PensionBee Community Involvement Policy

Contents

1. Our approach
2. Listening to and amplifying community voices
3. Charters
4. Corporate citizenship
5. School partnerships
6. Volunteering
7. External speakers

Our approach

PensionBee makes pensions simple so that everyone can look forward to a happy retirement.

We recognise that in order to achieve our vision of a world where everyone can look forward to a happy retirement, underpinned by financial freedom, social inclusion, and good health, we need to listen to and engage with our wider communities, and play our part in influencing positive change based on their needs.

Listening to and amplifying community voices

Each year we survey thousands of members of the public about a broad range of themes such as their experiences of the cost of living crisis, savings habits, and views on climate change. We also learn about lived experiences through focus groups and individual interviews, where we invite members of the public to share their views on themes such as gender inequality in the pensions system, the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on retirement plans, and experiences of scams.

The insights that we gather feed into our public campaigns to raise awareness about consumer experiences and needs and to make change, via the national press, regulators, and the business community.

We’ve supported numerous campaigns led by ShareAction’s Good Work Coalition to get FTSE100 companies and supermarkets to start paying a Living Wage, and we used customer insights in 2021 to highlight that savers expect companies in their pension funds to pay the Living Wage.

Charters

To publicly highlight our commitment to the local community and to set public targets for our own activities as a business over time, we’ve signed several Charters and joined campaigns related to the three pillars of our vision (financial freedom, social inclusion, and good health).

These include:

• ABI Making Flexible Work Charter
• ABI Transparent Parental Leave and Pay Initiative
• Accredited Living Wage Employer
• Accredited Disability Confident Employer
• Make My Money Matter
• Race at Work Charter
• Social Mobility Pledge
• Tech Talent Charter
• The Diversity Project
• Women in Finance Charter
• Workforce Disclosure Initiative Investor Coalition

These Charters and projects help connect us with national networks dedicated to particular causes and help further our reach into local communities.

Corporate citizenship

PensionBee wants all companies to become better corporate citizens and help build a business ecosystem that values all stakeholders and rewards positive impact to the planet and society. In order to do this, we must lead by example. As a publicly-listed technology company that seeks to revolutionise the pensions industry for consumers, we have a platform to make meaningful change. Not only are we dedicated to being an exemplary corporate citizen but to using our platform to signal to other companies that success means doing business in a fair and sustainable way.

We believe that transparent and standardised corporate disclosures are fundamental to holding both ourselves and individual firms to account and driving better standards across all industries and geographies.

As such we publish our own workforce data, such as the gender pay gap, our parental leave policy, and our Diversity, Inclusion, and Equality policy and targets. We also disclose through broader campaigns such as the Workforce Disclosure Initiative (WDI), and our Charters. We publish our environmental data and targets through the Streamlined Energy and Carbon Reporting initiative, the PAS 2060 carbon neutrality standard and from 2022, through the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD).

You can find all our disclosures in our dedicated ESG download hub.

School partnerships

Our school partnerships support our aim to promote a financial services sector where anyone can succeed, regardless of their background or personal characteristics, and a world where everyone can understand their finances and have basic financial literacy.

At PensionBee we have - and seek to maintain - complete gender parity across our business, our Executive Team, and our Board. We are also very proud that c.41% of our colleagues self-identify as coming from a minority ethnic group (as of 2021), something remarkable in financial services. As part of our mission to make pensions simple and engaging we seek to maintain a socially inclusive workplace that not only reflects the rich diversity of the UK population but is also a welcoming place for historically underrepresented groups in the pensions and financial services sector.

Through engaging with Charters and national campaigns focused on social inclusion, we’ve learned of the importance of exposure to employers and professionals for school students, particularly schools with large numbers of pupils with characteristics that are not currently well represented in the financial services and technology industries, such as children on free school meals who are from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds, minority ethnic pupils, and students with disabilities.

As a response, in 2020 we took on an Enterprise Adviser position at a local school, Langdon Park, a long-term partnership through which we support building career education. One way we do this is by sharing or donating resources, such as career story recordings, and laptops. We’ve also organised a series of Q&A careers sessions to connect Year 9 students with our colleagues.

We work with other local inner London schools in various ways, such as inviting students in for targeted work experience placements, CV writing and mock interview sessions, and providing support for students for whom English is a second language. Schools that we’ve worked with in 2022 include Our Lady’s Catholic High School in Hackney and Central Foundation Boys School. We develop all of our programs with the schools based on the needs of their students. Our interactions with students have raised our own awareness of their appetite for financial literacy education, and we’re now working with two local schools, Skinner’s Academy and Langdon Park, on bringing this to their students.

Volunteering

Each member of the PensionBee team is able to dedicate the equivalent of a full day of work to volunteer for a cause that is related to PensionBee.

We also organise charity events for colleagues to participate in, such as bee-conservation work with the RSPB Wildlife Charity, a London to Brighton bike ride to fundraise for Great Ormond Street Hospital, and an annual Christmas gift appeal to support local people experiencing homelessness organised in collaboration with Better Bankside.

We’re currently exploring ways that we can work with Brentford Bees FC, which we sponsor, to bring financial literacy skills to their communities.

External speakers

We regularly invite inspirational speakers to raise awareness about important topics and help us deepen our understanding of wider communities. Some recent talks include the experiences of traveller communities in the UK along with contextual policy analysis, a workshop about inclusive design delivered by DeafBlind UK, a Guardian journalist who shared her experiences reporting on race, start-up CTO Omar Reid’s presentation about being Black in Tech, and the founder of the Institute of Neurodiversity raising awareness about the work of the organisation and her own career experiences.

Your views

Everything we do at PensionBee is shaped by you, our stakeholders. We welcome your thoughts and suggestions on this policy and on our evolving approach to community involvement by emailing us at engagement@pensionbee.com.