Charity Bank has been named the winner of the Social Investment Pioneer Award at the 2025 NatWest SE100 Social Business Awards. This prestigious recognition celebrates their bold, innovative, and high-impact approach to social finance.
This honour comes at a time of record-breaking impact for Charity Bank. In 2024, they approved £85.4 million in new loans – their highest level ever – supporting 104 charities and social enterprises tackling some of the UK’s most urgent challenges, including homelessness, mental health, education, and environmental sustainability.
Importantly, 77% of their lending reached the UK’s most deprived communities, and £23.3 million was directed to diverse-led organisations – demonstrating our ongoing commitment to equity and inclusion.
Reinvesting Profits for Greater Impact
Alongside this growth in impact, Charity Bank also achieved solid financial performance, increasing the long-term sustainability of its lending support for UK charities and social enterprises. As Ed Siegel, Chief Executive of Charity Bank, explains:
“As a social enterprise itself, Charity Bank reinvests most of its surpluses into growing its lending activity and the social impact it enables. As our annual surpluses have grown, over the past two years we’ve gone a step further by allocating a portion of these to seed a grant fund, which has also benefited from contributions by some of our shareholders from the dividends they were entitled to. Most of the grants made by our Brighter Futures Fund have been used to enable lending to underserved organisations for whom repayable finance might otherwise not have been a viable option.”
Launched in late 2024, the Brighter Futures Fund (BFF) marks an evolution in our mission. All the grants made by the BFF to date have benefitted organisations that are either diverse-led or located in the bottom 30% of wards according to the indices of deprivation.
In just a few months, the fund has:
- Disbursed £439,000 in grants
- Enabled £2.8 million in social loans
- Supported 16 organisations, 75% of which are diverse-led and 94% based in the bottom 30% of deprived areas
From housing for young asylum seekers to community cafés supporting migrant women, the BFF is unlocking vital projects that would otherwise struggle to access mainstream finance.
The Charity Bank are honoured to receive this recognition, and it strengthens our resolve to continue reinvesting in the communities that need it most.
