Journey of a thousand miles – Embedding ESG at Multitude

This article is the third in a series of articles written by our Group ESG Officer, Nontokozo Khumalo. Nontokozo is responsible for driving Multitude's ESG and sustainability programme. She has over 10 years of experience in financial services working in ESG and client management.

As we near the end of the year, we think this is a good time to explore Multitude’s journey to embed the environmental, social and governance (ESG) consideration at Multitude. We are inspired and humbled by the increasing awareness and the value of ESG amongst our colleagues, stakeholders, suppliers, and investors.   

Journey of a thousand miles – Embedding ESG at Multitude

In 2021, we took a first step in a journey to embed environmental, social and governance (ESG) consideration at Multitude. This supports our vision to be the most valued financial ecosystem, something we believe can only be realised if we understand our risks, opportunities, and impacts, including those relating to ESG. Under a revised Group strategy, we articulated a group mission that at the core has an ESG agenda. Through our three business units backed by our Growth Platform, we want to democratise financial services through digitilisation, making them fast, easy, and green.

We started by defining what ESG means to us as Multitude in the 3rd quarter of last year and after robust discussion with colleagues including through workshops and a newly convened ESG Steering Committee, we published our first set of ESG Goals for 2025 and started to tell our ESG story.

Nontokozo Khumalo

The Social pillar is our main pillar

The “S” of ESG is where we know we can make significant impact, have the most risks to manage and opportunities to capture. As a financial technology growth platform offering products to diverse customer segments through three business units, SweepBank, Ferratum, and CapitalBox, we seek to serve the underserved customer, providing access to finance and services where and when it is needed most. Our business unit product and service offering not only supports access but ease of access to the right customer.

In defining our ESG strategy, we focused on how we can continue to widen access whilst doing this responsibly. Having already had Responsible Lending Principles in place that support customer selection processes, we wanted to start engaging our customers on our practices. Earlier this year we piloted a Responsibility Index in one of our Business units, Ferratum, which surveys customers on how responsible our practices are in addition to other factors used in the index. Our ESG Report 2022 will delve more into the Responsibility Index which will also be rolled out to SweepBank.

In addition, we assess satisfaction in the form of Net Promoter Scores for both our customers and employees, both of which are integral to the achievement of our business objectives. This addresses our 2025 ESG goal of monitoring, reporting on and improving stakeholder well-being. We have implemented a hybrid policy during the year, formalising our commitment to balance at work and recognising the impact of long work commutes on both employee lives and the environment. Our hybrid policy aims to balance necessary interaction between colleagues with flexibility in line with future ways of working.

ESG conscious Growth Technology platform enabled by strong commitment from leadership

A large part of commencing our ESG journey has been to answer the question of how best we can embed ESG in our everyday work. Answering this question is a continuous effort at Multitude with everyone having something valuable to contribute to the discussion. We have started to outline our commitments on topics such as human rights and diversity and inclusion and are considering what ESG means for the way we think about risk and even procurement.

We have been increasing our Board level engagement on ESG bringing our goals and frameworks into the governance agenda and board committee charters. We want everyone to be thinking about and owning ESG with strong support from the leadership of the company.

Social pillar

Do not forget about the “E”

Given the urgency of addressing climate change collectively as society, we want to play our part in supporting the transition to a low-carbon economy towards achievement of the Paris Agreement ambition. We are already enabling low environmental footprint finance and banking access through our digital platform offering cardless banking, paperless processes and use of data centres powered by renewable energy.

We want to measure and report on our carbon footprint and work towards targets to reduce the negative impact we have on the environment. Gathering quality data and closing gaps has been our initial focus and we anticipate progress in setting a baseline and targets that we can ultimately share with our stakeholders. Our Group Environmental Policy published in June this year outlines our planned actions on environment with further progress planned in this area.

Beach with Cold

Journey to greatness

The biggest achievement for us would be to see ESG be indistinguishable from traditional financial and strategic topics, becoming part of everyday decisions made by our colleagues across the globe. To borrow from our group mission, we want to see ESG “democratised” and accessible to everyone at Multitude.

My role as the Group ESG Officer is to drive this access, supported the cross functional and unit ESG Steering Committee whose membership includes our Group CEO as co-chair. This involves starting or supporting the many ESG conversations we have been having with colleagues from across the world and helping to tell the ESG story of our Growth platform both to ourselves and externally to our stakeholders including investors. ESG has significance for every person in today’s organisations where the stakes are high for companies to demonstrate good corporate citizenship, therefore widening interest is important for anyone working on this topic.

It has been inspiring to see the growth of ESG in our company in such a short space of time with some teams, business units and functions starting to take ownership of how to integrate ESG into their work and strategies. We want to continue to grow awareness on this area, its value and on how we can together be part of supporting EU and global wide ambitions and meet the changing demands of our stakeholders.

Working together with committed colleagues from across the world, with diverse views and experience, certainly makes for a rewarding journey of a thousand miles.

Did you enjoy reading this blog? Read the other articles by Nontokozo here,  

Article1: Three ESG trends for FinTech

Article 2: How FinTechs can effectively embed ESG

Disclaimer: The information provided in this article is intended for general informational purposes only. It is not intended to be, and should not be taken as, professional or financial advice.