And sometimes in previous years, that number was even negative. So in terms, investments was something that was not part of our strategic agenda, but now it is. And certainly we are ready to look for better multiples like we did in 2023. But that shows that we are on the right track. One of the important segments is our AAA. It’s like an office which focuses on, advice, investment advisory. The NPS is 85, which is the highest NPS of the industry. NPS here is measured by third parties in the market. And our net inflow per advisor was 2.5 million. And this is a very competitive number if we compare it with other offices or other peers. But we show that here, AAA is a major driver. Toro, our digital brokerage firm. I mean, last year I showed you that we grew and we grew a lot throughout the year.
We posted great results. So Toro has a very relevant agenda. So more and more there will be an integration between Toro and our Santander stores. We have independent brands, distinct brands in our private, as I mentioned before. We posted record numbers in terms of funding and results, but we still have more room to grow. We want to double our private segment in the coming years, and we are ready to do that. Now moving quickly to our strategic agenda. We’ve been accountable to the market. And in the third quarter of 2022, I decided to tell the market something about our strategic agenda. We were still in the first year of our legacy portfolio of older vintages. So on the one hand, there was a part of the portfolio that we need had to be managed.
And some other portfolios because we knew that for some time it will go down. Of course, we didn’t want that, but we knew that for a year or a year and a half, we would have to take care of that. But on the other hand, we chose some other businesses in the third quarter of 2022 that we would put focus on growing those businesses. So this is just a quick accountability of these businesses. I’ll start with payroll deductible loan. On the left-hand side of the slide, we see that we are growing again this quarter. We are growing all the payroll deductible loan lines. We are growing on the private side, and which is an asset percent in there. We are doing that with a very strict control of cost of credit. We are putting focus on payroll deductible loans.
And I’m very pleased to see that we’ve been consistently delivering good results. Also agribusiness, we made important deliveries. One of the things I told the market before is that we wanted to reach 50 billion of our portfolio of agribusiness products. We are talking about Ag products. Not only we arrived at 50 billion, but almost 54 billion, meaning that we were able to grow 42%, if you look December 22, vis-à-vis December 2023. And once we compared with December 2023, we reached almost 100% growth. That means that we doubled our portfolio, which shows that we put a lot of relevance in this business. Our consumer finance is the largest consumer finance company in the country. At the end of the year, we had 21% of quota. We want to grow that.
The ambition is to reach 25, and I hope we will reach that number this year. But we finalized that with a loan origination record, and this is a historical volume. So this is a very strong sign that appears in our results. But this just shows that we are really thinking big in terms of our consumer finance operation. About cards, I already mentioned our evolution in cards. We already posted great evolution in cards this quarter. I mean, if you look at billings, I mean, billings in the quarter year-on-year, in the fourth quarter of 2022 that was down vis-à-vis the previous year. In the third quarter of 2023, it was growing 7%. In the fourth quarter of 2023, it is growing 11%. So we are growing two digits in terms of billing, giving that the average spending increase in our customer base.
And also there is the fact that we are selling more cards now than when compared to the first quarter of the year. So what we saw in the fourth quarter of 2021, which is our record sales of cards, now we are resuming to a level that is almost two-thirds of that level. And this is a very adequate level for us. Again, we are not trying to have a sprint in terms of card sales like we did in 2021, because this is not how we wanted to end 2023 and going forward into 2024. But we are happy with the sales of cards, considering our customer base and the results will appear. And also, principality with Esfera. We will talk more about Esfera, but Esfera is progressing very well. In terms of companies, the agenda is quite positive. You will see the volumes further on.
But talking about strategies for large corporate and SMEs, there was a very good portfolio expansion. We grew two digits year-on-year. And so we want to continue posting a strong performance year-on-year. But the focus will always be in profitability. We could grow much faster on the large corporate side. But with principality being the focus now, we will certainly compete with the capital markets. And so we have to be more selective in terms of what we want to include in our balance sheet. And we have a very good performance in several rankings. Number one in consumer finance, foreign exchange, etc. So on the side of SMEs, on the right-hand side of the slide, our growth agenda remains very clear. We grew more than 100% quarter-on-quarter after growing more than three times last quarter.
That stable agenda of the portfolio, where we were still looking at the right moment to accelerate, we were growing stronger after the second half of the year. And the numbers are here to prove that. So we are already giving clear steps in that direction. And now to conclude my part, I will talk about technology and innovation. And certainly this is connected to everything I said before. We don’t have technology on the one hand and business on the other hand. Everything is business and technology is a major business center. The operation areas are large business centers. We have lots of figures in the slide I will just mention some. 95% of our operation already runs in the cloud. We are converging to 100%. Very soon, 100% of our operation will run in the cloud.
This is a very good figure because this generates efficiency, cost reduction. Therefore, we are very pleased to have such a strong cloud agenda. We are constantly investing like the rest of the market is as well. We are investing in Generative AI. Generative AI can be a major response to chat and remote channel. But it can also give us a good response for coding, development, generate new businesses. Therefore, we are moving quite fast in this agenda. We are also focusing on innovation. Our first innovation with DREX was very successful. We are making good progress with the Central Bank of Brazil. We are also focusing on banking as a service. We are certainly trying to expand this agenda because we want to have Santander more present with our customers.
We want to be a part of our customer experience on a day-to-day basis. We are also maturing our agenda business domains. We have 27 business domains that we introduced from 2022 to 2023. Now, from 2023 to 2024, we are also merging that more intensively with our product agenda. So business domains, those large communities that operate end-to-end in our businesses is quite consolidated in all of the remuneration, all the incentives are quite aligned. We continue pursuing our efficiency agenda. We are doubling the number of transactions. And while at the same time, we reduced by almost half the unit cost. And with that, I will turn the floor over to Gustavo, and I’ll come back during our Q&A. Thank you.
Gustavo Alejo: Thank you, Mario. Good morning, everyone. Let’s start the results section with the NII. We posted NII growth of almost 5% year-on-year. With good progress in client and market NII, we recorded a good performance in terms of volume, as well as in terms of funding, both of which benefited the client NII in 2023. In Q4, we saw the continuation of some positive trends seen in Q3, which led to growth of 4.8% in NII quarter-on-quarter. One of these is the gradual growth in retail credit, which will be detailed in greater depth in a minute. The other trend is the reduction in the Selic interest rate, which benefits our funding costs, as Mario mentioned. Market NII shows a progressive evolution, which I have been commenting on over the last few presentations, and which is in line with our expectations.
