Download the full State of the B report here
Banqer is a financial education platform that provides a hands-on environment for students to get curious, creative, and ultimately, confident with money.
Why did your business become a Certified B Corporation?
As a mission driven business who holds profit alongside purpose we wanted to ensure we were walking our talk. Becoming a certified B Corporation gave us the framework to hold ourselves accountable to and a means to communicate our mission in a standardised way.
What changes did you make during the certification process?
The greatest changes we made were in the areas we were weakest, namely environmental. It’s interesting, when you have a string social impact in one area you can almost be blind to others – we’d never fully considered our environmental impact. Thankfully as a small scale tech company it’s not inherently dreadful, but it gave us the opportunity to be mindful and considerate of facets that we were ignorant to prior. It really just opened a broad conversation around the things we didn’t know we didn’t know.
What are the positive impact your business has on environment, workers, and/or community?
The greatest impact Banqer has is empowerment through education. We believe that a sound financial education can drastically change the trajectory of a student’s life – not necessarily making everyone a millionaire, but at the least reducing financial deception and vulnerability. We statistically raise the financial literacy levels of tens of thousands of students which results in higher financial capability which correlates to better financial outcomes across the board.
Do you have impact improvements planned?
We’re always working to strengthen both our impact and the reporting and communication of our impact. We’ve been working through some impact theory and also looking into some longer form studies we could conduct with academics. We’re hoping to formally initiate these by the end of the year.
What benefits have you experienced from being a Certified B Corporation?
There are a bunch of benefits as we see it – the formalisation of our processes as a ‘business for good’ is invaluable. Also simply being connected to a bunch of like-minded businesses is pretty powerful too. As that number grows in NZ so too do the benefits really.
Kendall Flutey, Co-Founder of Banqer
This case study is featured in B Lab’s State of the B Report 2019.
