We've achieved a great deal in getting where we are today. We have over 2 million customers, around 25,000 agents in six countries and around 6,000 employees.
I believe to ensure the long-term sustainable success of the business it's important to have the right values, policies and working practices so as to operate ethically. This ethical culture needs to beat at the heart of our business, be part of our mindset and influence every working relationship - particularly between agent and customer.
Despite challenging economic conditions we've made good progress in integrating corporate responsibility initiatives and the way we manage non-financial performance. We continue to invest in longer-term responsible business initiatives - examples include the high profile Excellence in Execution programme which in part aims to improve the customer centricity of the business. Especially relevant is our treating customers fairly project through which we launched our new Customer Principles which emphasize the customer focus of the business and help us consider the impacts of our decisions on customers. We've also launched a Customer Charter which enables us to better communicate to customers the levels of service they can expect and it sets clear standards so we can better monitor performance. Another example is the Best Practice Guide. This is essentially 'how we do business' and it drives consistently good practice throughout the Group regarding our operational and functional procedures including customer treatment, effective people management, community investment, and environmental management.
Looking outside the Company I believe it's important to interact with wider stakeholder groups and be aware of the social issues that are important to them. Coming out of recession there is a strong desire to improve the governance of lending institutions and to ensure responsible and sustainable lending. Alongside this, issues such as levels of consumer indebtedness, the evaluation by lenders of the affordability of loan repayments and the treatment of customers in arrears are receiving close attention. These types of issues can help or hinder the business and so it's important for us to identify and respond to such issues, and proactively communicate the positive elements of the business. We've sought membership to several organisations in each of our markets to help us identify external issues; we continue to benchmark our performance and have signed up to international commitments, for example, participating in the UN Global Compact.
In the interests of integration we've also made some changes in how we report non-financial information. We've taken a first step by including more comprehensive non-financial information into our Annual Report because we think this demonstrates a more holistic approach to reporting and offers a fuller picture of the Company's current and future potential. We've also taken the first step in achieving independent external assurance against the International Standard on Assurance Engagements on some of our published customer performance indicators. We've done so because customer treatment is material to our business. In order to maintain levels of disclosure and transparency we have and will continue to regularly update this section of the website as well as reporting against the Global Reporting Initiative annually.
With good standards and systems in place, our future focus will move to the wider impact our business has on society. We think this is positive given, for example, the economic opportunities our loans create, the social benefit in people's quality of life and the wealth we create through taxation. We will therefore be increasingly asking what sustainability means for our business and for the countries and communities in which we operate. We hope the information provided demonstrates that we're travelling in the right direction.