How Black Horse won the 2023 Car Finance Awards’ “Company Award for Sustainability”

Being one of the UK’s largest car finance providers, sustainability is critical. Black Horse maintain a purpose to ‘Help Britain Prosper’, involving setting the most ambitious climate related targets in their sector and leading the green transport revolution by funding one in ten electric vehicles in the UK. Their sustainability extends to supporting colleagues, customers and communities to create a more sustainable and inclusive society.

The Green Agenda

Black Horse is making great strives to drive their green agenda.

-          Their dedicated Green Driving Hub for customers features continually updated information (through videos/articles) on Electric Vehicles (EV). Customers not yet ready to commit can sign-up to offset their vehicle carbon emissions through their partnership with iOffset.

-          They have sponsored the 2023 Great British EV Rally and are the first used vehicle finance house to put forward a team.

-          They joined the steering group of The Climate Group’s UK Electric Fleets Coalition and Electric Vehicle Fleet Accelerator (EVFA) to drive the EV transition.

-          In 2022, they funded a record 33,414 battery powered vehicles, including 18,064 BEVs and 15,350 PHEVs (£2.1bn of Group-wide EV funding in 2022).

-          To drive the green agenda, they’re empowering colleagues to become ‘Green Champions’

Supporting Customers

Black Horse had held their clients hands through the cost-of-living crisis and protected the most vulnerable through an array of methods.

-          A Cost-of-Living Hub/ Money Worries page with support and guidance.

-          A vulnerable customer hub to help colleagues support vulnerable customers with case studies and shared experiences.

-          Proactive cost-of-living communications were provided to 39,000 customers (driving a 1,000% increase in visits to their Money Worries page)

-          They provided 20 financial capability e-learning modules/ videos, to build money management capability/ confidence among vulnerable customers.

Supporting Colleagues

Black Horse aims to build a healthy and inclusive workforce through wellbeing programmes (80% of colleagues agreed that their wellbeing was supported in 2022). They strive for an increased representation of women, LGBTQ+, ethnic minorities and disabled colleagues (86% agree that they are an inclusive place to work). 91% agree that they ‘take personal ownership for individual development and growth’ and employee engagement has significantly increased to 72%, 22% above the UK norm.

Supporting Communities

Supporting communities is a key pillar of their sustainability strategy. In 2022 they donated £22.4m to charitable causes, while colleagues delivered financial education to more than 1700 students.

Supporting Long-Term, Sustainable Growth

Their sustainability work is helping to drive record customer/ dealer advocacy. Net promoter scores outstrip the financial services norm (+34) at +50 and +67 respectively and, cases funded increased 7% in 2022.

Judges were extremely impressed by this entry, stating that they “tick all the sustainability implementation areas” and are “certainly not shying away from their sustainability responsibilities.”