What sort of community development does the bank get involved in? We prefer to say that it’s our people who get involved and make a difference. Just providing financial support or sharing our business expertise alone would be too easy. We do those things, of course; for example, we’ve helped kick-start 80 small businesses in East London since 1987, with a survival and success rate that’s impressive by most start-up standards.
But equally valuable – perhaps even more valuable – are the thousands of hours our people have given to community projects that may be small in scale but can be huge in impact – everything from literacy and numeracy programmes to supporting an emergency line in East London for Asian women and young people who have been victims of domestic violence.
