Step One Finance Reviews

Thank you for leaving your feedback on Step One and suggestions for improvement. Perhaps more importantly, thank you for your dedication and participating in the company’s growth over such a significant period of time. For the benefit of readers who are not as familiar with Step One, we thought it might be helpful to share some of the growth milestones we achieved over the 5+ years you claim to have worked with the company. Step One was founded in 2010. Over the last 5 years we grew from a small 10-person team to our current size of nearly 40 full time employees. Over the same period, we have also raised institutional funding from some of the largest and most respected investors in the world reflecting their trust in both Step One’s strong management team but also the strength and quality of our overall team. In 2018 we needed to double the size of our office space from 3,000 sqft to 6,000 sqft in order to accommodate all of the new staff we were hiring. On the training side, in addition to utilising online courses for regulatory and other industry related training, in 2015 we introduced financial support for most members of our team who would like to obtain the CEMAP professional qualification, a program which continues today. We have also supported apprenticeship programs in IT, finance and our underwriting departments which facilitated the training of young people new to financial services and provided them with a launch pad for their new careers. Yes, our experienced managers are very hands on. They do not sit in offices away from the team but rather work side by side (with obvious social distancing constraints in the current climate) providing real time feedback and training opportunities for team members of all experience levels. While it is true that smaller companies tend to have reasonably flat organisational structures the company has worked with many members of our team who wanted to broaden their financial services experience through cross training and moving into new departments. As the company grows and moves into new lending markets there will continue to be significant opportunities for members of our team to grow professionally. In response to your COVID-19 update, your comments do not reflect the many steps the company has taken to safeguard our staff. The company follows all recommended government guidance including, but not limited to, social distancing, plexiglass screens between desks, seating reorganisations, hand washing stations and sanitiser, increased frequency of office cleaning, and remote working for staff where operationally feasible. At the time of this posting, the company has not had a single case of COVID-19 in our office since the start of the pandemic and we will always take the safety of our employees very seriously. As a final point of clarification, given the rapid growth of our company, most of our staff have joined in the last 2 - 3 years and there are only a small number of people who have spent more than 5 years with the company. Every single one of those team members with 5+ years of service are still working for Step One. Perhaps you did not work with the company for as long as you claim, but we thank you for your contribution nonetheless