Sustainability at Credicorp: our small-lender ESG picture, honestly

The vast majority of ESG (environmental, social, governance) reporting standards — TCFD, SECR, the upcoming UK SDS — apply at firm sizes well above where Credicorp sits. We are a small, privately held UK lender. None of those frameworks bind us. We still have an ESG picture; we still have an ESG opportunity. This article is the honest description of where we are on each of the three pillars, what we are doing, and — importantly — what we are not yet doing.

Environment: small footprint, deliberately

Credicorp is a remote-first operation. We have no large office to heat, no daily commute for most of the team, and no on-premise data centre to power. Every customer document is delivered electronically; we do not post paper agreements unless a customer requests a posted large-print copy under our accessibility policy. Our hosting infrastructure is UK-based and we choose providers that publish a credible commitment to renewable-energy procurement. The marginal energy cost of running our website + portal + collections automation across an average month is below the kind of figure that triggers any disclosure obligation — but it is also not zero, and we treat it accordingly.

What we don’t claim: we are not net-zero today. The supply chain (Stripe, our email provider, our cloud host) all carry their own emissions footprint that we count as ours-by-proxy. We do not currently publish a Scope-1/2/3 emissions estimate because a small-firm estimate would be too noisy to be useful and we don’t want to manufacture credibility by publishing numbers we can’t stand behind. As we grow into a size where measurement becomes reliable, the commitment is to publish.

Social: vulnerability, accessibility, fair treatment

The ‘S’ in ESG is where a lender’s most direct impact sits. Our day-to-day social commitments are:

• A vulnerable-customer framework built on the FCA’s Consumer Duty categories (health, life events, resilience, capability), applied voluntarily. A vulnerability flag changes how we handle the account end-to-end — plainer language, named handler, manual review on decisioning, generous forbearance.
• Accessibility: Simple View (plainer wording + single-column layout + more icons), Large Print (PDF + on-screen), High Contrast. Documents are available in Welsh, Scottish Gaelic and Scots alongside English. The application form is reachable on mobile, tablet and desktop with keyboard-only operation.
• Fair treatment of vulnerable communities: we do not lend in any borough or postcode based on a discriminatory list. Affordability is decided on the company’s affordability, not on the director’s protected characteristics.
• A modern slavery statement published voluntarily under the size threshold, with a real annual review.

Governance: independence, transparency, audit

Governance is where small firms most often have the biggest natural advantage and waste it. Our position:

• Single beneficial-owner clarity. Credicorp Limited’s UBO is named on the Companies House register. There is no opaque holding structure; there is no offshore wrapping. The lender is the firm you are dealing with.
• Independence from venture-capital pressure. Credicorp is privately held by its founder. We have no quarterly earnings target to meet, no growth-at-all-costs pressure from an investor base, and no exit timeline that would distort lending standards. The product and the cap exist because they are the right standards, not because they are commercially optimal.
• Annual published transparency report covering: total amount lent, default rate, complaints upheld, forbearance approval rate, vulnerability-flagged customers as a share of the book, and audit findings from the internal compliance review. The first edition of this report ships with the 2026 annual update.
• Operational audit. The collections, decisioning, complaints, and vulnerability handling processes carry internal-audit triggers and an annual external review by an independent compliance consultancy.

What we are working on

The picture above describes today. The trajectory we are committed to: publishing a real emissions estimate when our scale makes it meaningful; adopting the simplified UK SDS disclosure once the regime is published in final form and a small-firm guidance exists; expanding the Welsh / Gaelic / Scots translation coverage from chrome + summary to full agreement texts (subject to solicitor sign-off on the binding translations). The Responsible Lending policy is the canonical place to follow our updates on each of these.