Speaking on the Diversity and Inclusivity Finance Forum (DIFF) podcast, Mason said it was crucial for the financial services sector to acknowledge this in its work and actions.
He said: “Financial inclusion is massive from a Lloyds Banking Group perspective, and we’ve all got a social responsibility. We talk about privilege and if we’re not careful, privilege breeds privilege a bit like money makes money.”
“You end up in an environment where you don’t have a real view of what life’s all about, you just have your sphere of influence, and you forget that there are people in the UK who are genuinely really struggling financially.”
He added: “Home ownership is actually one of the biggest enablers of wealth, financial inclusion, and social mobility in anybody’s life.
“The fact that people genuinely struggle to get out of private rent, social rent and buy their own home is a massive disadvantage to people.”
Mason commended fellow guest Rupi Hunjan, CEO and founder of Censeo Financial for working with housing association Genesis to pioneer the shared ownership model.
He said Hunjan’s work in this area was “fantastic” because it gave people access to having property as an asset, with the ability to own some of their home and benefit from any growth in equity.
Reflecting the client base
Due to its structure of allowing people to own a share of their homes at a lower cost, host Bharat Sagar asked Hunjan if his workforce was deliberately diverse because shared ownership buyers tended to be.
Hunjan said this was not originally his intention, as he set his firm up in a “prestigious” location and wanted to proposition shared ownership as something which was not just for blue collar workers.
He said he simply judged his employees on merit and a diverse workforce was naturally created this way.
Hunjan said: “There are no politics; 50 per cent of my team comes from what we call BAME (Black, Asian and minority ethnic), 48 per cent are female, 10 per cent are disabled.
“If you work hard and have the qualifications, we’ll give you a chance. And if you perform, you stay. And if you don’t, you end up leaving.”
Hunjan said he had always been self-employed so had the belief that if you work hard, you take the credit and if you don’t you accept the blame.
He added that there “shouldn’t be any issues if a business is run that way”.
However, he noted that because of his diverse workforce, his employees were often able to empathise with the firm’s clients.
Mason agreed and said the industry needed to adopt more of Hunjan’s approach.
“We recruit a lot of people from certain universities and ex-consultants. When you talk about shared ownership and social inclusion, a lot of those people have no concept in reality of what life is like for somebody in circumstances completely different to them.
“Sharing experiences like Rupi’s firm should encourage people to think more about the makeup of their teams,” he said.
Hunjan said many people did not even get the opportunity to be interviewed and suggested the use of name-blind CVs, something brought up by Sagar, to reduce unconscious recruiter bias and make sure people from diverse backgrounds at least get that chance.
Mason added: “It seems like Rupi has been very proactive.
“I think we all need to try harder. It’s not good enough anymore to have a shortlist of people and say ‘we tried to tick the d and i (diversity and inclusion) box, but we ended up with a shortlist of four blokes because we didn’t get enough people applying’ – I think we all need to be more deliberate.”
Hunjan said this was imperative, but to also be mindful of that fact that ethnic minorities made up a small proportion of the population so to not get caught up in tokenism when recruiting.
Listen to the podcast [31 minutes] below.
