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In this section

Responsible Business

Clients

Our aim is to embed a culture that puts clients at the heart of everything we do

To achieve our purpose of empowering people to save and invest with confidence, we aim to encourage clients to take control of their financial future.

Examples include:

  • The Savings and Resilience Barometer and 5 to Thrive: Even though we can't always control what happens in life, we can prepare ahead to improve our financial security over the long term. That’s where being financially resilient comes into play. To understand personal financial resilience, HL has established a Savings and Resilience Barometer, based on the 5 key areas of our 5 to Thrive campaign produced every 6 months with Oxford Economics.

  • Leading an industry initiative to improve the transfer of investors’ money between companies.

  • Lobbying the DWP to give employees more control over their workplace pensions and improved access to pensions for the self-employed.

  • Financially Fearless: We’re on a mission to tackle money inequality and help every woman become Financially Fearless. You can join the community to build your financial knowledge, get money boosting tools and break down the taboo of talking about money.

  • Working with HM Treasury to support the new ban on cold calling to reduce the risk of pension fraud.

  • Lobbying industry and DWP on the importance of engaging people with their workplace pension.

  • Working with trade associations and HMRC to simplify Child Trust Fund and ISA rules.

We want to do the right thing for our clients and offer them the support they need to invest with confidence. We’re committed to helping all of our clients from novice to experienced investors. We offer a range of tools, guides and research to support clients regardless of their investing experience.

Responsible Investing Hub

We recognise that sustainability and responsible investing is increasingly important to our clients. We launched our Responsible Investment hub to respond to this need. Here we provide investment information, research and guides with the aim of supplementing clients knowledge of responsible investing. The ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) articles cover a wide variety of topics to help investors with different goals, covering areas such as the clean energy revolution, the impact of investing on deforestation and ESG factors to consider if investing in bonds.

Women

Women don’t invest as much as men for many reasons, one of those is confidence. We’ve undertaken work to promote and encourage more ‘Women in Investing’ to address inequalities in savings and pensions. We’ve run marketing campaigns aimed at women and done user research to make sure we are supporting them as much as we can.

First-time investors

First-time investors want to know the investing basics so we have plenty of tools and tips to get them started. Our guides includes a beginner’s guides to investing, funds and shares to help clients make the right decisions for them and their financial objectives. We also have an experienced Helpdesk ready to take your calls and answer your questions to help clients feel empowered to invest. Our Ready-Made investment products support first-time investors and guides them through the investing process, for more information please go to our Ready-Made Investments page.

Ethical investing

Clients are becoming more interested in investing ethically and we want to give people the opportunity to do this. Our website has information on ethical investing including a beginners guide to investing responsibly and a range of research and information.

Vulnerable clients

We’re committed to providing an exceptional service to all of our clients and offering the support they need. We’re looking at how we can better support our vulnerable clients. We have a partnership with Dementia UK to ensure that we can support vulnerable clients and train colleagues to ensure we are providing the best service for our clients.

FTSE4Good

HL are listed on the FTSE4Good index series, demonstrating our strong environmental, social and governance principles.

First-time investors

First-time investors want to know the investing basics, so we have plenty of tools and tips to get them started on our Learn section of our website. We also have an experienced Helpdesk ready to take your calls and answer your questions to help clients feel empowered to invest.

Vulnerable clients

We’re committed to providing an exceptional service to all our clients and continue to look at how we can better support our vulnerable clients. As part of this we’ve created a Supporting Life Events webpage on our website, which has been designed to support our vulnerable clients. We also provide support for those living with someone who is vulnerable.

Our colleagues are trained to help support our vulnerable clients and to date we have over 1600 colleagues registered as Dementia Friends. We provide additional support for colleagues through specific vulnerability procedure guides. We also work with charities to ensure we’re supporting our colleagues and clients in the best way we can. Some of the charities we’ve worked with are Alzheimer’s Society, SafeLives and Surviving Economic Abuse.

Accessibility

We want to be the most client-obsessed company in the UK. We know we can only hope to do this by meeting the needs of all our clients.

All our clients should be able to use all our services independently, without any issues. Our Accessibility Working Group and team of Accessibility Ambassadors are dedicated to improving our products and services. Together we’re working to embed accessibility into our processes and train our colleagues across the business.

Our initiatives for our website and app include:

  • Building accessibility into our design system, so that any new services we create will have accessibility at their core.

  • Aiming to conform to Level AA against Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 (WCAG) standards.

  • Including clients with accessibility needs in our user research so we can check our progress and receive vital feedback on our work. Learn more about our website accessibility.

There is much more that we want to do and we’re always working to improve.

Everyone should feel empowered to save and invest with confidence. We look forward to continuing our work to help our clients achieve this.

Email us with questions or feedback: Accessibility@hl.co.uk.

We always endeavour to do the right thing for our clients and other stakeholders. We actively seek to lobby via public consultation and with policymakers where we believe that retail investors in the UK will benefit.

Examples include:

  • Driving campaigns to improve the nation’s financial resilience

  • Improving information for clients, working with trade associations and engaging with government and the regulators

  • Developing the investing landscape for retail investors, improving retail investors’ rights and access to markets

  • Working with government to give employees more control over their workplace pensions and campaigning for improved access to pensions for the self-employed