365 Finance

365 Finance becomes a D&I champion with KEY ESG

About 365 Finance

365 Finance provides loans of up to £400,000 to small and medium businesses across the UK to help them scale their businesses without the administrative hassle and stress of traditional loans. 365 Finance offers a unique re-payment structure which is tied to the business’ monthly card sales, rather than a set monthly interest rate. This caters more closely to the needs of seasonal businesses that require additional flexibility. As a result, their customer base of over 10,000 includes primarily hospitality, retail and e-commerce.

365 Finance was founded in 2014 and today has grown to 65 employees. They have achieved a growth rate of over 60% each year since inception. They wanted to ensure that as the business scales, the diversity and inclusion (D&I) values that have led to its success are continued.

The Challenge

Like many rapidly scaling businesses, 365 Finance had no formal ESG management process in place, and no dedicated ESG resource available to manage the programme. The D&I committee, founded and headed by Farrah Talsi, Legal Counsel, identified a need to build strong D&I values as their employee and customer numbers grew, especially since, although there is no regulatory requirement for ESG reporting for 365 Finance, there is increasing scrutiny on ESG and D&I in the financial services sector. Moreover, the senior managers in the business were aware that best-practice D&I and sustainable values are good for brand visibility and marketing. They had identified an opportunity to champion its D&I values through a campaign called SheLeads which promoted and provided financial support for female founders. This campaign was designed both to win new business, and empower employees to work towards a meaningful goal.

However, there was very little awareness of how to achieve their internal and external D&I goals, and what the outcome could realistically be expected to be.

The Solution

Following their partnership with Pollen Street Capital, 365 Finance was able to leverage KEY ESG’s platform to lay the foundations of an ESG management process, gain management buy-in for their D&I project and record and track their progress in a centralised dashboard. The Company Platform enabled 365 Finance to begin tracking the EDCI metrics which Pollen Street Capital had stipulated and also gave them the autonomy to decide on which other metrics they wanted to focus on using KEY ESG’s metric library. Once the metric selection process was complete, 365 Finance was able to collaborate across the organisation to collect the relevant data and then report and communicate results to internal and external stakeholders.

Martin Kennington, CMO of 365 Finance said:

"Using KEY ESG’s dashboard enabled us to align internally on our D&I goals and report our results in a frictionless, streamlined way. The platform is so simple to use and makes ESG ambitions achievable for companies at every level of tech and ESG maturity."

Since onboarding KEY ESG, 365 Finance has drafted D&I policies, trained a group of employees to become mental health first aiders, launched an internal charitable giving programme which funds sustainable causes, and launched their SheLeads campaign externally. Initial results of the campaign are very positive with the content garnering unprecedented LinkedIn engagement and leading to an increase in applications from female founders from 24% to 34%.

What’s next?

365 Finance has progressed a long way in just one year of using the platform – they have engaged their team internally and communicated their D&I values in a powerful marketing campaign which has increased their customer acquisition rate.The next steps are for the business to further harness the internal engagement and increase the impact of their charitable giving programmes. The SheLeads campaign has gained impressive traction in the early stages so the business will focus on building on that momentum and continuing to champion female founders and their D&I values.

Martin Kennington finished by summarising the journey so far with KEY ESG:

"We were initially driven by Pollen Street Capital to onboard the software and I had concerns about capacity since we have no internal ESG resource. However, the platform has simplified and streamlined our ESG management processes and given us the autonomy to run with our D&I project. KEY ESG has empowered us to achieve our D&I ambitions and I look forward to seeing where our continuing relationship takes us."

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