We are the UK’s largest direct-to investor investment and savings service. For nearly 40 years, we have helped our clients save time, tax and money on their investments. Today we are trusted with £104 billion by 1,412,000 clients. We are a secure, FTSE 100 company, headquartered in Bristol employing over 1,600 people.
We are a great success story, having reached the heights of the FTSE top 50. We have come from very humble beginnings. When our business started back in 1981, the investment industry was completely different from what we see today.
Our offices these days are a stark contrast from the spare bedroom in Clifton where the business was first started. With initially a very modest ambition, to sell unit trusts, Peter Hargreaves and Stephen Lansdown
created Hargreaves Lansdown.
Peter and Stephen started with a £200 ad in a national newspaper. They got 168 responses, which in today’s terms seems like nothing but it was enough for them both to realise they had something worth pursuing.
Hargreaves Lansdown (HL) is both innovator and an innovation enabler. We created and developed our investment and savings platform, which enabled HL clients the ability to hold and see all of their investments in one place without the need to contact or pay for a financial adviser, long before that became the norm. This was a game-changer and a model now widely adopted. That decision to build and own our own technology has enabled us to grow faster than the competition. It meant we could be first to market.
One of Hargreaves Lansdown’s biggest enablers for our ongoing success has been our continued investment in our technology. We have over 350 colleagues working to maintain, develop and innovate our technology.
As the regulation in our industry increases, technology advances and the speed of change accelerates we can no longer build all of our technology ourselves. We need to look to partners to help us on our journey. Continued development and evolution of our core architecture will allow us to plug in with third party solutions in the future to provide new innovative services for our clients. This is key to our technology strategy.
Bristol is the largest centre for financial services in the South West and the Fintech industry presents a fantastic opportunity to expand this further. Pre COVID-19, the government was estimating over 30,000 UK jobs and1,600 new businesses coming from the sector by 2030.
HL is one of the largest employers in Bristol. We are proud of our heritage and support local projects to improve the city’s future.
We’re one of the founding signatories of the Bristol Equality Charter pledging to help improve equality and diversity across Bristol. We are a founding member of the Bristol Equality Network, and have signed the Women in Business Charter.
We have an active involvement with Bristol City Council and the development of the Bristol One City Plan, an initiative to bring together businesses to help develop a shared vision for Bristol and address key challenges facing the city.
Our colleagues are dedicated to doing the right thing and giving up their time to help charities and good causes.
In 2016 we launched our HL Foundation, a charitable arm of HL.
The Foundation’s mission is to utilise the skills and time of our workforce and partners to make a positive, sustainable difference in the world around us. To date the HL Foundation has raised more than £120,000 for the charities we support.
At HL one of our key values is ‘Do it better’ and we feel this is reflected well by the city that we are based in. Bristol is a collaborative and innovative city that is always looking to take the next step forward. The “Bristol: One City Approach” is an initiative to develop a shared vision for Bristol to 2050, bringing together participants from business, the public sector, voluntary organisations and communities. We participated in the development of the initial Plan, which was published in January 2019 and will continue to support this moving forward. HL sees itself as a business rooted in the Bristol community and is keen to add its voice and participation into the future vision for this great city.
Over the next year we will continue the development and evolution of our core architecture. The COVID-19 pandemic has seen many businesses bring forward their digital strategies. HL is no different and solutions that improve services for our clients and colleagues are vital.
We recently refreshed our technology strategy and are excited about rolling this out across the business in the coming months. If you step forward from now and through to 2025, then actually we’ve got to create a completely open ecosystem that leverages the technology and investment through third parties.
That open ecosystem will allow Hargreaves Lansdown to move faster when it comes to delivering services and experience to clients across multiple channels. The open platform will also enable the firm to integrate with third-party services, their tools and their data.
Our vision is about using technology to help us innovate, develop and deliver services that clients want and that will add value to them.
