the precedent case when UBS took over the cards program with Coop from Swisscard, and that also clearly illustrates stickiness and loyalty in these programs, right? I think I mentioned the data points before. 15 months into that transition, less than 40% of the customers had actually applied for a new card. We know from ABS documentation from Swisscard that their number of cards, this was beginning of this year, really hadn't moved much since that transition, right? We have to remember that for many customers, cards are actually low involvement products. They're sticky, right? They work. Look, if I have my card, I do have one too here, right? It works. Why should I change it, right?
Why should I go through the hassle of re-underwriting, of sending my documents, of finding all my loan statements, of, you know, salary statements, all those kind of things, when I can simply sit there, get a new card sent to my home, open the letter, and immediately it works, right? We do believe this again is part of our advantage in this situation. Now, even more importantly, we have been very active even before, but certainly since this announcement in terms of driving growth across the portfolio and active particularly specifically to this situation here. Really, as I said, being able to confirm the underlying hypothesis that provided the guidance for us. These are the five key actions that we're driving.
The first one is accelerating growth with our existing partners in the co-branding space, right? Like IKEA and TCS. It's business as usual. That's what we're doing, and there's good potential for 2022. Secondly, we already mentioned that we're launching a completely revived front-end engagement layer for our customers in the first quarter next year. Niklaus talked about this and showed you a bit how it's gonna work, and I'm thrilled about this. This will be a game changer for our entire portfolio, right? A whole new way of engaging with customers, a whole new way of more touch points with customers, ease of use, everything we talked about in the opening section. For us, also a great way for lifecycle management across the portfolio.
Third thing is we will be launching a completely revamped value proposition with our own cards around mid-next year. Again, I will not be able to tell you all the details here because this is obviously competitive in nature. What I can reassure you is that we're on track to deliver this, and there's some really innovative features that are gonna come with that program. Fourth, our transition program is gaining great shape, and we'll be ready for timely execution. Then last not least, we always have discussions with other co-branding partners. Clearly, over the last months, we've been intensifying these, and I am very pleased with how they are progressing. I'm actually quite optimistic we'll be able to come with some good news around this, one or two co-branding partners around mid-2022 as well.
With all of these actions, we're confirming again the guidance that we've given to you, and we're also confident in terms of our longer term outlook to recover to pre-COVID levels in assets and revenues by 2023. Look, I think if you take a step back, 2022 will clearly be a transition year for us in the cards business. I think that is clear. If I engage with our task force, if I engage with our teams that drive these new propositions, if we talk to market participants, the longer, the more I am convinced it's gonna be a reset for a new growth trajectory. You know, we have the capabilities, we're building the programs to execute, and we're resetting this business onto a new growth track, and that's where what we're gonna do.
All right, so I get all the fun stuff today. Now off to the next growth area here with Buy Now, Pay Later, which we talked about a bit in the morning already. Let me just kind of start with how this works, this product, so we kinda ground ourselves. Essentially starts with a customer going to buy a consumer product, pays in installments, could be anywhere between a few hundred and several thousand Swiss francs, and it's applicable both in online and offline environments. The Buy Now, Pay Later provider pays the merchant who immediately receives their funds minus a fee, and the customer typically equally immediately has access to the product that they buy.
In addition, because of the typical amounts and the modalities of the payment schedules, there's typically a much simplified credit approval process that applies. So what makes this so attractive? I mean, you can see how this drives significant benefits to all parties, right? In essence, if you think about it, the product really materially removes barriers out of this process in the transaction. For the consumer, it's convenience, it's flexible and safe payments with tailored payment options. For the merchant, it's an omni-channel solution, but actually it's much more than that, and they increasingly realize it. It's actually a traffic acquisition and marketing tool for new customers, right?
Because you can essentially promote certain product categories, you can attract new customers, so it's hugely beneficial, and that's also what drives some of these variations you see in some of the space. On the right side here, it's actually quite staggering if you look at the growth rates on a global scale, right? In Sweden, up to 25%, penetration e-commerce payments, and that's up from mid-single digits not too long ago, right? Switzerland is sort of in that space, mid-single digits, so it also gives you a good sense of the growth that we would expect in the market.
Let me spend a bit more on this so we can articulate the business case that we're seeing here. Retail sales in Switzerland are just under CHF 110 billion, forecast to grow about 2% per year, primarily driven by online sales. Financing volume supporting these retail sales is forecast to grow about 7% per year, right? Penetration increasing, and that in turn is mostly driven by Buy Now, Pay Later. We see this, we forecast this to be a very sizable CHF 3 billion-CHF 4 billion volume market by 2025. On the right you see the players in this market today. Let me give you some context on why we think our payment technology subsidiary Swissbilling has an edge.
Look, they may have been a little bit under the radar screen so far, but that doesn't mean they haven't been working hard and haven't made great progress in growing their customer base, relationships, capabilities, et cetera. We acquired this business in 2017, and they really have leading capabilities in billing in terms of fully integrated pay by invoice services, both in online and offline environments. Interesting data point, you know Switzerland today already about 80% of those who buy online choose to pay via invoice. And the way Swissbilling gets into this, in most cases, the service to the merchant includes financing the invoices, merchant is paid immediately, and then Swissbilling handles the billing, the dunning, the collection, and the risk management.
Underlying this is very, very strong risk management capabilities in the business. AI-based technology to integrate into the merchant's customer journey and really provide a seamless service to the consumers. I think, look, the outcome of all this, I think has been remarkable, right? We work with already today with over 1,100 merchants in Switzerland, more than 200 of them in Buy Now, Pay Later. We have over 800,000 recurring customers. This year we're looking to process about 1.3 million invoices. That makes CHF 350 million of billing volume, CHF 125 million of financing volume, which looks hard to assess the specifics around the share, but probably puts us in about a 10%-20% market share range at this point where we are.
Let me just reference a couple examples here. For both the largest sports retailer in Switzerland, Ochsner Sport you see here, as well as for a large global market leader in furniture retailing, Swissbilling is providing a Buy Now, Pay Later solution and a pay by invoice solution in their online stores. By the way, both of these in the past have worked with a well-known international Buy Now, Pay Later provider, whom I'm sure all of you have heard of. We actually are very well positioned to compete in this market. Why did they choose us? Well, it's because of the comprehensiveness of our solution, because we have deep local market understanding. We know the behavior of customers.
We know what they want, we know how to service them, and because we're able to tailor our offers directly to what these retailers want and need. The example on the right is, I apologize, it's in German, but it's actually a live snapshot from the website where you can see under the Swissbilling payment options, you can choose to pay in one invoice or to pay Buy Now, Pay Later, in this case, in three installments over three months. Let's hear this directly from these guys how they think about us.
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Very much focused on quality, very much focused on local market, very much focused on their customers, and very much focused on understanding how the market works, right? That's what won us this deal, and that's the strengths that we bring to the table.
How does Swissbilling fit in with our overall strategy? Let me spend a minute on this as well. You know the Temenos side, right? Traditionally, mostly focused on classic loan, leasing, and cards products. Swissbilling, on the other hand, operates in payments, invoice processing, invoice financing, and Buy Now, Pay Later, which is outside the CCA, the Consumer Credit Act. Now, we know from our own as well as external research that users of Buy Now, Pay Later products are also significantly more likely than non-users to rely as well on other types of credit, more often revolving credit cards. As we explained before, how financing methods increasingly used more interchangeably across touch points.
As we've seen these trends in embedded finance, now Buy Now, Pay Later gain traction, we've been developing comprehensive cross-sell, upsell and monetization strategies around this collaboration. That's really what we're setting ourselves up to do here. I think given our broad range of products and our broad range of channels and partners in the market, I think we're uniquely positioned to gain increasing traction and actually grow profitably from the outset. You know, the key point in this is monetization, right? It's hard to make money off just one single product if you're a monoliner, right? As much as I love some of those valuations, right? You expect from us a significant return on equity, right? There's a framework that we're executing towards, and we'll continue to do that.
I think what sets us apart in this space is the ability, because we have this entire chain of products across touchpoints, across channels, there's a monetization play here for us. I think it's much, much clearer than if you're just a monoliner. Let me just briefly summarize the strategy of what we're doing here. Again, I think great starting position. Over 800,000 recurring customers, over 1,100 merchants. Important side note, you know we're a regulated bank. Swissbilling is part of a regulated bank. Again, that is trusted by all stakeholders. I think that also gives us a bit of an edge, sets us apart from the competition. They've been great in winning partners, and by the way, in winning partners because of the combination between Cembra and Swissbilling, right?
That's how we won IKEA, for example, because we have more than one product. We have the entire range to offer, and we plan to do more of that going forward. We're profitable today, and given our broad product set, we've got strong monetization capabilities ahead of us. Few key initiatives for this coming year. The first one is to scale up our presence in the German-speaking part of Switzerland. The company's based in the French part where they have actually even higher penetration, so we have a good plan to grow mostly with about 200 merchants, mostly in the German-speaking part. Second, we're gonna introduce an account solution which will allow the consumer to even more flexibly manage their payments.
In parallel, and I mentioned this before, the power of this product for merchants really push that side to help customers, meaning our merchants, to use this product as a marketing and sales acquisition, a sales driving tool. Lastly, in 2023, we're also looking to extend this product to merchants who are not integrated into the payment and checkout processes yet. Look, while this market is nascent and you know, in the end, it depends on the participants to drive it, meaning folks like ourselves, and growth rates may vary a bit. Our ambition, underpinned by our business plan, is to generate CHF 1 billion or more of Finezly volume by 2026, and incremental CHF 10 million-CHF 20 million of net income to the business. I think an exciting journey ahead for us here.
That's what we had on the business acceleration and the new growth section. Let me hand over to Pascal to bring it home, talk to us about the financials and capital framework and all that. Thank you.
Thank you, Holger, and good morning, everyone. Before we talk about our financial ambitions, let's first update on the 2021 numbers. We expect a robust and resilient business performance for 2021, with a net income estimate between CHF 159 million-CHF 162 million, respectively an earnings per share of CHF 5.40 to CHF 5.50, which is 4%-5% increase compared to prior. This is aligned or in line with the outlook we gave in summertime. The net revenues are expected to be -2% to -3% for the full year, with the second half of the year broadly flat compared to prior years following card recoveries, as you can see in the middle of this chart.
We had in terms of transactions volume +14% compared to pre-COVID level, 2019, for the period July to November. For the same period, in terms of revenues, you can see on the bottom basically the gap, the revenue gap is narrowing. In terms of asset development, it was +1% total assets from June to November, with confirmation of stabilization of the personal loan assets, stable auto, and the credit card assets growing as a result of increased transaction volume. Obviously, more update on 2021 in February with the full- year update. The Cembra equity story is actually a straightforward story. Assets growth in line with GDP, high ROE, strong capitalization, and an attractive and increasing dividend. We deliver on this since the IPO.
We have an EPS growth, which is a mix of organic and inorganic activities, particularly with the acquisitions of Swissbilling, EFL, and Cashgate latest. We demonstrated during the COVID situations a resilient business performance. For the first six months of this year, 14.2% ROE. In COVID situations, many of our peers are actually reporting return on tangible equity. If you report, or if we would report on the return on tangible equity, we would be at 18% for the first six months of the year. We deliver this attractive, growing dividends +4% on a CAGR basis from 2013, supported by a strong capitalization, also very attractive. The cost of funds also driven by a balanced and well-diversified funding portfolio.
Still a bit of the past, profitability by source. Going forward, we will introduce a new alternative metrics, which is called the return on financing receivables, or we could call actually the net margin. Why do we introduce these metrics? In the past, we often commented on the yield development as an indications for or guidance for margin developments. Margin is the sum of several components, including, of course, the yield, but interest expense, provisions for losses, operating expense, taxes. In the future, we will decompose our profit by source and improve our disclosure to better explain the movement in margin. Why do we show on this page 2016? It's quite simple. On one side, as it was the revisions of the interest cap in Switzerland and reductions from 15% to 10% for personal loan and auto business, as an example.
It was also the first year after the introduction of negative interest rates in Switzerland. As you can see, it had some impact, ultimately, on the net interest income. The commission fees increased during that period from 2016 to 2019. Obviously, in line with the increase of the card growth. You can also see, this was the net interest income reduction was partly offset on one side by favorable provisions for losses, but also and with operating expense being flat.
2021, we'll obviously provide a more detailed in February, but in total, you obviously see as well the impact of the COVID situations on the commission and fees, and we expect a return on financing for 2021 in total to be around 2.5%. Now let's move to the outlook. On the left side, this is a recap of our expectations for future asset growth as presented earlier by Peter and Holger. At group level, we expect an asset growth or net financing growth of around 1%-3% per year. I want also to mention once again that the strategic program, Buy Now, Pay Later, will contribute mainly to commission and fees. This is fast-turning assets business. Therefore, it's not primary an asset growth or interest income business.
On the right side, we expect our return on financing receivables to increase over time. First stable, and then increase over time. With an anticipated pressure on the net interest margin, which is driven by pricing competitions and also assuming some increase in interest expense over time. We clearly expect this to be offset on one side as well by the increase in commission and fees, clearly supported by Buy Now, Pay Later growth, but also supported by the COVID recoveries and the impact on the card business. We clearly, also, expect a major contributions from the operational excellence, strategic initiatives, which was presented before by Niklaus, where we expect ultimately as well the net savings of CHF 30 million+ annual by 2026 latest. Let's talk about expense.
The strategic program, Operation Excellence, is instrumental to further drive efficiencies and scalability in our operating model and contribute materially to the improvement of our margin. We heard before that we expect the benefits realizations in excess of CHF 30 million in form of annual expense savings, and these are recurring savings. The savings are driven by automation, standardizations, and decommissions of legacy system, which is mainly driven by the simplified operating model as mentioned earlier. This will reduce our compensation benefits from 55% to 47% or below of the total OpEx over time, which make our operating model more scalable. In order to deliver on this,CHF 30 million annual savings, we will invest CHF 55 million in operating excellence.
As you can see here on the left side, you can see the shape of the cost and benefits with the expected positive net savings by 2024. 50%-60% of these CHF 55 million investments are related to build the core banking to simplify our operating model, and 30%-40% are related to future-proven technology. Our ambition is to reduce materially our cost-income ratio from today 51%, around 51%, to below 39% at the end of strategic cycle. This will bring us also closer to some of our international peers, particularly in the Nordics region. In 2022 and 2023, we expect the cost-income ratio to be largely stable.
As a result, some of the investments on one side are in the card strategy, but also the investments in our strategic program, Operation Excellence. Let's talk about funding. We have a balanced and well-diversified funding portfolio. We manage prudently our liquidity and interest rate risk, as you can also see on the table below. Liquidity coverage, as an example, is far above the minimum regulatory requirements of 100%, or you can also take as an example the leverage ratios, which is also far above the minimum 3% Basel III requirements. This shows the prudent approach to our risk management. Following the August announcement, our Cembra credit spread increased temporarily by 30 basis points and recovered fast and stabilized again at prior level a few weeks later.
This shows the strong confidence of our fixed income investors in the strength of our balance sheet, despite the loss of one of our important partner. Regarding change in interest rates, Cembra, we have usually lower exposure to interest rates change compared to many of our Swiss banks or competitors in leasing business. We actually anticipate a favorable impact in case of interest rates rise as repricing of the liabilities will lag due to a slightly negative duration gap we have today. Let's talk about capital management and outlook. First, as a reminder, we use the standardized approach of Basel III framework for the calculations of capital adequacy requirements for credit, market, and operational risk.
As you can see on the bottom left, 86% of the risk-weighted assets are allocated to credit risks, which we don't have the market risk, which shows also the simplicity of our balance sheet. In the past, we demonstrated an effective use of capital to the benefits of our shareholders. We set a minimum or midterm targets of 17%, and we used excess capital as an example in 2019 to finance growth for the Cashgate acquisition, temporarily going below the target with a clear path how to achieve the target of 17% in a short period of time.
We paid out extraordinary dividend for the financial year 2016, and even during the COVID period in 2020, we also paid out an ordinary dividend slightly above the range of 60%-70% to ensure a stable dividend per share. For the future, the Tier 1 capital ratio of 17% isn't changing. We want to maintain our credit rating for the benefit of attractive cost of funding. The upper limit of 19% on distributions of excess capital is removed because we want to enhance our returns through capital redeployment already above 17%, and we want to allocate capital to further drive organic and profitable growth. Similar to the past, we will continue to explore opportunistic M&A following our disciplined financial and capital management, as we have demonstrated in the past, we drive synergies from acquisitions.
To the extent excess capital is not deployed with such growth, we will redistribute excess capital in form of stock buyback or special dividends. As part of the Cashgate acquisitions, we placed an additional Tier 1, and going forward, we want to continue, or we want to consider continuing hybrid funding in the future, but of course, depending on market conditions. Finally, as already mentioned by Volker, we will implement the Current Expected Credit Losses as of January 1st, 2023, under, as required by the US GAAP standards and also the FINMA accounting ordinance. This will have an impact, a one-off impact on the Tier 1 ratio between 0.6%-0.9% during the strategic cycle 2022-2026. EPS outlook.
We expect to grow our EPS by 20%-30% over the strategic cycle, and this is supported by our strategic initiatives. On one side, operational excellence will be a key contributor to the EPS growth, but you see as well that the profitable growth out of the business accelerations in personal loans, in auto, in cards, and new growth opportunities will be EPS accretive. As we discussed before, we will further redeploy excess capital to drive profitable growth. From EPS growth, let's move to dividend per share outlook. We want to maintain an attractive and increasing dividend. What does it mean? For 2021, we plan to pay a dividend of CHF 3.75, same level as what we paid last year. For 2022, the dividend is expected to be at least CHF 3.75.
Afterwards, we intend to increase the dividend based on a sustainable earnings growth subject to a minimum of the prior dividend per share. Let's recap on our financial targets. We have the existing targets today, which are return on equity, Tier 1 capital ratio, and the dividend per share. For the return on equity, we mentioned before, 2022, 2023, slightly decrease, for the 13%-14%, with the ambitions starting 2024 to deliver again a return on equity above 15%. Tier 1 capital ratio unchanged, and dividend per share for 2022 at least CHF 3.75, and then, as mentioned before, 2023 to 2026, increasing.
To track the strategy executions or to monitor the strategy executions, we will implement additional targets, one being overall the assets growth, 1% to 3% in line with GDP. Also, the EPS, the cumulative EPS growth we mentioned before, 20% to 30% as a result of the implementation of the strategy programs. The cost-income ratio, stable overall above 50%, probably stable overall for 2022-2023, with a clear ambitions to gradually reduce to less or below 39% in 2026. We discussed before with Volker, the risk provisions for losses expected to be broadly in line overall with the historic performance we delivered at 1% or below. Of course, mentioned several times, we will also implement or improve our additional disclosures.
One being the profit by source. We will report a savings from Buy Now, Pay Later being improved on the Swissbilling disclosures. Ultimately, we will show, as well as, a return on tangible equity in addition to return on equity. Let me summarize before I hand over to you, Holger. We remain focused on continuing to create shareholder value. We know our company very well. We have a clear roadmap on how to execute on our strategy. We thoroughly understand the opportunities of this strategy as well as the challenges. As usual, actually as we do it today, we communicate frequently at all with you, with our shareholders, and welcome very much the continued dialogue. Thank you.
With that, I hand over to you.
Thank you.
[audio distortion]
Excellent. Let me briefly wrap up here, and then we'll take some more questions here in the audience and for those remotely with us. Starting with our ambition, right? Combining leadership in our core in consumer finance with leadership in technology to deliver the most intuitive and compelling solutions for our customers in consumer finance here in Switzerland. We're doing this from a position of strength. Volker walked you through our credit factory, our passionate teams, and you've heard from our customers what they like about us. To execute against the vision, we're driving four distinct strategic programs. Niklaus talked about operational excellence, how we simplify what we do, and how we put our tech stack onto a future-proof infrastructure to take over CHF 30 million of annual cost out, and to significantly further increase our proposition to our customers and partners.
We talked about accelerating growth in our core businesses, and also the opportunities we're seeing with Buy Now, Pay Later and embedded finance. All of this underpinned by cultural transformation that really takes all the good things we have, all the strengths we have, and lifts us to the next level. All this will deliver 15% or more ROE from 2024 onwards, and a dividend of CHF 3.75 this year, the same or more next year, growing from there onwards, backed by strong EPS growth. That's what we had to present today. Now I'm excited to take some more questions and engage in dialogue with you. Floor is yours, please.
Nicolas Bürki, Mirabaud Asset Management. Unless I missed it, I think you did not show the time distribution of the CHF 55 million cost. Can you elaborate a bit on that, please?
Sure.
Thank you.
Pascal, do you wanna give some context on the distribution there?
Yeah. Can we show the page number 47? You see here on the bottom line as well, basically, as all the costs, the P&L OpEx impact, including the depreciations of the investments, the CHF 55 million. You see as of from a P&L standpoint, the biggest impact will be in 2024, at the same times where we expect as all the benefits to come in.
Please, Martin.
Yes, Martin Rausch, UBS. I have a couple of questions, please. Maybe first starting with the capital management. Just to make sure I understand the new capital management framework, can you clarify how the decision process will look like once you hit 17% Tier 1 ratio and you don't see near-term or imminent organic growth opportunities nor M&A transactions in the pipeline, you would distribute that excess capital about 17%. Am I interpreting this right? Or there is perhaps a bit more flexibility to the approach?
Well, let Pascal talk to that in a second, but just quick preload, and you gave part of the answer in your question, right? Clear priorities, right? We have a growth plan here that delivers organic growth. Secondly, as we've always said in the past, right, strategy enabling M&A absolutely in the cards, right? So, that is also the case. You get to the third option, and then let Pascal briefly walk through that in terms of distribution.
Yeah. As I mentioned before, we have demonstrated in the past an effective use of capital, and we'll continue as well to do so. We will have regular assessments on our capital positions, taking into consideration the business opportunities we see on the market, taking into consideration the development of our core business as well as organic growth. Looking at M&As, I think we have demonstrated in the past that we are able to execute on opportunistic cases. Of course, it's set over time, so if we don't see this business opportunity coming, then we will redeploy excess capital then in form of buyback or special dividends.
That's very clear. Thank you very much. One more question to Pascal, perhaps a slightly technical one. You mentioned that you would consider additional hybrid capital, assuming AT1. What sort of size do you have in mind here? Then what would be the other criteria that would apply?
No size at this point in time. It really depends on the market conditions. For now, we are very pleased with the capital structure we have, as well as the diversified funding, including the convertible Additional Tier 1, then of course on the equity side. Nothing in mind other than saying that actually we like hybrid funding.
Thanks. Andreas Brun from Vontobel. One or two for Pascal. On page 50, could you elaborate on the contribution from capital redeployment? What do you mean exactly by that? A second one, how would your ROE targets compare to the old levels, given that-
Yeah, the CECL reduces the overall capital level. One for Holger, you didn't talk about the IKEA card growth. How did it go so far, year to date? How does actually the launch of the mobile-first in Q1, 2022 compare to your former plans? Is it a delay, and if so, why did it happen?
Yeah. Thank you for the question, Andreas. Pascal, do you wanna start? Then I take the commercial ones.
No, look, the capital redeployment, the way we calculate it is, ultimately to redeploy all the excess capital we generate from the business above 17%, but also taking into consideration the forms of acquisitions or forms of strategic partnerships as an example, or as I mentioned before, in form of redistributions of the excess capital via special dividends or buyback. That's the way it's shown here. In terms of ROE, clearly the target is always to come back to the mid-term target we had in the past, at the 15%.
Yes, we have been a bit higher over the past three years of strategic cycles, but also taking into consideration market situations and the investments we are making at this point in time, as all our ambitions is to deliver the 15% or plus. The last one was, I think, for you, huh?
On IKEA, yes. Yeah. Thanks, Pascal. On the IKEA question, and thanks for the question, Andreas. Look, it's a great partnership. We're excited about it, right? It's one of the, I think, the second-largest loyalty program in the country, well over 1 million participants, so significant potential. Relative to the overall book in our cards portfolio, the piece that IKEA plays is still fairly small. I think that's fair to say. There's a lot of growth to be had for us ahead in 2022. I would say the relationship is very strong, and that's where it starts, right? We've always said in these co-branding relationships, it's not necessarily day one that counts from an execution or sort of number of cards perspective.
It's really, are you committed to the partnership. One data point I will give you is, a couple months ago, I Buy Now, Pay Later with them as well. That's actually taking off extraordinarily well in terms of the online shops. Things are coming together there. Right now, you asked another question around the cards mobile first. That is a bit delayed from our very initial plan, and there's two reasons for this. One was during the pandemic, there was just some logistical challenges in terms of collaboration between the teams, but also in collaboration with our partners, particularly IKEA, we're adding some features to the launch scope.
This was really out of that relationship, and so we're excited for that to be coming out in the first quarter. Please, yeah.
Hello, this is Daniel Regli from Octavian again. Thank you for taking my questions. I've actually a lot of questions. I limit myself for the moment to two or three. One is, can you maybe talk again a little bit on the market structure in personal loans and auto leasing and loans? Obviously, you're currently having market shares of 41%, respectively 21%, and your targeted market share is not very different from this, so you don't expect to gain market share in both markets. The second question would be on the launch of this proprietary credit card proposition. Can you maybe elaborate a bit on how this stands in relation to your current existing proprietary credit card?
Is there any kind of cannibalization of the existing offer, or will this also be replaced by this new proposition? I'll leave it with you.
We'll start with those?
Yeah, please.
Excellent. We'll take the other ones to make sure you guys don't walk out with open questions. Look, on the market, and Peter, you can add to this if I miss something. In personal loans, as you know, we've had some challenges on the asset side, right? Over the last few years. A lot of it's driven by deliberate restrictions in our underwriting policy, some of it cash synergies. Some of this also, I think, as I said before, right? We gotta make sure we are strongly present in the market, right? I think Peter walked you through what we're gonna do there. We will return this business to growth. Now, at 41% market share, we also wanna be realistic, right?
We're not going to undercut ourselves in price to gain share, right? We're not gonna do that. That's not the business we're in. Look, organically, that's sort of what we're looking at, right? We talked a bit before about, you know, if there are inorganic opportunities, we'll consider those. There's also, if you want, you know, some more consideration of the competitive composition, the vehicle, right? In terms of potential growth there. I think the message I wanna make sure you can take away here is we're resetting that business to growth in line with the market. We wanna make sure we retain our share and also the profitability. Now, on the auto side, a bit different on the auto side. I think, you know, we talked about this before, too.
This has always been a bit of voiceover in the past, right? We like the business, and we still like it. You know, I think it's a great business. We have outstanding distribution, outstanding relationships in this market. What we're doing here, actually, with the new platform that we're talking about, is efficiency and growth enabling. We are looking to grow our share. We are looking to increase our margins against what we've seen. I think it should have said on the page as well. Let me just go back to that auto page so you get the full view here. There you go. Right. We're 21% today. We do want to grow the share.
We wanna grow receivables a bit ahead of the market and also the return, right, with the measures that we just explained, right? New platform, meaning new products and services, significantly improved servicing times, and also a way to more effective and efficiently work with importers. We're actually quite excited what we're doing here and reposition this business from a we like it to a we still like it, and we like it even more with growth perspective. Hopefully that answers your question there in terms of auto. To your question on the proprietary card. Look, again, and I can't give you a ton of details on this. Again, we've got a dedicated team working through the proposition. That value proposition is coming together nicely.
We're engaging, you know, the right kind of external parties, agencies, et cetera, to get ready for the launch there. I think this will be a significant product for us, right? I think, you know, the... We haven't really put our existing card into the center of what we do commercially. Now I think this is a bit what I was alluding to before, right? We've been, for all the right reasons, really focused on particularly one relationship. I think what we now have the opportunity here is this is the energy I think I'm feeling about this, right? Yes, we wanna continue to be a very strong co-brand player and leader in the market, and we can add to this. Right. This is one of the things that I'm quite excited about.
We're looking forward to the launch in the summer.
Just maybe, if I may, one follow-up on this.
Sure.
Co-branding partners. You're envisaging one to two new co-branding
Yeah
partners, over the course of the next years. Has your approach to wooing for these partners already changed, or are you bound to wait until the Migros partnership ended mid next year to go to certain partners?
Yeah. No, I'm glad you're asking the question, somebody would have, right? No. Look, we talk to everyone in the market. I wouldn't say everyone in the market, but we're talking to partners across the spectrum in the market. Right? There's folks we've always talked to, and the universe has now opened up for us, right? Those conversations, you can assume, are progressing along the lines, you know, across industries, if you want. As I said, I'm pleased with the way these conversations are progressing across the board.
Okay. Thanks a lot.
Thank you.
Thanks. Kaspar Kennel, zCapital. A handful of short questions. First on personal loans business, while your ambition is 1% to 2% growth in receivables PA, what's your expected market growth in this business? I'm not sure if you mentioned that. Second, on the auto business, that you need to replace, you know, in your platform, your business platform. Is that just outdated, not up to speed anymore, or are you really feeling that you're losing market share in this business? Additionally, if you talk about additional captives, are you talking about, you know, new entrants into the market in Switzerland, car makers, or are we talking about, you know, captives giving up their business, looking for a second source of financing? What are we talking about?
Yeah.
If I may, on cards.
Mm-hmm.
On page 33, you've shown this, you know, loyalty, the loyal customers are being, you know, the profitable ones. How do you just give us a feel on how you define the loyalty by what you measure that. Just a feel. I know it's probably-
Very short term there, right?
I know, I know. On the BNPL, just briefly, when you target CHF 1 billion in financing volumes, you're not talking about net financing receivables, I would assume.
Correct.
Maybe just confirm that. The last one, a very quick one on RWA outlook, compared to net financing receivables targets or outlook. Is there anything in between that? I mean, should we expect a different kind of RWA growth?
Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for the questions. Actually, perhaps, Pascal, if you wanna start with the last two-
Yeah.
On the Buy Now, Pay Later and the rwa outlook, and then I'll take the commercial questions.
No, usually our business or the development of the RWA are very quite correlated as well with the development of financing receivables. Similar as in the past. Exactly, you are right. The CHF 1 billion as of, it's financing, so it's not assets. As Buy Now, Pay Later, so this is mainly a fast turning as assets.
Mm-hmm.
The contributions is mainly as a commission and fees, coming from customer or merchant fees.
Yeah. Thanks, Pascal. One addition I would make to this, fully agreed, right? It's a fee-based business. It's also a bit of feeder business though, right? I've alluded to this before. Our research, external research clearly shows that there is Buy Now, Pay Later users in proximity to other credit products, right? We really look at it as a way, if you want, to bring our whole product suite to bear with this new product that we're growing here. Let me go through some of the other questions you raised. Personal loan. Yeah, look, we may not have mentioned it, but we actually that's what we're looking at, right? We wanna grow in line with the market.
That's also why you see our market share remaining where it is. That's the ambition, right? Again, that's against the challenge that we've had the last 18, 24 months, recognizing it's a pretty high market share, I would say. Clear market leader, right? But that's what you should expect, right? Growing in line with the market, retaining our share and the profitability. That's on the personal loan side. In auto. Look, I would say it's not so much we need a new platform. I mean, the business runs well. In fact, runs extraordinarily well, right? You heard some of the customer feedback there, and we could give you hundreds of more dealers to speak with. Great collaboration. Yields this year are looking great in the second half.
You know, we're keeping our market share. It works, right? Now we're not here to just manage the status quo, right? That's not my philosophy of running a business, right? I'm out there. I want us to be out there every day to say, "What can we do better," right? Here's an opportunity for us. Here's an opportunity to become significantly more efficient. Here's an opportunity to significantly increase our value proposition for dealers and for end customers in this space. That's what we're going after, right? That also allows us to come out with this confidence to say that, "Look, that's an opportunity to grow share and to also grow returns in this business." I hope that helps with the question.
You know, to your point around other partners, well, look, it's a little bit of both, right? It could be existing importers, but it also, and maybe that's also what you're alluding to, right? The distribution structures are also changing here, right? There are online players, there are just platforms, et cetera, right? And this new platform that we're bringing in will also be, because of the nature how it's structured, the cloud-based OpenAPI infrastructure will also enable us to much more efficiently and effectively work with those partners. So there is. Yes, there is a bit that side too, which is an investment into the future of car distribution, right? We're the market leader in the space.
We will be the market leader in two, three, five years from now, and this is what it takes to ensure that. That's our clear ambition. Now, page 33. You're pushing me a little bit here. Let me. Look, two things. One, as I've said, right, we have a dedicated team that works through this, and that team is leading another group of people who've done not much else in the last five months other than slicing and dicing and digging through data like there's no tomorrow, right? I could show you probably 10, 15 other really cool insights that we found. Now, I ask for understanding, we don't because we wanna. This is proprietary knowledge and this is. You know, for competitive reasons, we don't wanna give anybody a head start here.
I wanted to share this point with you. Basically what we've done here is we have. Think about it, right? We've segmented the portfolio, the entire cars portfolio by profitability. We've got 15 years of data, and we've mapped against that behaviors, right? Usage patterns, attrition, new customers, what comes in, what comes out. You can see the movie, right? We've done that across criteria, so that's the outcome that you're seeing here. Hopefully that helps a bit with your question on that part. I think I covered everything you asked, right?
Yes, you did. Just one follow-up.
Please.
Very short. Can you talk about the BNPL volumes? This CHF 1 billion, how much receivables do you expect out of that billion?
Pascal?
Net, net.
Yep. You can take the page 46. Around CHF 300 million.
Yep. There's another question here in the room.
Thank you. Martin Rausch from UBS. I have a few smaller questions.
Please.
Firstly, on the auto business, you mentioned the opportunity in the subscription model. Could you give us a bit more details on this? With whom would you do this? And also, how does the economics of this business differ from your typical leasing business? That's the first question. Secondly, one on the trading update. I see from the slide that personal loan receivables seem to be flat, flattish in the second half of the year. I think, in the H1 call, you mentioned you're putting quite a special emphasis on turning that business around.
Is there a discrepancy here? Is it basically a purely market driven development? Or, what's the reason for this? Thirdly, on costs, Pascal, you mentioned that you would expect a reduced share of compensation and benefits going from 55%-47%. Could you give us a sense what does this mean in terms of headcount and the composition of the staff base, how you intend to achieve this?
Mm-hmm.
Thank you.
All right. Excellent. Thank you. Let me take the first two and then hand over to Pascal. All the subscription models. Look, to me, this is again, it has to be a, and it is a matter of just business as usual, right? If you're the market leader in the space, you have to be on top of these trends, right? Look, this market is still nascent. It's small, but it's growing. We've seen it grow in other countries and regions. You know, it's forecast to be anywhere around probably 20% at some point in other markets, but also in Switzerland, right? Simple answer is you cannot not engage with that channel if you're the market leader, right? That's where we're coming from.
Look, you know, you can assume that we're talking to all market participants around these kinds of things. You know, that's sort of just our basic philosophy around this. We're market leader, we wanna retain leadership, and so we're engaging with various participants. In terms of the economics, look, I don't see them changing dramatically. You know, I don't see them changing dramatically. The processes there will likely become sort of more efficient, which will help us a bit on the cost side. You know, pricing in the end on leasing and loan is market driven.
You know, the other thing I would say is, as I alluded to, as we build this new platform that we're seeing, we have a good opportunity to actually add products that will give us more fee and other sources of income in terms of that. Overall, by and large, and you've seen this on the page as well, we'd rather expect increasing returns in this portfolio, and that factors in some of these models that we talked about. Then your second question on the personal loan side, the trading update.
Yeah, I think what we said was that we indeed I put this task force onto the business because I wanted to make sure that we have the right sense of urgency and produce the right outcomes in the personal loan business. Again, as a market leader, our ambition clearly is to retain market share, right? Now, I think we said it half year, we wanna stabilize the business, and that's what we've done, right? Peter and the team have actually, I think, done a really nice job in getting us there after the challenges that we've seen over the last couple of years. The good news is you've now met the guy, and he's on the hook to deliver it back to growth.
He said so clearly, right? You all heard it. I heard it, too. That's the next step.
Great point. I mean, COVID is still here. I mean, of course we are still prudent and on the right. We are not doing any stupid mistakes, and therefore I think stabilizing was the right thing to do now, and I think we're moving now back into growth mode. That's the idea.
Thank you, Volker. Perhaps do we have some questions on the phone?
There is an old one regarding the annual savings.
Sorry, I'm sorry about that. Yeah, of course, the savings on the technology program, right. Go ahead, Pascal.
Back to the CHF 30 million annual cost savings. The large majority of the CHF 30 million will be achieved with the reductions in personnel costs. Basically it's the results of automation standardizations, and the remaining part also will mainly be related as well to decommissioning of legacy system. The reduction in personnel cost is expected to be managed through natural fluctuations. You can look at our annual reports. We have an attrition ratio of around 10%. It's around a period of now five years that we deliver on these programs. We are responsible. We'll manage these situations in a responsible manner and be also very diligent with hiring new people. At this point in time, it's expected to be managed through natural fluctuation.
Thank you. Do we have some questions on the phone?
We have a question from Mr. Benjamin Roy from Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead.
Yes, thank you very much. Maybe one just to double-check on the net cost savings. Does it mean you're roughly aiming for CHF 220 million of cost base going forward from 2026 onwards? Then Buy Now, Pay Later. i mean, you mentioned that roughly CHF 300 million is the target initially. Can you help us a bit understand what the revenue impact is? Because I think those should be. I mean, you said they're turning fast, obviously, but the margin should be, if you analyze it, quite attractive. Is it fair to assume this is well into the double digits, the margin on Buy Now,P ay Later?
The second question on BNPL is, when I look at the leading players at the moment, they have loss rates that probably Volker wouldn't be asleep at night. So just wondering, how is the Cembra approach with typically rather high loss rates, and how would you compete in the business against very aggressive players who seem to be mainly growth focused and not P&L optimizing for now? Thank you very much.
Great. Thank you for the question. Pascal, do you wanna take the first two on the net cost saving and the revenue impact? Situation with Buy Now, Pay Later.
Yeah. Net cost savings, to clarify, we commit as well to the CHF 30 million annual savings by 2026. This is an absolute number. We also commit as part of the targets to a cost-income ratio of 39% or below also by 2026. It doesn't mean that by default as well it will be as well to 2026. It's really depending also on how the revenue will develop. This is why we have this kind of two metrics on one side, as well the net savings from the strategic programs, operational excellence, which would materially contribute to the reductions in the cost-income ratio.
And the-
The second one.
Buy Now, Pay Later , the revenue.
On the margin. Look, I think we estimate overall CHF 10 million-CHF 20 million, 1%-2%. It's broadly in line overall with what we have seen on this market all in the past, but it's difficult overall to give an indication as for the future. This is why the range is relatively broad at this point in time. We really see overall in the next three to five years what kind of margins are possible on the Swiss market. On the loss you want to.
It's actually a very good question that you ask on the loss side. When we've now been going through the chapter of the Cembra DNA, I mentioned in a side comment that there might be segments where actually the 1% loss rate is not yet to be expected in isolation, but we need to be priced for the risk. I Buy Now, Pay Later market is probably in this category because the loss rate is always measured to receivables. Pascal has Buy Now, Pay Later is more of a transactional business, so it's not generating too many assets.
Nonetheless, I'm convinced that we can manage losses diligently also in Buy Now, Pay Later, because we are in the Swiss market, which is typically a bit more conservative market compared to other countries where Buy Now, Pay Laters, Buy Now, Pay Later players are active. I think it's also about kind of picking the right retailers to collaborate with, which also drives loss performance and can control loss performance. I think also we need to put it into context of the overall business. Because, yes, we might have, from a loss rate perspective, a slightly higher percentage on Buy Now, Pay Later. But Buy Now, Pay Later in context of the overall Cembra business is still small. It will not immediately impact the overall loss rate of the business.
It will be acceptable with a higher loss rate in this segment if we get the pricing for it.
Yeah.
Thanks, Volker. Two quick things I'd add, right? One, even today, the business is profitable, right? Let's not forget, they've been operating for 10 years. We bought them in 2017, but they've been operating for 10 years. They have a sense for what they do. I think risk management there is actually quite strong and quite advanced in many ways. The second thing I would also add here is, we gotta keep in mind, this is not a standalone business, right? This for us is again both a feeder business, but also part of our Cembra product universe, right? In terms of lifecycle management, et cetera. I mentioned before our monetization strategy, our cross-sell strategy, and everything that we're building around that to really capitalize on that.
Yes, we do have Volker to keep us honest on this and make sure that we do all the right things. Thanks for the question. Anything else on the phone?
No further questions from the phone, sir.
Thanks. Then let me take a few that we have on the screen here. First one, is there no cannibalization between Buy Now, Pay Later and credit cards? Which business is more attractive for Cembra? Good question. Thank you. Well, look, we like both businesses. That's the short answer. The slightly longer is, you know, we don't anticipate cannibalization here. If anything, as I said, you know, you could see as Buy Now, Pay Later a bit of a feeder business. It's also slightly different use case. You know, it tends to be a bit more instant, a bit more fast-paced in a sense in terms of the customer usage than the cards business. The cards business will continue to benefit just from the macro environment that we talked about, right?
That tailwind's still there. We really, again, I don't see much cannibalization here. I think it's slightly different use cases. Really look at them in a complementary way. And if anything, you know, again, given the cross-sell opportunities that we're looking at, we're trying to get one plus one to be more than two here. Another question here. Your growth assumption in personal loans of 1%-2%, 2%-4% in auto stand above historical organic development. Do these targets include inorganic growth or do you expect to take more market share in the future, without negative pricing or profitability effects? In brackets. I like that bracket and I agree with it. We wanna keep our profitability in place.
Look, I think the way to think about this is, we're market leader, we wanna grow in line with the market. That's how it starts, right? If the market's about 1%-2% in P loans as we see, that's what we wanna do. We really wanna do this organically. Now, it may not be spot on every month or every quarter, but as a general direction, that's what we wanna do. We wanna do the same in auto. Now in auto, the 2%-4% is slightly above market growth, and that's because of what we explained before, right? We're building a new platform, new propositions, can add some products, and that should give us some tailwind.
As I've also said, you know, if there are opportunities in the market to accelerate our growth plans, and they are a good fit with what we do here in Switzerland, then we'll certainly entertain that. But the general principle is we wanna grow in line with the market, right? And again, that may not hit every month or quarter, but in general principle, that's what you should expect from us. One more question here online: With the transition to a cloud-based data management, which data protection issues do you expect? And on a related subject, how robust will your solution be against cyberattacks, communication outage, and other potential disruptions? Great question. And I can tell you something that we monitor very closely, right?
I'll let perhaps Nik start, and then Volker, you can add a bit as well on the cyber risk side. Nik, do you wanna start this?
Yes, I can take over this one. It depends on what you're talking about. If you're talking about a public cloud, for instance, like, you're going into Microsoft Cloud or et cetera, then the cyber risk is, compared to when we do it on our own, quite low because they're investing multi-millions, more than $200 million, for instance, in Microsoft's case, in cyber measures, you know, to protect against that one which we are not able to invest, obviously. The second thing is in our cloud, so the private cloud, of course, we follow our standards that we have, like we have currently in our own data center. Volker, you might want to add on this topic.
Yeah. I think you covered already a lot around it. I mean, cyber risk is obviously something that we have on our radar screen because that's also a risk that is kind of general in the banking sphere currently, highly discussed in Switzerland. I think we are well protected with the cyber framework that we have put in place. Kind of related to cloud, there are obviously also technologies that kind of would protect the data better, which is kind of in the area of anonymization, encryption, and all these kind of things. We will certainly look into the measures and find the appropriate measures to protect the data because I've been kind of highlighting the data a lot in my part of the presentation.
This is an asset for us, and we need to protect our assets, and we need to deal with this asset in a very responsible way, so we are very aware what we are doing now.
Thanks, Volker. I go through another few questions here on the web. In your Buy Now, Pay Later initiative, will you be able, for instance, to offer clients zero interest for a time period if they pay the full amount, excuse me, within the period? I'll answer this way: There's a range of things, I'd say, arrangements you can set up between provider and merchant. Zero interest is certainly one of the features on these products. Then there's a different revenue source, and sometimes that's funded by the merchant, right?
The different arrangements that you can make, and again, it sort of goes back a bit to what we talked about before, which is that merchants really recognize this as a tool to build sales and attract sales and as a marketing tool. The short answer to that is, yes, these kinds of features can be incorporated. Another question on Buy Now, Pay Later. The newcomers in this space have been growing quickly with card-based products as it gives them. Now the question disappeared. Can you bring it back up? I think it is a bit further up. I think, I mean, from memory, I think it was around, what are our. There we go. Have been growing quickly with card-based products.
It gives them instant acceptance at 80 million merchants worldwide? Cornèr Bank recently introduced Click & Go. Can you speak a bit about strategic priorities given that your card-based product is planned relatively late in 2023? Let me find this page again. Give me one second. I'll go Buy Now, Pay Later pages. yeah. so look, I mean, this is the list of initiatives that we presented before, right? So there's the near-term things that we're doing in the new year, which is really accelerating onboarding partners in the country, particularly in the German-speaking part, where we're a little underrepresented given the nature of the business from the French part of Switzerland.
The product extension for consumers, as we talked about, and accounts-based solutions, they can more flexibly manage their payments. Then also really develop this as the marketing tool that I talked about with merchants, in terms of helping them win in their business models. The cards-based product, as this question rightly alludes to, is something that we're planning for 2023. Look, I mean, I would say, you know, for us with this set of initiatives, I think we feel that we have the right pillars in place to grow in this market. That's the way I think about it. You know, the other thing, again, to keep in mind is the ability to cross-sell and leverage our entire product suite across customers and channels.
That's something that we've been building out, which again, I think should help us stay ahead of the competition in this space. Let's see. I think there were a few more questions further down here on the screen. If we can scroll down a bit, we'll take those too. Is that all? Is there nothing more on the screen? That's it? Okay. Anything else on the phone?
We've no further questions, sir.
We've got something more in the room here, please. Yeah.
Thank you. Daniel Regli from Octavian. Again, this might be a bit of a philosophical question, but I mean, when I was unfortunately a bit late, but in the beginning, you talked about embedded finance. What you talked about to me sounded like typical application of blockchain solutions. Can you maybe elaborate a bit on whether you're envisaging something in relation to blockchain or is this completely not relevant for your business or
Yeah.
Your thoughts about this?
Yeah. Look, great question. I would say not yet. That's the way I would put it. Hopefully one of the things you're taking away here is, right, and I'll just repeat this, you wanna be a consumer finance leader in the future, you have to be a technology leader in the future. You can be certain we'll be looking at these kind of trends, right, and see if there's opportunities that create value for customers, that create value for shareholders, then we'll look at those, right? I fundamentally. One, these trends excite me, right? I really think what technology offers us these days, it's just phenomenal, right? There's so much potential there. Two, look, again, we wanna lead in the space.
We have to be on top of these trends, right? Hopefully you're taking that away. Technology will play a more prominent role for us going forward. As in when there's things there, and if you have a suggestion, happy to talk. But as and when things are moving in that direction, we'll certainly consider that. Any other questions in the room? Webcast? Phone? Good. I would say, look, ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for the time today. Just a quick wrap again. We're excited. Reimagining Cembra, hopefully you got the gist of what we're looking to do. A great business, great set of capabilities, great set of skills, lot of good customer intimacy, credit factory. Our DNA we talked about.
We're taking this business and repositioning it for sustained success in the market, and we're very excited about this journey. Culture transformation to come to that. Four strategic programs we talked about. As you've seen and heard, we're not waiting to kick this off. We're right into it, right? We'll see you in the new year to update you on where we're going with these initiatives. We'll have a full update on the year. If we don't see and speak each other, then please stay healthy and safe. Happy holiday season. Merry Christmas. All the best for 2022. We're excited to get into this journey as a team and speak to you soon. Thank you so much.