Lowell’s first Sustainability Report; increased transparency to help
From day one Lowell has aimed to be a sustainable business, a better business. Our mission, to Make Credit Work Better for All, says it all – that we’re aware of the importance and impact of our work, and that we want that impact to be a positive one.
One thing we’ve not done to any great extent before is talk publicly about our work under the Sustainability banner - all that changes from today when we publish our first Lowell Sustainability Report
As a client, how can the report help you?
In a nutshell: More evidence to show Lowell’s the partner for you
Our first Sustainability Report highlights our progress in 2021 against our strategy and sets out our plans for the future so we can be held
accountable for our impact. Framed by the four key areas of our strategy, it shares the impacts we have on our customers and clients, colleagues, communities and the environment. It gives insight into the sort of company we are today – our culture, governance and risk management processes – and our future aims – such as our ambition to set emissions reduction targets for Scope 1, 2 & 3, in line with climate science, that will shape our roadmap to becoming Net-Zero by 2030.
It gives our clients access to more information about Lowell than ever before – including evidence that we’ll look after your customers and your business, and carbon reporting to help you understand your own supply chain impacts. This will help you make a more informed choice about whether we’re the right partner for you on a cultural and practical level.
A more detailed review of what the report includes:
About our business, our stakeholders and the role we play: As it’s our first report, we’ve used it as an opportunity to educate people about Lowell – the work we do, how we impact our colleagues, customers and clients, and the role we play in our industry and wider society. We believe that the more we can share about our business, the more attractive we’ll be as a company to work for and with.
2021 achievements and initiatives: Organised under the four key areas of our Sustainability Strategy - Better for Customers, Better Ethics
and Understanding, Better for Society and Responsible Business – you’ll see a range of initiatives Lowell has delivered during 2021 to progress our sustainability agenda, as well as a flavour of our future focus areas. Things like the development of our Groupwide pledges for Customers in Vulnerable Situations, how we’ve shared insights from our FVI research to help policymakers better understand financial vulnerability and our plans to offer all colleagues the opportunity to volunteer for a community cause using their paid working hours.
23 key performance indicators: The report is supported by a 23-metric strong scorecard, that shares 2021 performance against a range of
quantitative and qualitative measures. We’ve also aligned our metrics to the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board and the UN Sustainability Development Goals, as well as including unique metrics for Lowell to give a deeper and broader insight into Lowell’s business performance than ever before. We’ll share our market-leading customer net promoter scores, ‘excellent’ client satisfaction scores and strong scores across colleague engagement topics, as well as some of our wider impacts – such as the fact that we reached over 10 million consumers in the UK alone with our messages of financial education and support during 2021.
14 ambitious future targets: At Lowell, we are always pushing ourselves to be better, and so we wanted to share some of our future
goals to hold ourselves to account. There are 14 targets in our scorecard – to give you a flavour, we’re looking to achieve global standards across all colleague engagement metrics, improve the gender diversity of our senior team to 40% female by 2025, and as part of our wider impacts, we’re also focused on reducing our impact on the environment. Our focus is on reducing as much as possible, and we’ve committed to be carbon neutral by 2025 and achieving Net Zero emissions by 2030.
Want to know more? We’re developing our work on Sustainability all the time. Please send any questions to sustainability@lowellgroup.co.uk, or request a chat with our Sustainability Manager via your Head of Sector.
