Crown Agents Bank, Journey to Certification

Foreign Exchange (FX) and cross-border payments are often complex and expensive, especially when operating in hard-to-reach markets. We use our strength of network, technology, and expertise to move money to, from, and across hard-to-reach markets.

At Crown Agents Bank (CAB) we knew that becoming a B Corp would deliver multiple benefits; it would enable us to stand out in the world of UK regulated banks, and it would meet a growing appetite to work with and for businesses whose goals and mission positively contribute to society and the planet. 

We also knew it would support us in implementing our ESG strategy, first developed in 2020, providing us with a tool to further engage our staff in a meaningful way as we take action to reach our environmental and social goals. 

“Becoming a B Corp aligns with our commitment to sustainable and responsible business practices, and positive social impact by moving money where it is needed including harder to reach markets.”
Chris Green, Chief Risk Officer, Member of the CAB Board and ESG Board Subcommittee.

The process of certifying took perseverance. In 2021 Head of ESG, Charlie Bronks and colleagues, started working through the B Corp   Impact Assessment (BIA) alongside support from B Corp  Leaders at Junxion Strategy. The BIA organises the complex and overlapping issues across the sustainability landscape into five pillars: Governance, Workers, Community, Environmental and Customers. Within these pillars there are about 20 Impact Topics, each containing questions about operational and business impact.

“Whilst B Corp certification was a long process, it was ultimately very worthwhile. It helped to bring the team together around our ESG ambitions and has paved the way for CAB to have more impact in the future” 
Charlie Bronks, Head of ESG  

As an authorised and regulated UK Bank, CAB’s  governance was already in-line with best practice. Our success in fulfilling our mission and realising our vision depends on our ability to attract, retain and motivate highly talented individuals. Therefore, our employee benefits, empowerment and satisfaction scored well for positive impact. 

Despite a strong initial baseline score on our BIA, Charlie and the team nonetheless worked on several discreet operational tasks to further increase positive impact. We developed a virtual office stewardship policy and committed to inclusivity and diversity targets at senior leadership level. Most importantly, we began to review how we manage the outcomes of our work to support purpose-driven enterprises.

Having submitted our B Corp Certification with those improvements in place, we completed an in-depth and rigorous verification process, submitting over a hundred pieces of evidence of our operational and business impact. About two years after we began the process, we certified in the summer of 2023.

How CAB has a positive impact in the world
CAB is a key partner to the humanitarian and international development sectors, supporting multilateral, government, and non-governmental organisations in some of the world’s most challenging environments. With CAB’s assistance, partner organisations can deliver FX and payments to and from hard-to-reach regions including those suffering the consequences of war, disease and natural disaster. 

Proprietary technology and solutions have been developed specifically to cater to the needs of these markets, to reduce the cost and friction associated with moving money, so that more funds are delivered to those who need it most. We were awarded an Impact Business Model acknowledging this support we provide for purpose-driven enterprises and underserved populations.   

We are proud to have this part of our business model acknowledged. Whilst it was challenging to explore not just our output but also the outcomes of our vital services, it was rewarding to reflect on the positive impact on our stakeholders. 

Embedding B Corp thinking into our governance
As a requirement to become a Certified B Corporation in the UK, we had to change our Articles of Association  . The change obliges us to consider wider stakeholders as well as shareholders when making business decisions. 
Our most vulnerable stakeholders already form the heart of our business purpose – to move money where it is needed. Embedding this stakeholder-centric decision-making into our legal documents therefore felt natural, as well as being a crucial step to becoming a Certified B Corporation. 

We didn’t take this step lightly: we explored the implications of this legal change and are committed to refining our governance processes to ensure we can deliver on the spirit and the letter of our new Articles, setting a positive example for our sector.

Example of our impact - The Payments Association’s Sustainability Superheroes – community-focused financial inclusion 
The Payments Association is an independent representative for the industry, which drives collaboration within the payments sector in order to bring about meaningful change and innovation.  One of their initiatives is the Inclusivity Working Group, which helps drive best practice and knowledge sharing on inclusivity in the payments space. 

Charlie Bronks, Head of ESG, and Richo Strydom, Chief Technology Officer, were interviewed by The Payments Association as part of their Sustainability Superheroes campaign in 2022. Charlie talked about CAB’s superpower being the trust we have established with international stakeholders that allows us to grow relationships with tier one and tier two banks, which in turn aids in capacity building. We are also continuously partnering with mobile network operators to advance technology access. 

Our work with partners actively implementing biometric solutions to help overcome locally specific issues also demonstrates the impact we can have within our stakeholder communities. Rural Africa, for example, is where many home addresses are not formally recognised. By partnering with innovative solution providers, we will help local people open bank accounts without a home address! Our community-focussed work directly improves financial inclusion outcomes and is our sustainability superpower.    

Measuring our impact
After much hard work and commitment, we are delighted to have certified with 84.1 points, which is a great start for us on our sustainability journey given the median score of ordinary businesses who complete the assessment is 50.9. However, we know that B Corp certification is more than just points. Our B Corp certification demonstrates that we are a business that meets high standards of verified social and environmental performance, public transparency, and legal accountability, with profit and purpose interlinked. We have taken B Corp to the heart of our business, embedding the ethos in the key decisions that we make. 

Breakdown of our scores.

• Governance: 12.5
• Workers: 35.1 
• Community: 16
• Environment: 10.1 
• Customers: 10.4 
• TOTAL: 84.1     

We are delighted to join just half a dozen UK regulated banks in the B Corp movement and are particularly proud to be verified in this industry for creating impact for underserved communities through our partnerships with Non-Governmental Organisations across multiple emerging and frontier markets. 

‘A company's impact score is a sum of all of the individual questions in the assessment. The weight of each question and section depends on the company's specific track. The track is determined by the industry, size, and geography of the business.’ 
How the B Corp Impact Assessment is Scored

Committed to continuous improvement 
New B Corp standards coming in 2024 might change the approach to calculating impact in the BIA, ensuring a range of important minimum requirements across ten impact topics   . However, reflecting on our current BIA gives us the opportunity to focus our improvement across the five pillars, ensuring we increase our positive impact next time we certify. 

B Corps are required to recertify every three years, so as a part of our business strategy and reporting commitments we will work to continue to improve our impact, and we aim to achieve the following improvement actions:

• Introduce a formal link between performance related variable pay and the achievement of our ESG targets
• ESG learning and development:
  • Bank wide training requirement modules for sustainability
  • Required training for compliance team to complete Sustainability modules.
• Continuous review of our policies and processes to ensure we promote diversity across the Bank
• Grade all suppliers according to their fulfillment of predetermined criteria and achieve >50% of suppliers that CAB works with being graded
• Reduce emissions from travel in-line with CAB-specific science-based targets.
• Set up cross departmental working group to focus on incoming mandatory carbon reporting regulations
• Measure and track the impact of our work on wider beneficiaries, informing a strategy to increase positive impact and reduce negative impact of CAB's work
• Continue our commitment to hard-to-reach markets by continuously investing in currencies, partnerships, and economies.

Aiming for long-term positive impact
Although we are proud to have achieved certification, we know that this is just the beginning of our journey, and we will keep working to on being a positive example for the banking sector . As part of the next steps on our journey we will be reflecting further on our ‘Theory of Change’, asking ourselves how we can best continue to adapt our products and services, so they deliver the change we want to see in the world. Ultimately, we commit to continuously improving our impact, re-enforcing a stakeholder-centric approach to decision-making across the business, and publishing our progress in our annual impact report.