Mr. Chair, thank you for having us here today. It's my pleasure to be here with two of my team members to answer your questions.
In reference to your question, it is true that when the national housing strategy was launched, CMHC had to ramp up our direct delivery capability, funding direct projects through an application-based process, which are the majority of the national housing strategy programs. That was not something that CMHC had been doing for a number of years. We had some legacy funding, and of course we have our commercial businesses, our mortgage insurance and our securitization, those commercial businesses.
At the beginning of the NHS, we actually had to ramp up that capability, and we definitely had some growing pains with that. I'll fully acknowledge that. As we started to implement these capabilities and the processes and so forth, we were, in some degree, learning as we went. Through that process, we consistently sought feedback from our clients, from proponents and from all sectors of the housing sector and we continuously tried to improve that.
It's something that we continue to do today. We consistently seek feedback—whether it's through our clients or through venues such as this committee to get feedback—and deal with issues as they arise. We have seen steady improvement in our processing times and have reduced them by over 50% over the last several years. We continually measure not just our clients' satisfaction but how difficult it is to work with us, as well as something that we call our “net promoter score”, which is, at its root, how likely someone is to recommend CMHC. We constantly look at those measures as well as the qualitative feedback we get from our clients, and we look to improve.
As Romy Bowers said when she was here, I think there's obviously still room for us to continue to improve, but we're quite happy with the progress to this point in terms of the number of commitments we've made and the funding we have committed. We've basically committed practically all the funding that's been allocated to us so far in the strategy, and that crosses the spectrum, including not-for-profits.