This week, we spoke to Sagheer Malik (pictured), group chief commercial officer and managing director of home finance at Offa.
Malik’s ethnicity is Kashmiri-Pakistani, but he was born and raised in Birmingham. “I’ve always felt both things at once: proudly British, and connected to my family’s heritage,” he said.
His grandfather came here through a trade deal between England and the Kashmiri authorities in response to a shortage of labour in English factories, Malik said.
He added: “What that upbringing gave me is fairly typical of immigrant families: hard work, education, respect for others, and a strong sense of community… he passed on a work ethic I’ve carried into everything I do.”
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Reconciling faith and financial goals
Malik pointed to Offa’s recent research, which found that eight in 10 British Muslims believe their home finance choices are restricted because of their faith.
According to the survey, the most commonly cited challenges were lengthy decision-making processes, excessive paperwork and poor customer service.
“For us at Offa, it’s about serving people who have historically been left to choose between their faith and their financial goals,” Malik added.
‘Unity in Diversity is less of a policy and more of a description of the room’
This year’s theme for South Asian Heritage Month is ‘Unity in Diversity.’
Malik said: “Internally for us, unity in diversity is less of a policy and more of a description of the room. More than 50% of our people are from ethnic minority backgrounds, the majority of them South Asian.”
Celebrating ethnic heritage in the workplace has a professional, creative, and personal purpose at Offa.
Malik continued: “People perform at their best when they’re comfortable, when they can bring their whole selves to work.
“The opposite of that is exhausting. If you’re spending your energy building up a persona… that’s brain power you’re not spending on the actual job.
“When people are open about their culture and their way of looking at the world, teams think differently… and you get to solutions you wouldn’t have reached otherwise.
“A business full of people with identical backgrounds and identical assumptions is a business with a blind spot it can’t see.”
More role models needed from ethnic minority backgrounds
Malik said diversity across the financial services sector has improved, but he argued that greater representation remains important in helping people see the industry as accessible to them.
He added that many Muslim customers continue to feel under-served by mainstream finance providers and are looking for products that align with their beliefs.
Discussing Offa’s proposition, Malik said: “We recognised the way many South Asian and Muslim families actually pool resources and support each other across generations doesn’t always map neatly onto conventional finance criteria.”
Offa’s branding is reflective of the marriage between inter-faith worlds.
Malik pointed to the long history of links between Britain and the Islamic world, noting that King Offa, the eighth-century Anglo-Saxon ruler after whom the company is named, minted a gold coin bearing an Arabic inscription modelled on the Islamic dinar to facilitate trade.
Referencing current debates around immigration, he said some anti-immigrant sentiment is based on the assumption that Muslim communities are a recent addition to British society.
For Malik, the example of King Offa demonstrated that connections between Britain and the Islamic world date back centuries and are “not something that happened to Britain, rather than something that’s part of it.”
