Social

Bluestep's social sustainability work applies to both our employees and our customers. We are firmly dedicated to diversity among our employees, and we work actively to increase their well-being. We strive to ensure that we contribute to financial inclusion, therefore our priority is to make continual improvements to the customer journey, while being an active partner with strong social engagement.

Sustainability

Environment

Governance

Employee well-being

At Bluestep, we are driven by our conviction that our employees constitute our best resource to make a difference. In order to increase our employees' well-being, we have put in place a range of initiatives that reinforce our employees' influence, responsibility and general health.

We have several health-related initiatives, such as exercise and yoga classes, weekly preventive health-promotion opportunities, and flexible working hours. We also strive to promote a healthy feedback culture, and emphasise the development of strengths rather than focusing on shortcomings.

We offer all employees greater flexibility and clearly delineated free time, to ensure that every individual can achieve a healthy work-life balance.

To increase our employees' influence, we strive to increase their engagement in selected strategic decisions, such as to increase diversity, develop new social initiatives, and to promote a sustainable, goal-driven culture.

The objective is to increase the pride ratings of our employees in the employee index from today's 82 percent to over 90 percent in 2022, and also to increase the proportion of employees who consider Bluestep as an outstanding workplace from 86 percent to over 90 percent in 2022.

Diversity

To strengthen diversity, fairness and opportunities within Bluestep, we work in accordance with several commitments led by our senior management team. Among other things, we aim to increase gender equality in leading positions, including within senior management. The target is to increase the proportion of women from today's 36 per cent to 50 per cent (+/- 10 per cent) by 2024. Part of this work also involves the development of diversity in recruitment and potential succession planning for leading positions.

To ensure equal opportunities concerning and career development, we analyse our salary distribution in order to ensure equal salaries. From 2021 onwards, .

We also place great importance on sharing information about our clear policies for whistleblowing and to combat harassment.

Bluestep is a member of Diversity Charter Sweden.

*Diversity Charter Sweden is a non-profit organisation that works to promote diversity in working life, and that aims to demonstrate the benefits of an inclusive approach to working life and society.

Social engagement

We strive to be an inclusive bank, that shows a strong sense of social engagement. Since 2015, Bluestep has been working together with Mentor Sverige, a non-profit organisation that helps people find a path to a promising future. The mentor programme is a partnership between Bluestep and a secondary school in Stockholm. Employees from Bluestep visit the school to inspire the students. They talk about dreams, how to apply for your first job, and personal finance. Young teenagers are offered the opportunity to have a mentor who works at Bluestep for a year. The mentor and the student meet regularly – twice per month.

In order to take greater responsibility and to further develop our social engagement, we are establishing clear targets for our engagement that are in line with the company's sustainable ambitions and vision. We will also identify new relevant partnerships with the aim of strengthening our social engagement. To ensure that Bluestep's employees are supportive of and committed to our partnerships, the employees are involved in the work to identify future partners and to determine what issues we should be engaged in.

To strengthen Bluestep's social engagement, we analyse and develop both our current and future digital structures, such as our website, potential budget tools and apps, and webinars.

Improving the customer journey

Bluestep wants to contribute to financial inclusion, and we constantly strive to improve our customers' financial well-being, at every step along the journey.

We are always working to simplify and improve our customer experience by offering digital tools that support the customer throughout the entire customer journey, and by measuring which solutions provide the best results for the customer. Another objective is to standardise the material used in the development of our customer understanding, and to minimise the number of documents.

Our customers' financial knowledge is another important aspect of our work to ensure greater financial inclusion. Bluestep therefore places great emphasis on this. We do this by, for example, making loan documents and other material easier to understand. The provision of services, such as budgeting tools and digital financial tips, also contributes to increasing customers' knowledge.

In this regard, we have set the target of reaching 90 percent customer satisfaction in the NKI customer satisfaction index.