Responsible Business: Hargreaves Lansdown's Bristol Financial Resilience Action Group

Amy Joyce Business West
19 June 2025

Welcome to the Responsible Business series, dedicated to empowering businesses of all sizes to better support their employees. Through insightful conversations and expert advice from our members, we aim to provide you with the tools and strategies needed to make a positive impact. This month, we’re excited to feature Bristol Initiative member Siobhan Denniff,  who sits on our Bristol Advisory Committee. As Responsible Business Manager at Hargreaves Lansdown, she shares her insights on driving meaningful change in the workplace.

Hargreaves Lansdown (HL) is the UK’s number one platform for private investors. We help our clients save time, tax and money on their investments. Our purpose is to make it easy to save and invest for a better future, both for our clients and the wider community.  

In response to the cost-of-living crisis, we wanted to explore ways we can utilise the financial expertise we hold internally to support our local community and make Bristol, where we have been proudly headquartered for over 40 years, the most financially resilient city in the UK.   

As a first step, we developed our 5 to Thrive campaign, as a way of making it easy to talk about financial resilience, focusing on these as our core building blocks:  

  • Control your debt   
  • Protect you and your family   
  • Save a penny for a rainy day    
  • Plan for later life   
  • Invest to make more of your money   

Using these 5 to Thrive pillars, we partnered with Oxford Economics to create a unique index that measures the nation’s financial resilience. Our Savings and Resilience Barometer, a report we publish every 6 months, gives an overview of households’ financial resilience. It harnesses data from several sources to analyse 16 indicators across the five pillars to create our results. 

The outputs of this work allow HL to shine a light on the need for policymakers to think holistically about financial resilience and help us to better design products for our clients. As we now have a measure of financial resilience, we wanted to look at how we could use these findings to support our local community.  

So, the concept of Bristol Financial Resilience Action Group (BFRAG) was born, with the aim of making Bristol the most financially resilient city in the UK. We support local employers by offering free financial education webinars and guides for their employees. We also work directly with employers on internal initiatives, which include: incentivising pension contributions and allowing them to be changed at any time, sick pay, life cover, signposting debt advice and sorting payroll errors in a timely fashion. 

In 2023, we launched the BFRAG pilot with 19 Bristol employers, which provided 25,000 households with access to free financial education. Through working with the employers on the internal initiatives, the programme supported approximately 1,300 households to have access to increased pension contributions and paid for life cover, and therefore increased their financial resilience. 

One of the organisations that took part in the pilot said:

“The pandemic resulted in many organisations giving greater consideration to the mental well-being of their employees. Being part of BFRAG has helped us to broaden our wellbeing policy to include financial wellbeing, and we have benefited by learning about the support offered by other organisations, especially where the cost of change is zero or minimal. We have made a small change to our pension offer, but we hope it is significant to reinforce the overall aim of BRFAG to improve financial resilience.”  

After the success of the pilot, we launched year 2 of the programme in January 2025, now with a total of 33 employers, with all 19 from the pilot year staying on. As well as the resources we provide for employees, we also directly support the employers by running quarterly “Teach-in” sessions where we discuss best practice, any new developments or changes the government is implementing that impact pensions or pay and opportunity to network with the Bristol business community.  

We would love to sign up more members to continue to grow this network and support more people on the journey to increasing their financial resilience, in a continually challenging economic climate.

If you'd like to follow Siobhan on social media you can do so on Linkedin here, and more information about the Bristol Financial Inclusion Action Group or how to sign up can be found on their website. If you are a member of The Bristol Initiative or Chambers and would like to be featured in a blog just like this one, then you can get in touch with Amy.