About us
We are one of the biggest Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs) in the UK.
Fair for You is a charity-owned ‘social lender’ providing affordable and ethical credit to financially excluded families across all four nations for the purchase of household goods and essential services. Our Mission is simple: to change lives through better lending.
Why are we different?
We have a flexible approach to customer repayment with no hidden penalties or fees for late or over-payments. We retain our debt and do not sell it to collection agencies or bailiffs. We also do not lend cash. We have the lowest average interest rate and one of the lowest bad debt rates within the CDFIs sector.
Our owner
The Fair Credit Charity owns Fair for You which in turn is a Community Interest Company or CIC. The Charity is dedicated to alleviating poverty through better credit provision and seeks to advance education in relation to money and debt management. The Charity’s values of integrity, trust, partnership, fairness and openness flow through the CIC.
The CIC Board
Our Chair is Howard Bell, the former co-founder of PayPal Europe and a current Board member on several social and commercial enterprises. The Board also numbers the ex-CFO of Zoopla, a Board Member of the English Football League Trust and the former Chief Customer Officer of Sainsbury’s Bank, as well as two Fair Credit Charity Trustees.
The Senior Team
Our Chief Executive is Simon Dukes, an ex-senior civil servant who has over ten years’ experience running and scaling social enterprises including Community Pharmacy England and the UK’s Fraud Prevention Service, CIFAS. Our Deputy CEO is Emma Goodwin, formerly a Deloitte Chartered Accountant with management experience in a number of FTSE businesses. Our other senior executives have expertise in fintech, specialist micro-lending and financial compliance.
Vision, Mission & Values
Vision
We have an overriding vision for our organisation – which is what we aim for with every customer every day of the week – and that is “to change lives through better lending.”
Mission
In order to achieve that, we have a mission statement – this summarises the main things we do to “change lives” – we believe our mission is “to make credit accessible to those who need it most: harnessing our deep understanding of people and their circumstances to lend responsibly and provide finance, goods and services.”
Values
When we asked the people who work for Fair for You how they went about their work every day, there were five words that virtually everyone mentioned. We have called these our values.
1. Trust
We trust our colleagues to do the right thing for our customers just as our customers trust us to help them when life happens.
2. Partnership
We actively seek to work in partnership with our customers, with each other and with our retailers and commercial partners.
3. Fairness
We are an impartial organisation which treats everyone with fairness regardless of their financial situation. Similarly, we would never discriminate on the basis of people’s age, disability, gender/ gender reassignment, marriage/ civil partnership, pregnancy/ maternity, race, religion or belief, sex, or sexual orientation.
4. Integrity
We strive to demonstrate integrity in everything we do. Being a social lender requires strong ethical principles. We can be trusted to do the right thing for our customers.
5. Openness
We say what we do and do what we say, and we will always treat each other and our customers with honesty and openness.