That’s about making BUK more efficient, investing in our client and customer relationships and growing through more tailored products. Before I come to each of those, let me briefly remind you exactly what BUK is. BUK operates at scale in an attractive and sophisticated market. We have 20 million active customers. The depth and breadth of those relationships provide a robust and strong deposit base. That is the foundation of our lending businesses where we are a leading player in the mortgage, credit card and loan markets for individuals and small businesses. Over 80% of our income is generated by net interest income, and we are committed to growing this through a combination of lending growth, asset margin enhancement and the structural hedge program that Anna mentioned earlier.
That structural hedge program is a fundamentally important part of how we manage the business through an interest rate cycle. The strength of our deposit franchise is the result of significant investment in focus over many years, irrespective of the rate cycle. That hedge helps ensure we can maintain investment in our customers, efficiency and asset growth. All of that underpins our plans to maintain a high RoTE performance. RoTE for the past three years has been around 18% or higher. We have been disciplined in the way we have delivered these returns with positive jaws in our cost-to-income ratio, low impairments through tight credit controls during the pandemic and a conservative funding profile with low loan-to-deposit ratio. We know we have more work to do to drive more efficiencies and lower our cost to income ratio, which we aim to reduce to around 50% by 2026.
Our prudent risk and funding profile means we have the capacity to grow lending whilst maintaining our discipline, thus enhancing our profitability. So how do we intend to do that? Consistent with the group’s strategy, we are focused on making BUK simpler, better and more balanced. We will be simpler by investing in digitization, automation and technology, delivering material efficiencies. We will be better by investing in customer experience and our product offering, supporting the relationships that underpin our deposit franchise and creating opportunities to broaden these relationships. We will be more balanced. We have positioned the business conservatively over the past few years. Now is the time to grow by winning back market share on the asset side of the business, particularly in unsecured lending and business banking.
I’m going to spend a little time on each of those to bring them to life and how we intend to deliver. On delivering a simpler BUK, we have invested significantly in transforming the business in the past three years. That combined with economic headwinds over the pandemic led to a cost-to-income ratio of 68% in 2021. Our investments and changes in the environment have brought that to 58% today. But we must go further. Our aim is to get that to about 50% by 2026. In the chart on the left, we have segmented our cost base into four parts to show how we think about our costs. We are focused on driving efficiencies across all four, but I have singled out the top two, because this is where we believe we lag peers. On distribution, this covers the cost of servicing our customers day-to-day.
We have historically operated with a higher number of branches, creating higher associated real estate and people costs. We have acted by reducing our branch presence as customer behavior has shifted. Our focus will now shift on optimizing the way we engage with our customers and communities. We will do that through a far more efficient and flexible footprint. By the end of this year, we will have over 900 touch points available across the country, including branches, flexible community sites and shared banking hubs. Of course, the primary basis of customer interaction today is through our digital channels. In fact, 98% of customer interactions are now digital. Our touch point optimization will strengthen that further completing our digitization work and leveraging our physical footprint as a value-added complement to it.
In Operations and Technology, we are in the process of automating the parts of our operation, which are not yet processed straight through and simplifying and upgrading our technology capabilities. The historic complexity and fragmentation of our technology means that the transition cost has increased this proportion of our costs. However, this is an investment in our future capabilities and further efficiencies that we must make. The evolution of our cost base over the last three years has been shaped by these investments. The left side of this slide outlines the impact of our cost actions to date. We have streamlined BUK through actions such as rationalizing our product portfolio, reducing our branch numbers and headcount and simplifying our technology estate, all of which I mentioned on the prior slide.
That has brought base costs down by 7% and contributed to our cost-to-income ratio declining from 68% to 58%, notwithstanding the impact of inflation on our underlying costs. That gives us confidence in our ability to drive our cost-to-income ratio to about 50% in 2026 as our investment in efficiency will continue to offset any lingering inflation. This cost discipline not only delivers efficiency today, but it also creates capacity to invest in both future cost efficiency and future revenue. On the right-hand side of this slide, you see that our plans reflect an 80% increase in transformation investment spend over the next three years to £1.2 billion from £700 million in the prior three year period. Our investment in driving cost efficiencies will continue through customer journey, automation, optimization and simplification.
The mix of investment will evolve with continued focus on revenue growth as we align our products with customer needs better and capture the opportunities of the partnerships that you saw on a prior slide. Combined with the benefits of our investments to date, we expect the income benefit from investment to increase by about £600 million in 2026 from £100 million in the prior period. Combined with the expected efficiency savings, that makes our aim to deliver a cost-to-income ratio of 50%, both achievable and credible. Let’s shift to how we make the UK better. That requires increased focus on an investment in improving our relationship with our customers and clients. As I mentioned at the beginning, our starting point is strong, evidenced by a deep deposit franchise rooted in trust earned across multiple generations.
We know that our focus on transformation over the past years has disrupted those relationships. You see that in the dip in our overall Net Promoter Score in the chart on the top left here. For example, the scale and pace of our branch closures as well as the product and service simplification that we’ve undertaken has disrupted how we interact with and support customers. Meanwhile, work required to update the information that we hold on business clients has created understandable frustration on their part. We are committed to enhancing that position from here on. I showed you earlier that we’ve rationalized our product offering by 32% and made our range simpler. We did that in part for efficiency, but also so that we could invest in tailoring our offering to better align the service that we provide with the needs and expectations of our different customers.
We have much more to do to get that alignment as precise as it needs to be. Getting that alignment right creates the opportunities for us to enhance our relationships with our customers and as we do so, we would expect to see average balances grow and an increase in the number of needs that we solve for each customer. By being better, we improve customer satisfaction, we support our deposit franchise, and we maintain the foundation of a resilient funding profile that enables us to grow the asset side of the business. And that brings me to the third priority, how we intend to make BUK more balanced. As I mentioned at the beginning, we are a scale player across our balance sheet. The last three to four years has benefited scale players on the liability side of the business as consumers and businesses retained high cash balances across the pandemic, coupled with economic uncertainty, the severely limited their appetite or need for borrowing.
We believe we are at the beginning of more stability in the UK with the inflation outlook having moderated and the consequent rate stability, giving more confidence to borrowers, both individuals and businesses. We are also confident that our investments to date have placed us in a good position so that we can capture the opportunity that recovery will present. A quick reminder of where we have come from. We made deliberate choices to navigate the longstanding economic uncertainties in the UK with a low-risk profile. That was prudent, but it led to market share declines, particularly in unsecured lending and a lower margin profile in mortgages and a persistence of a low loan-to-deposit ratio in business banking. In short, we didn’t take the opportunity to reallocate or recycle underutilized risk appetite from one area of BUK to another.
That opportunity is now in front of us. I’d like to bring each of those to life a little more now. In unsecured lending, our plan is to grow market share. We have simplified our customer journeys and revamped our credit and affordability models to enable this. In consumer loans, we have historically focused on relationship lending, but we will shortly begin to open up our lending to all qualifying customers, whether they bank with us or not. I will shortly come back to a dedicated slide on the recently announced Tesco deal. In mortgages, our aim is to improve application margins through a number of initiatives. First, by improving our broker support, including by simplifying how we support brokers and improving the platform through which they provide us with their applications.
Secondly, we will do more high loan-to-value lending as a proportion of our total book. Our current position versus peers is conservative at 6%. We have capacity to grow that proportion without materially shifting our risk position. We also have the capability to offer specialized solutions through our Kensington acquisition from last year, where the margin opportunity is typically significantly higher than that of our existing Barclays product range. And finally, we intend to increase our focus on the mortgage needs of our Premier and Blue customers who are far more likely to come to us directly. In Business Banking, we will grow our lending market share by leveraging our existing relationships on the liability side, both in terms of access to customers and our ability to automate credit decisioning given the visibility we already have on their financial positions.
We will also continue to broaden our lending proposition, including in the asset finance space and accelerate digitization of client journeys to make it easier for them to access what we offer. Whilst lending is at the heart of our growth opportunity, we will conduct this in a controlled way that maintains our disciplined risk profile. I’d like to bring that to life explicitly. As I noted earlier, we made deliberate choices to derisk during periods of macroeconomic uncertainty in the UK. While that impacted market share negatively, it also led to historically low loan loss rates. You see that clearly on the left side of this slide. Today, that rate stands at 14 basis points versus 36 basis points in 2019. It’s worth noting that even that 2019 level was lower than years before that.
We have capacity to grow within the parameters of our historic loan loss experience and our 2026 plan delivers a risk profile that is consistent with that 2019 level. The right side of this slide shows you that same information in a graphical format for BUK at the top and then cards and loans below that. You can see the larger Blue Eagle representing 2026, lies in between the 2019 position to its right and the 2023 position to its left for the business overall. My point simply that we have room to grow as we pivot the UK to take advantage of opportunities to increase market share and margins and deliver a more balanced asset profile within BUK and ultimately, for the group. Given the recent announcement of our intention to acquire the retail banking business of Tesco and enter into a long-term exclusive partnership, you will naturally wonder how that fits within the ambitions that I’ve just shared.
This slide outlines what that banking business is. £8 billion of high-quality unsecured loans split evenly between credit cards and personal loans, funded by £7 billion of non-transactional deposits that fit neatly into what I outlined earlier about being better. We are naturally excited by this opportunity. It takes us a long way towards the unsecured lending growth ambitions that I just shared. In particular, this provides the opportunity to grow both the lending and deposit products through the Barclays and Tesco brands, which we believe appeal to different segments of the market. The long-term exclusive partnership with Tesco also provides an unparalleled platform to work with the UK’s leading loyalty program as well as the opportunity to market through Tesco channels and the open market.
