International Personal Finance The human face of finance

We're a people business and are committed to playing a responsible and active part in the communities where our customers, employees and agents live and work.

At the heart of our exciting community investment programme are two main themes - education and social inclusion.  We're focusing on projects that will help us establish and build strong community partnerships and deliver long-lasting benefits to our local communities.  We're also concentrating on encouraging and enabling employees and agents to volunteer in our initiatives.

We have a group policy for community investment which outlines our objectives and guides all our businesses towards best practice. Since our demerger from Provident Financial plc, we are now developing a new corporate community involvement programme which will improve co-ordination of our community activities, align them with our business strategy and provide a framework to monitor, benchmark and assess our performance. 

During 2007 we plan to develop partnerships and programs to achieve a balance between group strategic goals and country specific community requirements. We will report on progress in our 2007 corporate responsibility report.

Financial literacy

Financial literacy is the focus of many governments, consumer groups and financial organisations like us.  We recognise that, as part of our responsible lending efforts, it is important for us to ensure customers are able to make informed judgments and decisions regarding the use and management of money.

We are involved in a number of financial literacy initiatives. In the Czech Republic and Poland we have run the 'Read Before You Sign' campaign with promotes simple and easily understandable customer contracts, and we will run this successful campaign in other regions. In Slovakia we support programmes which include money management such as the Development of Life Skills and 'SOS' training programmes. In Hungary we are involved in financial literacy initiatives through our work with Junior Achievement Hungary and are an active member of the Hungarian Business Leaders Forum financial workshop.   

Snapshot of global activities

Not only have our community investment efforts had a positive impact on community stakeholders but they've helped us build a good, local reputation in each country we serve and provided a whole host of opportunities for employees to develop new skills.  Here are some of the projects we're involved with around the world.