Zopa: Growth comes from having strong foundations (HR ones too)

To anyone who’s still not heard of Zopa [the company who’s name is actually the long-forgotten acronym of ‘Zone of Possible Agreement’] – let’s just say the next six months are going to be big.

Starting out life as a peer-to-peer lender in 2005, the recent trajectory of this UK challenger financial services brand (particularly since 2020, when it acquired its full banking licence), has been leading up to what is widely expected to happen later this year – the unveiling of its first current account.

In a move that will see it start to break away from its traditional ISA, loans and credit card product offerings, Zopa hopes to smash already impressive growth rates (last year alone new customers grew by 28% to 1.4 million), to reach 5 million customers by as early as 2028. To achieve that, the business is promising to go through what it is calling its own “growth blitz” – adding to its current headcount of 900 by a further 15-20% a year for the next few years at least. And to steer them through all of this is precisely where Iain Kendrick – Zopa Bank’s Chief People Officer – comes in. But don’t just think growing the business is his only concern.

“Although people might think we’re a brash challenger [on Zopa’s own website Kendrick describes the firm’s forthcoming relocation to Canary Wharf as a “statement of intent, as we change the face of banking,”] today he is more measured. “We’re no bullshit, no egos here,” he says. “We have zero tolerance to self-inflated egos,” he adds, “which is something that’s straight from our CEO [Jaidev Janardana, who grew up in India before moving to America and then Britain].” What this means for the business going forward, he says, is that his role is what he describes as “less around finding people from a ‘culture fit’ perspective, and more about how we develop and grow with ‘culture add’ as our point of view.” He adds: “What’s interesting about our next phase of growth is that as much as we’ll need ‘proper’ banking expertise, around fraud and cyber security, and everything like this, more than anything, we actually need people from a product innovation, marketing, and customer service background.”

For Kendrick – who himself has no prior financial services experiences; but more recently has experience working for digital-first companies like computer game company King – it’s this less-expected source of talent that he says is what makes Zopa such an exciting place to be. “in digital companies, it’s the culture that really resonates with me,” he says. “This was a business I thought I could have fun at, and that’s still very much what I want to do,” he says.

Since he joined in 2022, Kendrick has already seen employee numbers grow from 550. High on the agenda is getting more customer service staff – but interestingly, he says he isn’t interested in poaching staff from the established banking players. Zopa is its own unique brand, he suggests, and as such, people from the established banks wouldn’t really fit. “I’m much more interested in building up my own pipeline of ‘Zopians’ [as the bank calls them],” he says. “People with a banking services background are probably our lowest density of people,” he continues.

Reaching more diverse talent

To get these people, Kendrick says he’s much more interested in casting his net wider, to reach newer, more diverse talent pools. Since 2021, for instance, the business has partnered with Code First Girls, the largest provider of free coding courses for women in the UK. It offers funded course places, Nano-degree scholarships and hosts online events for career switchers and university graduates looking to up-skill and enter the world of tech. Some 135 participants have accessed its training, leading to more than a dozen job offers at Zopa. It also collaborates with specialist organisations, such as Coding Black Females. “We’ve also brought in ivee, a recruitment platform that helps women return to work, to increase our visibility to a very specific candidate pool,” he says. “Plus, decode job ads to remove gender biases.”

Collectively, Kendrick estimates that these, plus other measures, combine to supply Zopa with 40% of its new talent intake, and once they’re in, career development is the watchword (see later), with this people director seeing talent in everyone. He says: “We’ve trained up our customer service personnel into tech engineers. This is a place where if people want to succeed, we will support them.”

The importance of inclusion

It’s around inclusion, and recognising everyone for who they are that clearly resonates with Kendrick.

Prior to him joining, Zopa had already made a commitment to try and achieve one-third female representation for senior management. But it’s been on this watch however, that the business surpassed this (in 2022), and since then, Zopa has seen this figure even go as high as 44% (in 2023) – dipping to 38% last year, following its acquisition of DivideBuy.

Kendrick says he’s also proud to have launched the first Women in Business Network, and to have partnered with the Gender Equality Collective (a body that aims to raise awareness around DEI issues related to gender). Thanks to Kendrick, Zopa is a regular name on the Top Most Loved Workplaces lists for both Parents and Caregivers and Women. Last year a taskforce looked specifically at female employees’ maternity experiences, and a renewed return-to-work pathway is rolling out this year.