Responsible Lending
Responsible lending is a basis for competition and for ensuring trust in our sector.
The steps we take to ensure responsible lending include the affordability model we apply to our mortgage lending, through to our practice of sharing the majority of our data so that peoples' overall financial circumstances are fully understood.
More information on these can be found by using the links above and in our Corporate Responsibility Report 
Key highlights of our responsible lending strategy include:
- We were the first UK financial services and ATM provider to feature green labels on all our ATMs to inform customers that they are free.
- We were the only issuer not to issue credit card cheques to under 25s and include reminders in every cheque mailing that customers have the right to opt out of receiving further credit card cheques.
- We pioneered Summary boxes, first, on our credit card statements and also on credit card cheque mailings. These help ensure our customers fully understand the associated costs. We have recently introduced Summary Boxes to our Estate Agency Agreements.
- We were the first large institution to share the majority of our data with the UK's three leading credit agencies. If all providers shared full data, this would aid understanding of individuals' overall financial circumstances.
- We won the award for Most Responsible Lender in 2005 and Most Responsible Customer Acquisition Programme in 2006 at the Credit Card Awards.
- We contributed £2.25m in 2006 to organisations providing free debt advice services to individuals and small businesses.
- We adopted the Equator Principles in August 2006 - a financial industry benchmark for determining, assessing and managing social and environmental risk in project finance
- We support Business Debtline, a telephone helpline offering expert, professional advice, enabling clients to deal with their business debts in an informed and proactive way.
More detailed information on responsible lending can be found in our Corporate Responsibility Report
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These documents are PDF files (Portable Document Format) and you will need Adobe Acrobat Reader®
to access the document contents. If you do not have Adobe Acrobat installed on your computer, please click the image below for a free download. The Adobe web site will be opened in another window.
If you are having trouble reading these documents with a screen reader, please check that your screen reader software is compatible with PDF files. You can learn about PDF files and accessibility at access.adobe.com .
Adobe, the Adobe logo, Acrobat, the Acrobat logo are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Adobe Systems Incorporated in the United States and/or other countries.
