Finance Monthly CFO Awards Winners Edition

Finance Monthly CFO Awards 2020 www.finance-monthly.com 22 UNITED KINGDOM Finance Monthly CFO Awards 2020 Indeed, the UK financial services industry as a whole has a crucial role to play when it comes to ESG – which has the potential to directly impact product offerings and customer behaviour, as well as their desires to invest, finance and, ultimately, repay. To show our commitment to ESG, in recent years Shawbrook has split our responsibilities into four main areas, namely the environment, community, marketplace and workplace segments. We understand embedding sustainability in all aspects of our business model is the right thing to do and we are absolutely committed to creating a strong business that is not achieved at the expense of our environment. Whether it be our carbon footprint, our waste and energy consumption or the way we do business, Shawbrook strives to entrench sustainability across all aspects of our business operations. Moving forward, I believe ESG will be one of the main cogs in our strategy in the years and decades to come. We have already established a Climate Change Working Group and developed a plan focusing on the development of the bank wide ESG strategy, risk appetite and management and governance arrangements to ensure appropriate decision making, and disclosures. As CFO, I recognise the financial risks associated with ESG but I am also very much aware that the impact of ESG activities, and particularly climate change, stretches far wider than the financial risks outlined in our plan. Finally, we also have a duty to look after and support our people, and this is something that I am very passionate about. I want Shawbrook to be looked upon as a progressive and inclusive organisation – an organisation that supports its staff through any challenge that presents itself. We’ve made lots of progress in recent years around improving our understanding of mental health and wellbeing and also diversity and inclusion, but we know that despite the progress we’ve made, there remains much to be done. As CFO, I realise that I am in a great position to not only act as a voice of support for the business but to also actively push initiatives and this is something I shall continue to do moving forward. These range from large corporate programmes such as the listing/de- listing of the bank to optimising our capital stack through debt market issuances of AT1 and Tier 2 hybrid capital, with a three-fold growth in the lending balances funded by UK retail depositors, our inaugural securitisation and central bank funding schemes. I am also particularly proud of the progress we have made in the continued modernisation of the business from a technology and systems perspective. Although careful cost management remains a key objective of the Group, we continue to invest in technology solutions to support our business priorities and have made great strides across our Property Finance, Business Finance, Consumer Lending and Savings divisions in providing them with the technology advancements required in order to take the business to the next level. This investment in technology will continue as we constantly look to improve the overall end-to-end customer journey. Meanwhile, from a regulatory perspective, the FCA’s introduction of the Senior Manager Regime saw me assume personal responsibility for ensuring the bank has sufficient capital, funding and liquidity to support the balance sheet, a challenge made even harder against the backdrop of Brexit and Covid-19. What do you hope to achieve in the future? I want to see the bank achieve its full potential despite the challenging macroeconomic backdrop and I want to see my finance team and wider colleagues from across the group flourish and achieve success. Being able to deploy suitable risk appetite into specialist lending markets during such challenged economic times is our raison d’etre and is what our people are known for being best in class at. I believe the UK banking markets will eventually consolidate to fewer players and I know Shawbrook can play a significant part in that sector consolidation, from a position of strength rather than weakness. We are also very aware of our environmental, social and governance (ESG) responsibilities. At Shawbrook, we want to always operate as a responsible business and continue to act with integrity and adhere to high ethical standards. We understand that in order to deliver truly sustainable returns, continuous consideration of our ESG impact must be embedded into our day-to-day business activity. Q