Thursday 30 November 2023 10:30 am | Updated: Monday 04 December 2023 12:37 am

IMPACT AM AWARDS 2023 SPONSORS

London

Aon plc (NYSE: AON) exists to shape decisions for the better — to protect and enrich the lives of people around the world. Our colleagues provide our clients in over 120 countries with advice and solutions that give them the clarity and confidence to make better decisions to protect and grow their business. Follow Aon on Twitter and LinkedIn. Stay up-to-date by visiting the Aon Newsroom and sign up for News Alerts here.

AI Forge is an incubator that runs an intensive 12-week programme in London and Miami, accelerating the creation of AI companies solving real-world problems. Led by seasoned entrepreneurs, the programme offers hands-on training with more than 60 masterclasses and workshops. Each city incubates 36 startups a year through three Cohorts building great products, teams, and returns for founders and investors. The programme aims to systematically validate the problem and solution our founders are working on, and de-risk their business model. The programme offers 100 hours of full stack developer time to build the startups’ MVPs, 40 hours of design and UX/UI support, £10k in cash to support living costs during the programme, access to experienced mentors, corporate clients and a network of investors. The programme aims to achieve pre-seed funding for 85% of the startups and support raising their seed round.

For decades, the clearing of payments remained unchanged and unchallenged. We asked, ‘What if there was a better way? What if we could make payments faster, safer, more reliable and accessible to all?’ In 2016, we started building ClearBank from a small basement office and continued to ask ourselves these questions every day. We’re the first new, full-service clearingbank plugged directly into the UK’s payment infrastructure for 250 years. At the time, cloud-based systems and API fluency were new and there hadn’t been a competitor in the market for so long. But that didn’t stop us. We waved goodbye to legacy systems and embraced the new technology — where our true innovation began and didn’t stop. By making it faster, easier and cheaper for financial institutions to access banking infrastructure, we know that we have changed and continue to challenge the very fabric of banking. But we’re not done yet.

FuturePlus is part of The Sustainability Group. We were founded on the principle that every organisation has a role in creating a just, equitable, and sustainable world. We believe that businesses with sustainability at the core of every corporate strategy are not only more effective and financially successful, but also more attractive to customers and investors, and better employers. We launched FuturePlus in 2021. The platform is our solution to providing sustainability support, particularly for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). FuturePlus is a unique, data-driven solution that helps businesses to measure, manage and communicate their sustainability performance and growth. FuturePlus also offers a robust portfolio manager tool for managing investments, assets, portfolio groups, and supply chains in real time.

Innovate Finance is the independent industry body for UK FinTech.Our mission is to accelerate the UK’s leading role in the financial services sector by directly supporting the next generation of technology-led innovators to create a more inclusive, more democratic and more effective financial services sector that works better for everyone.Innovate Finance’s membership and partnership community ranges from seed stage startups to scale up and high growth FinTechs; from multinational financial institutions to big tech firms; and from investors to global FinTech hubs. Innovate Finance supports our members and the wider financial innovation ecosystem by promoting policy and regulation that allows innovation to thrive, encouraging talent, diversity and skills into the sector, facilitating the scaling journey, fostering business opportunity, partnerships and domestic and international growth, and driving capital into UK FinTech.By bringing together and connecting the most forward-thinking participants in financial services, Innovate Finance is helping create a financial services sector that is more transparent, more sustainable and more inclusive.

LSEG is a leading global financial markets infrastructure and data provider. We play a vital social and economic role in the world’s financial system. With our open approach, trusted expertise and global scale, we enable the sustainable growth and stability of our customers and their communities. We are leaders in data and analytics; capital formation and trade execution; and clearing and risk management.

At Metrikus, we’re on a mission to change the way buildings are operated. Our market-leading software helps organisations to make their spaces more efficient, productive and sustainable. By aggregating siloed building data from multiple sources, Metrikus’ cloud-based SaaS platform provides clients with the data they need to monitor and improve ESG performance. We can measure and report on ESG metrics with precision, and display them in a single place, ensuring traceability and accountability.

Louise Doyle and Steph Scholes, Founders of Needi, a corporate gifting concierge service using psychology and AI, to match extraordinarily perfect gifts for your team, events and clients from the best, local independent businesses. Their expert Gift Consultants, save companies like Virgin, Spotify, Quickbooks and KPMG Acceleris huge amounts of time, energy and money, with their free corporate gifting service . From personalised new-starter gifts to unique and luxurious Christmas gifts and experiences, Needi fuels your company’s growth, through motivating and retaining the best staff and clients and creating meaningful connections with thoughtful, affordable gifting.needi.co.uk … for the gifts that matter

Progress Together is levelling the playing field within UK financial services. As a not-for profit organisation, it focusses on socio-economic diversity at senior levels. Progress Together’s 2023 report, ‘Shaping our Economy’, revealed that socio-economic background has a greater impact on career progression than gender or ethnicity.People from working class families are not being given opportunities to progress within financial services.That’s why Progress Together is working to create a sector in which all employees can succeed based on job performance, not the circumstances of their birth.As a membership body it does this by collaborating with firms to come together as an industry, collect and publish data and hold leadership accountable. www.progresstogether.co.uk

Founded in 2015 and launched in 2017, Tide is the leading business financial platform in the UK. Tide helps SMEs save time (and money) in the running of their businesses by not only offering business accounts and related banking services, but also a comprehensive set of highly usable and connected administrative solutions from invoicing to accounting. Tide has 550,000 SME members in the UK (10% market share) and more than 150,000 SMEs in India. Tide has also been recognised with the Great Place to Work certification. It employs nearly 1,500 Tideans worldwide. Tide has been funded by Anthemis, Apax Digital, Augmentum, Creandum, Goodwater, Jigsaw, Latitude, LocalGlobe, Passion Capital, SBI Group, SpeedInvest and Tencent, amongst others. Tide’s long-term ambition is to be the leading business financial platform globally.

Volution is a pioneering UK-based venture capital fund, specialising in providing extension capital to bridge the critical funding gap between Series A and Series B for high-growth FinTech and SaaS companies. With a robust team of experienced investors, founders, and operators, Volution is dedicated to fostering long-term, stable, and sustainable growth for its portfolio companies. Their strategic investment approach is complemented by a strong commitment to environmental, social, and governance (ESG) principles, underscored by their innovative ESG and Carbon Carry initiative. Volution’s focus lies not only in financial support but also in empowering companies through collaboration, knowledge exchange, and community-building. Volution aims to redefine the funding model and support exceptional companies on their scaling journey, ensuring they are well-prepared to reach Series B and beyond.

Zumo is a B2B digital assets infrastructure engineered with a focus on compliance and sustainability. It enables financial institutions and enterprises to effortlessly embed digital assets via a simple API and unlock the potential of their brand in web3.