An update on diversity at Zopa in 2024
At Zopa Bank, our people are connected by purpose and a shared mission to create a fairer financial world that makes every penny count. We do this by offering fair, simple, and intuitive financial products that add great value to the lives of our customers.
We extend our values of fairness and inclusivity onto our culture and the way we build teams and enable our colleagues to do great work.
We always strive to provide a supportive working environment that embraces individuality across race, ethnicity, faith, sexual orientation, class, disability, and gender.
Increasing female representation
As part of our commitment to diversity and female representation, in 2018 we signed the Women in Finance Charter with a pledge to ensure that at least 33% of our senior management is made up of women.
We were incredibly proud to have surpassed this goal in 2022, when we achieved a total of 40% representation of women in senior management (defined as leadership team and their direct reports) – an 11% increase from 2021.
We then achieved an even higher 44% senior female representation in 2023. This percentage went down to 38% in 2024 because our first major acquisition of DivideBuy in 2023 changed the gender split of our employee base.
We are confident we will again increase this representation through ongoing initiatives that place diversity and female representation at the forefront of our strategy:
Women in Business Network – We’ve launched our first official employee resource group: the Women in Business Network, which is open to all and has initiatives with a female centric lens. Its member panel has hosted three events so far, all aimed at enhancing the female experience at Zopa.
Gender Equity Collective - We work with ‘The Gender Equity Collective’, which educates and raises awareness on DE&I issues related to gender. We’ve launched two masterclasses with them, covering reciprocal allyship and inclusive leadership, with almost 100 Zopians attending.
Partnering with Code First Girls - We have partnered with CFG since 2021, offering technical training courses in data, software, full-stack and product management to 135 participants. This has already led to a dozen job offers with Zopa and we will continue to work together in 2025.
Building a diverse talent pipeline - We decode job ads to remove gender bias and focus on ensuring gender diverse candidate lists and interview panels, including training for all interviewers on how to identify and mitigate against gender bias. We’ve also onboarded ivee., a recruitment platform that helps women return to work, to increase our visibility to a very specific candidate pool.
Ensuring a 50:50 hiring pipeline - We have maintained our 50:50 split in our graduate hiring pipeline. Next year we will continue our focus on the development of graduate and apprenticeship levels, nurturing the next generation of female Zopa leaders and managers.
Raising awareness - We’ve been rated 4.5/5 on the Top Most Loved Workplace lists for Parents & Caregivers and Women. We also collaborate with specialist organisations, such as Coding Black Females, to host women in tech events, and with Innovate Finance on its annual Powerlist of Women in FinTech, which five Zopians featured on in 2024.
Supporting maternity – This year, a taskforce undertook to review and overhaul our female employees’ maternity experience by reviewing all aspects of their return-to-work journey. This will be rolled out in early 2025.
From gender parity to pay parity
With 38% female representation in its leadership team, Zopa bank continues its work towards achieving true gender parity, ensuring it is a leading player among UK digital banks when it comes to female representation at the highest level.
We also pay equally across like-for-like roles, proudly employing a diverse team of people across the organisation.
But while our pay is fair across like-for-like roles and we continue to have more women in our business than ever before, our current pay gap remains higher than what we’d like. As of April 2024, our median gender pay gap was 37%, down from 38.2% in 2023.
This is mainly a product of the distribution of women across our firm. We have more men in tech and product roles; these roles often come with a higher market value. And we have more women in customer service roles, the Zopa function which consists of our lowest salaries overall.
When we look at our overall gender pay gap separating out our Customer Operations team, we observe a significant reduction in our overall gender pay gap.
One of our main committed focus areas of our strategy has been to increase the representation of females in our upper quartile and we are delighted to have continued to increase representation by almost 2% year on year within this quartile. Notably, between May-23 and April-24, 41.8% of all joiners were female.
The UK Financial Services industry shares the long-term challenge of closing the gender pay gap and we know that there is still more work we can do. Our intentions in this area are reflected in our diversity goals.
We have an ongoing commitment to hire more women into a greater number of senior levels and continuously invest in our talented women to achieve and maintain balanced representation at all levels.
We work continuously, year on year, to ensure our workplace enables female employees to thrive, and in turn, to reduce our gender pay gap.
Driving Diversity and Inclusion
We have made further investments in 2024 to improve our diversity and inclusion efforts. These are building on the previous initiatives we launched in 2022 and 2023, demonstrating our ongoing commitment to continuous improvement in this area:
Building out our mentoring programme - Our mentoring programme has helped Zopians at all levels move towards their personal development and career goals for three years.
Bolstering our Leadership Academy - We run Leadership Development programmes in Operations and Technology, and our Leadership Academy takes emerging leaders and develops them over a six-month period.
Delivering unconscious bias training - We collaborate with Mission Diverse to deliver unconscious bias training to all managers, providing Zopians with important new insights where they can learn from each other and better understand their teams.
Delivering menopause training – We run multiple Menopause Awareness training sessions and have a dedicated Menopause Advocate group who organise ‘Lunch and Learn’ sessions. We also have free sanitary products on site from Hey Girls.
Delivering neurodiversity training - We partnered with Rachel Morgan Trimmer from Fire Bird to run sessions championing neurodiversity as a catalyst for inclusivity. Our managers received bespoke training on awareness and how to support neurodiverse team members.
Trans Advocacy Group – We launched Zopa’s first Trans Advocacy Group in 2024, which is open to all and bolsters inclusivity at Zopa for the LGBTQ+ community. The member group researched and recommended 15 new policies to support Trans and non-binary individuals, which are now being implemented in collaboration with Zopa’s People team and guidance from Stonewall's Diversity Champion scheme.
Improving ethnic representation - Zopa’s community encompasses 41 nationalities with some 24% of our employees identifying as ethnically diverse. While Black representation at Zopa is at 4%, on par with the general UK population, we think it is still not high enough. We encourage Zopians to disclose their ethnicity during our bi-annual engagement survey and our talent acquisition team has dedicated D&I targets for talent sourcing and recruitment to ensure we have a diverse talent pipeline.
New benefits - Our benefits enhance our employees’ lives for the better across a broad spectrum of life situations. These include:
16 weeks new parent leave for all new parents, including adoption
Premium subscription to Anya (a new parent support app)
15 days bereavement leave for a loved one, including 2 days for a beloved pet
An EV salary sacrifice scheme
Flexible bank holidays (religious or any other bank holiday) to dates better suited to the individuals’ beliefs
Group Income Protection
A will writing service
A free mortgage advice
Generous health cash plan thresholds to support dental, optical and other every day health costs
Today Zopa bank offers an environment of high trust, inclusivity and a range of benefits that empower our teams to work in ways that enable them to meet both their personal and professional objectives.
In 2025, we will continue to invest in our People proposition, empowering our employees to do their best work, adding even more improvements to the delivery of our strategy that is guided by our unwavering commitment to fairness, equal representation, diversity and inclusion.
Signed, Iain Kendrick, Chief People Officer at Zopa Bank
