Working with Progress Together provides the opportunity to attend thought provoking workshops with other FS organisations, allowing valuable time to share best practice and move the dial to level the playing field for social mobility across the industry.

The evidence-based approach from Progress Together has enabled us to drive engagement from our board and ExCo, encouraging them to take ownership of and action on socio-economic diversity, promoting the culture and strategy needed to advance socio-economic diversity, with particular focus on their most senior leadership positions.

We were also able to work collaboratively with Progress Together and other FS organisations to create a joint response to the FCA Consultation Paper on Diversity and Inclusion, with a focused lens on social mobility.

Progress Together have acted as an advocate for FS to introduce the ability to record employee socio-economic data within HR platforms, which is key to our ability to track progress against our ambition of having 35% of our senior leaders form a lower Socio-Economic Background by 2030.

Our research for the initial report with Progress Together gave us a benchmark for the position of social mobility within FS. From this, we have been able to build a clear and ambitious framework, providing focus, targets and actions towards our social-mobility agenda to start driving the change towards a more equitable approach for socio-economic background and enabling us to measure sustained progress.

We have introduced new initiatives such as our Mobilise development programme which mentors students in the local communities that Santander serves, supports our employees to develop skills to support those from lower socio-economic backgrounds and creates much needed longitude research on the actions that organisations can take to support those from lower socio-economic backgrounds.

We have launched the Santander University Scholars Programme, providing 100 university children from underrepresented groups with an annual grant of £10,00 during their study years and access to a dedicated mentor and work placements.

Internally, we deliver bespoke development programmes for colleagues from underrepresented groups, including lower social economic backgrounds, ensuring that each programme is representative and in line with our diversity targets (at least 50% women, 14% ethnicity minority, 35% SoMo, disability, family & carers etc). All the programmes include four core elements: personal competency development, sponsorship, lunch & learns and networking.

At Santander, we understand that having an inclusive culture helps people to feel that they belong, leading to a high performing environment where all people are accepted and respected for who they are. We currently score in the top quartile of external benchmarks across all key questions for Equity and Inclusion. We’re proud of what our people tell us about how it feels to work at Santander, scoring of 9.2/10 for ‘At Santander, people of all backgrounds are accepted for who they are’.

We are fast becoming Leaders for Social Mobility, ranked Top 30 in the 2023 Social Mobility Employer Index, and appearing in each of the last five years. We are improving our understanding of our people in our organisation through better data disclosure, as we aim to best represent the customers and communities we serve. Our data shows that we have a high proportion of people who come from a working-class background in comparison to most of the sector, and that social mobility is acting as a golden thread, helping us become more inclusive across diversity strands and intersections.

Our different initiatives act as an introduction to Santander to feed into our recruitment pipeline, positioning us as an inclusive employer dedicated to those from lower Socio-economic backgrounds by highlighting the many routes into employment.

In the coming years, we’ll continue to use our membership to advocate for a fairer society, where everyone has the opportunity to succeed, no matter their background.

Our ambition is to have 35% of our senior leaders to come from a lower social economic background from our current position of 29% by 2030.

Our aim is to build on our foundation actions to demonstrate innovative responses to social challenges by:

• Analysing and understanding the intersectional challenges facing our people of a lower socio-economic backgrounds and support with their development and progress.
• Develop and measure SME Breakthrough tools, resources and programmes to social mobility outcomes.
• Help young people develop workplace skills through mentoring with schools and helping higher education learners get good jobs, with particular focus on social mobility cold spots and disadvantages areas.

Advocate the importance of increased social mobility and be a leading light for this across the financial sector and wider.

Joining Progress Together is a vital step towards a more resilient, productive and equitable workforce. Membership provides the resources, recommendations and research needed to support those in senior positions to create positive change towards a financial services sector that can benefit fully from the range of perspectives, experiences and expertise that people from all socio-economic backgrounds can bring.

Being a member of Progress Together provides the opportunities to have access to detailed reporting and anonymous benchmarking against each other.

We would like to thank Progress Together for the ongoing support and championing the change towards ensuring that socio-economic background does not limit progress within the Financial Services sector.