Our focus

As a financial services firm, Sapphire is duty-bound to address diversity and inclusion within our teams and client offerings.  Because an unjust workplace starts from the top, senior management is primarily responsible for delivering change by de-biasing the organisation to ensure that inclusivity is inherent. We also expect our clients, as well as our employees, to hold us accountable because diverse and inclusive teams provide a better service. This is the main reason why we decided to become B-Corp Certified.

In 2018, we made a formal pledge of support to improve gender diversity in the financial services sector by becoming signatories to HM Treasury's Women in Finance Charter. We strive to enable women's talent to be optimised for the greater good of our colleagues, clients and for the communities we live in. The Charter requires us to report our targets and progress towards supporting women in finance.

We also have our own inclusion goals and are excited to report our progress in them as well, in order to keep evolving.

Achievements

• 2009: Developed a flexible working policy as a way of differentiating ourselves from other companies.

• 2017: Vasiliki Carson was recognised as a finalist in the Investment Week's Women in Investment Awards.

• 2018 (July): Sapphire became a signatory of the Women in Finance Charter.

• 2019 (Oct): Hosted the Women in Venture Capital panel discussion, the first-ever to be held in Northern Ireland, with an all-female panel.

• 2020 (Jan): Achieved gender parity.

• 2020 (Nov): Received the inaugural Highly Commended Award for Diversity and Inclusion from the Enterprise Investment Scheme Association.

• 2021 (Jan): The entire team successfully completed unconscious bias training, and the course was added to the firm's induction training program.

• 2021 (Apr): Sapphire became a signatory supporter of the Task Force for Climate-Related Financial Disclosures ("TCFD").

• 2021 (Sept): Sapphire became a signatory of the Investing in Women Code, committing to supporting diversity and inclusion in access to finance.

• 2022 (Dec): Sapphire became a B-Corp certified company.
• 2023 (Jan): Achieved our Women in Finance Charter targets.
• 2024 (Sep): We were not able to maintain our Women in Finance Charter targets. However, we remain resolute in our commitment and have developed a plan to get us back to gender parity.
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Progressing

• - Continuously striving to maintain gender parity through the scale-up phase.

• - Reviewing our fund management processes, which includes collecting and analysing gender data such as female representation in portfolio companies, executive teams, boards, and investment committees.

• - Ongoing diversity training programmes are offered to our team.

• - - Ensuring the funds we manage and their advisers appreciate the importance of diversity and inclusion in their teams and investments.

The targets for the future

Women in Finance Charter

As a signatory of the Women in Finance Charter, we have made an ongoing commitment to maintaining gender parity at the senior management level. We also strive to maintain a level of at least 50% of women in our team. With over 370 company signatories, the Charter is covering c.900,000 employees in the financial services sector. It not only makes signatories commit and evidence actions but also provides insights into what we are doing to drive progress towards achieving change.

The Charter's principles are to:

• - Support the progression of women into senior roles in the financial services sector;

• - Identify one member of the senior executive team who is responsible and accountable for gender diversity and inclusion;

• - Recognise the diversity of the sector and that firms will have different starting points – each firm sets its own targets and strategy; and

• - Publicly report on progress to deliver against these internal targets to support the transparency and accountability needed to drive change.

• Our targets and progress to date are as follows:

1. Maintain a team with a 50/50 male to female ratio.  🕔 Achieved but not maintained.
2. Maintain a team with a 50/50 male to female senior management ratio. 🕔 Achieved but not maintained.
3. Host events and deliver presentations to raise awareness of the importance of female representation in the financial services profession.   ✅Achieved.
4. Appoint a member of senior management responsible and accountable for gender diversity and inclusion.  ✅Achieved.
5. Link pay to delivery against internal inclusivity targets. To establish a mechanism for linking diversity goals to pay that is built into personal performance objectives.  🕔  Continuous progress on this.
6. Public publication of progress. We publish our targets and our progress towards attaining these targets on our website.  ✅ Achieved

Investing in Women Code

The Investing in Women Code is a commitment to support the advancement of female entrepreneurship in the United Kingdom by improving female entrepreneurs’ access to tools, resources and finance from the financial services sector. As a signatory to the Investing in Women Code, my organisation is committed to a culture of inclusion and to advancing access to capital for female entrepreneurs. As a signatory, my organisation will:

• - have a nominated member of the senior leadership team who is responsible for supporting equality in all its interactions with entrepreneurs

• - provide HM Treasury or a relevant industry body designated by HM Treasury, with a commonly agreed set of data concerning all-female-led businesses; mixed-gender-led businesses and all-male-led businesses.

• - adopt internal practices which aim to improve the potential for female entrepreneurs to successfully access the tools, resources, investment and finance they need to build and grow their businesses, working with relevant players in the ecosystem. My organisation will review these actions annually and make this commitment publicly available

Ecologi

Ecologi help team's to become climate positive by planting trees & funding the world’s best climate crisis solutions.

Sapphire Capital actively contribute to Ecologi mission statement to become and remain climate positive. To dates, Sapphire's contribution helped the plantation of 500 trees and offset 50 tons of CO2. 

You can follow our achievement here.