DETROIT — Nearly 12 years after General Motors bought AmeriCredit to create GM Financial, the captive lender has reimbursed its parent company in full.

In 2021 alone, GM Financial paid the automaker a $3.5 billion dividend. That payment covers the amount GM spent in 2010 to acquire AmeriCredit, a Texas-based subprime lender.

And a series of payments from 2017 to 2020, totaling $2.1 billion, repays capital injections GM had given GM Financial for international acquisitions.

“The payment is much higher than we planned just a couple of years ago,” CEO Dan Berce told Automotive News. “We had planned to have a nice cadence increase in the dividend over a number of years until it reached about our after-tax earnings level. But we’ve had outsized earnings for the last two years because of credit and used-car pricing in particular.”

GM Financial filled the void left when prebankruptcy GM sold off control of its previous captive, GMAC Financial Services, in 2007. The new captive paid $800 million to its parent in 2020 after paying $400 million in 2019, $375 million in 2018 and $550 million in 2017, when GM Financial sold its European operations.

GM Financial has said it would return a cash dividend to GM at least annually until it consistently holds 50 percent of GM retail sales penetration in the U.S. and doesn’t need to retain capital to support growth. GM Financial financed 44 percent of GM’s U.S. vehicle sales last year.

Berce said he expects the dividend in 2022 to return to a traditional cadence but that it could be larger if credit and used-vehicle pricing have more upside than expected, he said.

In the fourth quarter, GM Financial’s net income rose 17 percent to $909 million, and revenue fell 5.7 percent to $3.2 billion, the company said in a statement Tuesday.

For all of 2021, GM Financial’s net income surged 89 percent to $3.8 billion on higher used-vehicle prices, strong credit performance, and lower cost of funds. Revenue fell 3 percent to $13.4 billion on low inventory.

Full-year earnings before taxes nearly doubled to $5 billion.

GM Financial issued 2022 guidance of $3.5 billion to $4 billion in pretax earnings because of an expected deterioration in credit, a reduction of reserve levels in 2021 and lower used-vehicle pricing, Berce said.

In 2021, GM Financial booked nearly $2 billion in profit from leased-vehicle terminations, up from gains of $1.3 billion in 2020 and $652 million in 2019.

“Used-car values in ’20 in the second half of the year were really quite good,” Berce said. “But a couple months during the pandemic, they had dipped, whereas in 2021 we had a full year of really strong used-car pricing.”

GM Financial said it expects used-vehicle prices to begin normalizing in the second half of this year.