The grey, drizzly morning did little to dampen enthusiasm as we gathered to celebrate the first birthday of Discover Finance and consider what lies ahead.

Generously hosted by L&G, attendees from across the sector joined our busy room and video call, ready to discuss the wealth of potential at hand.

What is Discover Finance?

Ever heard the phrase, “It’s not for people like me”, about a career or sector? It’s something we often hear from young people when talking about the Financial Services sector. This sector-invisibility limits social mobility and restricts the pool of future talent for employers, leading to increased cost per hire and missed diversity targets.

‍“We’ve got communities where there are four generations of families who haven’t worked. Kids from areas like this are never going to hear about opportunities without extra help”

Discover Finance is a collaborative initiative that was set up to inspire young people from diverse and underrepresented backgrounds to consider a career in Financial Services. Connectr Early Engagement manages the initiative, giving employers an accessible and resource-light way to share their opportunities with young, ambitious individuals who might otherwise miss their chance.

Early success stories

We heard from Beth Wistow at LGPS Central, one of Discover Finance's Founding Members. As a small organisation of just over 100 employees, they were emphatic that they couldn’t have delivered the same scale of impact alone. They’re already seeing an impact – one of the four hires into their first apprenticeship intake this year had participated in the West Midlands Discover Finance last year.

‍“Until he joined the cohort, Ahmed had never heard of us and was completely unaware of the opportunities in Financial services.”

In addition to hiring benefits, LGPS have seen increased online engagement: Teaching their cohorts about LinkedIn provided a multifaceted benefit, with a flurry of new LinkedIn members, connection requests, and enthusiastic posts.

Looking ahead

2026 is set to be even bigger, better and more impactful than 2025, with events across the UK, Wales and Scotland. We will continue to run programmes across Cardiff, Edinburgh, London and West Midlands - as well as expanding into new locations such as Leeds, Liverpool and Bristol, and exciting ambitions in the works for reaching different and bigger audiences.

We’re delighted to see how magnetic Discover Finance is for young people. Our October 25 London cohort had 10 times more applicants than places, demonstrating the scale of opportunity available to employers who participate.

The appetite for this programme is huge: 317 young people applied for one of 30 spaces on our autumn Discover Finance rotation in London.

How can we evolve Discover Finance?

Discover Finance has always been shaped by and for the sector, so shaping what Year 2 looks like was an important part of the morning. We split into several breakout groups in order to discuss how Discover Finance should scale for Year 2: from new locations, to more hiring outcomes, to increased student targeting.

We considered how we can scale to ensure we support the full candidate funnel and clearly demonstrate hiring ROI - and how we can leverage our collective strengths to achieve this.

Delivering across the candidate funnel

A key theme from discussions was that in order to support more young people into the sector, Discover Finance should consider the full end-to-end candidate funnel and support it though a combined breadth and depth of engagement:

• From light touch awareness generation at the top end,
• through to experiences of the workplace to explore, myth-bust and support decision making,
• then supporting conversion into successful job applications at the narrow end of the hiring funnel.

We explored how we can develop Discover Finance further to take students through that full journey of awareness, exposure to the sector and ‘myth-busting’, helping to narrow the funnel and focus onconversion. 

96% of Cardiff attendees said Discover Finance developed their understanding of different types of careers which they were not aware of before.

No organisation can ignore ROI. All parties were keen to ensure Discover Finance can articulate clear hiring outcomes, reassuring key stakeholders that their investment in the programme will pay back with ambitious, engaged talent.

The group also recognised that many young people will prioritise engaging with Discover Finance where they can see that it increases their future employment prospects.

Leverage our collective strength

The variety of organisations in Discover Finance complements one another, helping create a fully rounded programme. Bringing together firms of different sizes and brand awareness benefits partner firms and future talent alike.

Across partner firms there will always be a ‘next step’ for students to engage with, no matter when their work experience rotation takes place: there are different application timelines and a variety of support tools candidates can tap into across the network (such as BDO’s Hive platform for school leavers) so that as a collective we can make sure Discover Finance is providing a multi-touchpoint experience for students with clear next steps.

Discover Finance is building a shared talent pool of candidates from more diverse backgrounds who are interested in the sector, have a better awareness of it’s make up and can make informed decisions about their next steps. Continuing to build scale into the programme will boost the pipeline to reduce concerns around competition for talent from the programme – and ultimately give more young people exposure to different career pathways.

If we can successfully scale the reach and conversion to hires from Discover Finance in Year 2, then the growth into new locations and firms will follow.

Food for thought – our wild card ideas!

The group agreed that Discover Finance is a model that could be easily applied to reach new audiences, such as 18-24-year-old NEETs, primary school children and engaging influencers (parents and teachers).

At the heart of our discussions was the recognition that Discover Finance has enormous untapped potential and can be developed to support socialmobility goals, meet hiring targets and inspire young people.

Don’t lose your chance to engage with diverse talent

There’s never been a better time to join the programme. Our first impact report shows the enormous potential awaiting underrepresented young people and employers in the finance and insurance sector.

If you’d like to join – let us know! We need partner firms across the UK,  and would love to discuss ways for you to be involved.

And if you’re already involved, please spread the word. The more people taking part in this, the better our collective impact!

A huge thank you to the team at L&G for hosting yesterday's event! 

And thank you to the continued industry support from: L&G, LGPS Central, Aon, Phoenix Group, Principality Building Society, BDO, ABI, IFoA and the City of London Corporation.