Sustainability at Smart
Smart is committed to doing business in a sustainable and responsible way
Sustainability is defined as meeting our present needs without compromising future generations. This is a priority across all levels at Smart. Our Sustainability Team works across the organisation and with colleagues across every area to maximise Smart’s positive impact.
Sustainability at Smart
Sustainable growth is not only the right thing to do – it is also the best way to build a successful business and have a lasting impact on the world.
Some of our focus on sustainability at Smart is about big choices we make – choosing an HQ building that is ‘operationally carbon zero’, and moving more of our technology to suppliers who themselves focus on sustainability, like Amazon Web Services, in turn reducing the environmental impact of our technology.
Some of our focus on sustainability is around design and business decisions – creating technology that is multilingual, that can communicate with clear language and that can support different retirement systems across the world, and that can scale while considering its impact on the environment.
And some of our focus on sustainability at Smart is about the way each of us act every day. We are a people organisation, and how we work with and treat our colleagues, how each of us behaves and our personal impact all make a difference.
Smart calculated its operational carbon footprint in 2021 and is committed to reducing its emissions where possible. We are in the process of measuring our carbon footprint for Keystone, our core technology, to help us and our clients understand the environmental impact of using our platform.
Investing in our people
Promoting the wellbeing of our colleagues
At Smart, one of the 8 principles we work to is “We want happy and good people in our team.” Hired named Smart in their ‘Top 10 medium-sized employers for Tech Talent’. We've been named one of the top ten best workplaces in tech by UK's Great Place to Work, one of the Top 20 for wellbeing, and one of the Top 50 workplaces for women.
Amongst other benefits aimed at putting our people first:
We work with Sanctus, to offer professional development with proactive mental wellbeing support, along with health insurance from Equipsme, a 4x base salary ‘death in service’ benefit to ease any worries, enhanced maternity and paternity leave, a five-week sabbatical after five years’ employment, and numerous other benefits.
We offer all colleagues a £500 annual training budget to develop their skills, and on top of that internally we have a tech academy, a leadership development programme, a coach-led programme specifically aimed at helping women at Smart further their careers, a network designed to help those who are newer to the workplace, and training to help those starting out in the words of technology and finance.
As a tech company, we also invest in the developers of the future. We are a proud supporter of Rails Girls – a non-profit community that makes coding more accessible to women. It has created numerous hiring opportunities for women in tech and over 25% of their participants return to coach. We sponsor their annual London workshop, and our engineering team also volunteer as coaches and mentors.
Investing sustainably
Retirement savings can be transformational
There is $62 trillion in assets under management within retirement savings globally. We seek to build our technology in ways that make it easy for our partners and their customers to understand and choose how their assets are invested.
We believe that retirement savings are powerful – if invested wisely, they can grow as well as help with major global issues. For example, our UK master trust, Smart Pension, serves almost a million savers. Smart Pension uses Smart’s technology to serve those savers while investing sustainably:
Over 70% of Smart Pension's default growth fund is invested sustainably.
Smart Pension has committed to be Net Zero by 2040, with a 50% reduction in emissions by 2025.
Smart Pension's investment approach helps local communities.
Smart Pension also makes tools and guides available to help members with financial wellbeing.
People, Planet, Prosperity
Along with the above, and strong attention to ESG in many areas of the organisation, our Sustainability team groups much of its work around the ‘3 Ps’: People, Planet and Prosperity. There need not be a trade-off between these three areas as they are mutually reinforcing with both financial and non-financial benefits. Namely, that profitable companies can also contribute to social good and that growth need not always mean an increase in environmental pressure.
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