The Citi Microentrepreneurship Awards celebrate the impact and achievements of responsible finance providers on the people and places of Britain, and champion the outstanding microentrepreneurs who are creating jobs, services and prosperity in their communities.

The awards are run by Responsible Finance in partnership with the Citi Foundation.

SIS has been recognised with the Impact Award for the positive impact of its investment activity on the people, communities and economies it serves.

Over the last three years, this activity has helped create over 1,000 jobs and sustained over 3,500. Over 1.4 million people benefited from SIS customers’ activities in the 2019-20 financial year.

SIS has also introduced several measures to ensure that impact is at the core of its operations and investment activity, including the publication of an annual Social Impact Report and the appointment of a Head of Impact, with responsibility for refining SIS’s impact strategy and objectives and supporting the sector to enhance its impact practices.

In 2018, SIS also established SIS Ventures, a ‘profit with purpose’ investor aimed at supporting high impact enterprises. SIS Ventures raised £1.3M in its first round of funding, concluding deals with a number of early-stage enterprises including Brewgooder, Talking Medicines, Cyan Forensics, Good-Loop and Trojan Energy.

Commenting on the award, Lindsay Wake, head of impact at SIS, said: “Having intensified our focus on impact over the past year, this award feels like validation of all the hard work carried out by the team at SIS. Developing our expertise in delivering impact-driven investment outcomes is helping SIS to make an even bigger difference to the organisations we’re investing in. This, in turn, is helping our customers increase and improve the impact they can make on people’s lives across a range of social, economic and environmental measures. It’s a win win.”