Corporate responsibility (‘CR’)

Community investment – by contribution type

 

Our Customer Principles emphasise the customer focus of our business and help us to consider the impacts of our business decisions on our customers.

 

Our values underpin every aspect of our approach to doing business and define the sort of group we want to be.

We strive to be an ethical business, known for treating our customers fairly, for bringing tangible benefits to the communities in which we work and for supporting and developing our employees. We do everything we can to minimise our environmental impacts.

Our Code of Ethics commits us to conducting our business with honesty and integrity and in accordance with the law. We are also committed to respecting human rights and avoiding fraud and corruption. We have a whistle-blowing policy and operate an externally managed hotline wherever we are legally able to do so. We pay suppliers promptly and encourage other people we work with to meet the ethical, social and environmental standards we set ourselves.

Integrating CR

Our efforts in CR are led from the top. Our Chief Executive Officer, John Harnett, chairs our CR steering committee which formally met twice in 2008. Our international CR working group, the international environment working groups and our Treating Customers Fairly (‘TCF’) group all report to the steering committee.

Treating Customers Fairly

One core element is aligning our business to the UK Financial Services Authority’s TCF principles. We have interpreted what this means for our business and developed our own Customer Principles which were signed off by the board in 2008. These emphasise the customer focus of our business and help us to consider the impacts of our business decisions on our customers. These commit us, amongst other things, to provide customers with simple products designed to meet their needs, keep customers informed, provide clear and well-balanced information, understand their ability to repay loans and help them through difficulties.

Our people

We have HR policies covering non-discrimination, equal opportunities and diversity. We provide employees with safe and comfortable working conditions, learning and development and offer comprehensive terms and conditions both in terms of basic salary and benefits. In 2008, our employees undertook over 175,000 formal training hours (28.9 hours per employee).

Community investment

We focus our community programmes on issues that relate directly to our business. That is why we have chosen to make financial literacy central to our community investment activities. We want to help ensure that customers in our markets have the right knowledge to make informed financial decisions and believe this will be increasingly important in the emerging economies where we want to operate. We invested £0.6 million in our community activities in 2008, representing 0.9% of pre-tax profit. We also have an active volunteering programme which saw nearly 2,000 employees volunteer over 5,800 hours.

Environmental footprint

Our environmental management system is based on the international standard ISO14001 and we carry out audits against this standard in every business, every year. We build on the enthusiasm of our employees through a range of environmental volunteering activities and run communications campaigns to support this. As a result of our efforts, our carbon footprint remains steady at 3.04 tonnes/CO₂ per employee, we reduced paper use by 9.5% and increased recycled paper as a percentage of paper purchased from 12% to 15%.

Stakeholder engagement

We believe we can learn a great deal through effective stakeholder engagement. During the year we continued to organise employee and agent forums and to carry out annual engagement surveys. We regularly commission external research into customer opinions in each of our markets. We also ran a stakeholder round table in 2008 to obtain external insight into our TCF strategy and CR reporting.

We work in partnership with a wide range of organisations in all our markets and in 2008 we decided to participate in the UN Global Compact. This is the largest corporate voluntary organisation for CR.

In 2008 IPF was included in the FTSE4Good Index. Although the Group was not large enough by market capitalisation to be invited to participate in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index assessment, we commissioned SAM Research to undertake an external benchmarking assessment against the same criteria. This gave encouraging results regarding our CR performance relative to peers – our overall score was 61% against a peer group average of 38% and a top score of 68%.

You can read a full account of our progress in our 2008 CR Report at http://www.ipfincrreport.co.uk/2008

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