Just, in essence, what I wanted to share was a case study of what we’ve done, and our people turnover is 5% versus a market average of 25 to 37% in the Fintech space, depending on the specialty. And how we did that, we did that in the absence of having equity. Now, if you’ve ever tried to recruit within the Fintech space, equity is really, really difficult.
So before I move there, I’ll just explain to you what Nomo is. So Nomo is actually pronounced “Noomoo” in Arabic and it means ones that want to aspire to do more or create more and create wealth. So in essence, what happened was we have a founding comfy that’s in Kuwait and we bought the banking license through a majority shareholdership in London. And we’ve broken down each into two parts. So we have BLME, British, London and Middle East Bank, that owns the brand side, and we have Nomo Fintech, which is the part I look after, that is the build side. So that here you’ll see this is actually what this means.
So we did Nomo specifically in the branding. So very similar to what you actually see, like a Monzo Revolut. You think of that as the Monzo Revolut to the Middle East. And it’s digital friendly and ease of application. This is actual people within our business, it’s our CEO on the second one side there. And this is our staff and we are very, very employee driven. And what I wanted to share is actually how we’ve done it in the absence of equity to keep our attention so high. So as we’ve said, so I’m 46 and you can imagine moving into a workplace with the average age was 27 when we started and everyone is super bright and knows everything. So we actually embraced that and we said, okay, you will help us craft that and you will help us drive the culture.
And here, if you look at our turnover, so we’ve got multiple locations, but our main offices on the UAE, we’ve got 6%. And for the UK we’ve actually only got 2%. First is the market, which is 25 to 37% as I spoke about before. Okay, so here I also thought important to bring in the diversity. Now you’ll see UK Fintech white is only 1%, and we actually for BB2 trading as Nomo Fintech, we had 50%. Then if you look at the other percentages we had African Fintech space was 3% versus we had 10% and we’re still not happy. That’s a focus. We’re still driving that. Maybe you look at the Fintech stats across the board, females are still underrepresented and especially females of colour. And that’s a big thing for us. So that’s our main focus.
How do we do it? This generation that we are working with, constantly want to learn, constantly want to have a voice. If there’s an issue, they’re in your office and they tell you all the time, all the time and we love it. So we said, okay, we’re going to give you a blank space. And these were the sort of things that we did. They want to share the information, bright young things. We have lunch & learns every two weeks, they come, they say their story, they impart their knowledge, people are super happy. We gave them access to platforms for learning that they needed. We gave them an extended budget for learning and development. We gave them opportunities to go abroad. Then we moved to the next slide. So this is in the pack, you can read it. We actually said, culture and wellbeing has to be owned by them. It can’t be owned by us. And we looked at everything, very, very focused on mental health, very, very focused on wellbeing.
They wanted access to things and they wanted access to things now. So we did very much, we brought in the ecosystem of Fintech startups. We’ve got an app that’s called UNUM, 24/7 access. And we asked them their opinion. So every single quarter they get asked these 14 questions and they actually give it and they give their feedback honestly and openly. And they say the top four scores, our managers value our contribution. They love the tools and technology that they have, and the two points there. What they don’t like, stress. Fintech, very long hours, very intense, openness to change. They want things to happen and very, very quickly. Pay and benefits, they never seem to be happy with pay and benefits even though you’re paying above the 75th percentile. And then the other thing would obviously be transparency. So what we actually did is we actually looked at all of these facets and we looked at what we could practically do.
So we created an open environment where that one-on-one mental health practitioner if they need to see. They have one-on-one health sessions if they require. We’ve got formal referrals in place if they need it as well. Then the next one was openness to change. We are transparent to the degree of transparency. Every two weeks we discuss scorecard. You want to see the CEO discuss anything, you can see it. You want to address anything, you can address it. And then when you look at pay and benefits in relation to market, we heard them with cost of living. We gave them career ladders and learning path that they can access with budget to get it done. We do salary surveys quarterly. We share those results with them. And we actually have career discussions targeted every six months plus that’s aligned to our succession and retention framework. So in a nutshell, we’ve seen that what we’ve done is enabled them to have a voice in creating the culture. And that in sense is actually created our retention platform.
See Rashaad delivering his presentation at DisruptHR Aberdeen here >>>> https://vimeo.com/876121885
More talks from DisruptHR Aberdeen here >>>> https://hunteradams.co.uk/blog/disrupthr-aberdeen/
