


WELCOME MESSAGE FROM
LLOYDS BANK
We have been working with British businesses for hundreds of years, striving to meet their needs and helping them achieve their ambitions.
Supporting businesses is part of our core purpose of helping Britain prosper, and
Britain can only truly prosper when it’s inclusive of all communities.
As CEO for Business and Commercial Banking, which supports start-ups through to mid-sized corporates, I know how important entrepreneurs are to the UK’s future prosperity.
We passionately believe that all businesses should have the same opportunities to succeed as each other but we recognise through what Black business communities are telling us that there’s still much work to do to create an equitable landscape.
It’s sobering to hear first-hand the experiences, thoughts and feelings of Black entrepreneurs and this report, in its second year, again makes for uncomfortable reading.
We’ve made a commitment within our Race Action Plan to help create equity for Black entrepreneurs. We pledge to use our influence to make bigger and faster changes and we’ll hold ourselves to account on our progress.
Continuing to listen to Black business owners is a crucial step in building trust and following the inaugural report in 2021, we collectively developed ten recommendations as a charter for action, informed by the Black Business Advisory Committee (BBAC), Community Leaders and Black business owners.
Alongside our fantastic partners including the BBAC, Black Business Network (BBN) and Foundervine we’ve launched a number of initiatives aligned to these recommendations. These include the Immerse programme, and sponsorship of the Black Investor 360 Finance Festival. We have formed relationships with Black-owned national and regional grassroots organisations to support events and initiatives aligned to our collective mission of enabling Black-owned businesses to thrive; such as Jamii, Black Owned Business Exhibition (BOB Expo) and the UK Black Business Show. We’ve established more than one hundred mentoring relationships as part of our partnership with Mentor Black Business, and have committed to one hundred more. We are also developing a Supply Chain Diversity programme to ensure our supply base represents the communities we serve.
While I’m proud to see the impact these initiatives are having, there’s still a long way to go. We, our financial services peers, government, and other institutions, share a collective responsibility to do more. And we will do more.
You can find out more about: our support for Black-owned businesses on our dedicated Black Business Hub, the progress we have made so far aligned to the ten recommendations, and our Race Action Plan.
Elyn Corfield
CEO, Business &
Commercial Banking
Lloyds Banking Group
