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A B Corp™ (short for Certified B Corporation™) is a business that meets high standards of social and environmental performance, transparency, and accountability. Certified by the nonprofit B Lab, B Corps™ commit to doing what’s best for everyone.
We meet B Lab’s integrated social, environmental, and governance standards.
This embeds our purpose and plans for positive impact in our company DNA, so that we’re aware of our impact on people and the planet.
Our purpose, ethics, and commitment to positive social and environmental impact guide everything we do. Our Society is led by a Board of Executive and Non-Executive Directors who challenge and shape our strategy, ensuring accountability and transparency at every level. As a mutual, our purpose drives our daily decisions, and our code of ethics ensures we act in the best interests of our customers. Our Board also has direct oversight of our social and environmental goals, helping to steer our long-term impact.
Our people have always been our priority, and we recognise that every colleague has different needs at different stages of life. We’re proud of the support we offer, and others recognise it too: we’ve been named a Best Place to Work in The Sunday Times 2025 awards and are triple accredited by the Real Living Wage Foundation for Wages, Hours and Pensions. Our new B Corp accreditation further strengthens our commitment to supporting colleagues in every aspect of their working lives—from financial security and wellbeing to healthcare, career development, and overall engagement.
Community is at the core of who we are, and we’re committed to helping our local area thrive. We partner with JERICHO to support people facing barriers to work, and we’ve raised over £1 million for Birmingham Children’s Hospital. In 2025, we also donated over £17,000 to local causes through our Mercian Community Trust grants. We give our time as well as funding. Every colleague can volunteer two days a year, with many delivering financial education in local schools. In 2025, we supported 2,800 students and used our branch community rooms to provide scam and fraud awareness to vulnerable people in our community.
Across our heartlands, several branches have transformed unused space into free community rooms for local groups, charities, and neighbours to meet and connect. Our Tipton branch also hosts weekly Talkin’ Tables sessions to help combat loneliness, offering a friendly, drop-in space every Friday led by volunteers who welcome visitors and spark conversation.
We’re serious about tackling climate change and making sure we play our part in building a greener future. We’ve got a plan to get us to Net Zero, and we’re working hard to make it happen. This means reducing our carbon footprint, using 100% renewable energy, and increasing sustainable practices across everything we do. We’re open about our progress and include climate-related information in our Annual Report and Accounts.
Our very purpose is centred around supporting the underserved and overcharged, ensuring financial security is possible for all. A core part of our purpose is to help people achieve financial security through homeownership. Everyone is different, so we don’t use a one-size-fits all policy. Our mortgage products offer up to 40-year terms, competitive interest rates, lower deposits, and personalised support from start to finish. And our overall approach to standard variable rates and scrapping arrears fees shows our commitment to treating our customers fairly.
We’re committed to making our recruitment accessible to the widest range of talent, regardless of background or life experience. We’ve joined Business in the Community (BITC) and signed up to its Opening Doors campaign to help make roles more inclusive. We’ve also joined the Ban the Box campaign, creating fairer opportunities for people with criminal convictions by removing the conviction tick box from initial applications. Instead, we ask about offences later in the process, allowing us to assess candidates on their skills and suitability first while still taking a risk-based approach.
We know every customer faces different financial challenges, so we work to make our support clear and accessible. We were the first building society to partner with Plain Numbers, helping us simplify communications so customers can better understand their finances. We’re also part of the Alzheimer’s Society’s Dementia Friends programme, with over 240 colleagues trained to support customers living with dementia and their families.
