Promoting access through partnerships
To ensure our own products and services reach the people who need them most and bring them into financial inclusion, we recognise that it's vital to partner with governments, non-government organisations, local programmes and charities.
Such collaborations help us to meet needs or reach geographical areas that we may not be able to access alone, and offer people excluded from banking a trusted partner, with which they can progress to financial inclusion.
Examples of our work
In Africa
Since 2005 Barclays has worked with Susu money collectors in Ghana, helping to support their businesses and make banking services accessible to people in rural communities.
More than 4,000 Susu collectors operate across Ghana, collecting a fixed amount of money from their clients daily, keeping it safe and returning it at the end of each month, minus one day's contribution. Collectors usually have between 400 and 2,000 clients and in 2008 the Susu industry was valued at approximately £75m.
We provide deposit accounts to the collectors, and loans they can in turn lend to their clients. The number of collectors on our programme increased from 100 in two regions in the first year to more than 500 across the country by 2007, and continues to grow.
Around 70 per cent of the Susu collectors have attended Barclays training sessions. The programme is now being expanded to other intermediaries such as credit unions and trade associations. Our aim is to help more than a million people in Ghana access appropriate financial services.
In the UK
We work with a number of organisations in the UK to help promote basic banking and improve access to our basic bank account, the Barclays Cash Card Account.
We partner with social housing landlords, enabling their tenants to open accounts more easily. We also support UNLOCK, a charity for ex-offenders, running a pilot programme helping prison inmates to open accounts just before their release.
We also have a long-standing relationship with The Passage, a charity supporting homeless people based in Central London.
The Passage provides resources to encourage, inspire and challenge homeless people to transform their lives. We are assisting clients of The Passage to open basic bank accounts when they need to do so by simplifying the identification and verification processes, using the charity as a trusted intermediary, or partner.
Almost 400 people have opened such accounts to date, and we believe that the majority are still actively using their accounts. Out of more than 330 of these clients, more than 25 per cent have since upgraded their basic bank accounts to full current accounts and 20 per cent are saving regularly.
This highlights how the basic account is an important step for The Passage’s clients in taking back control of their finances and of their lives.
