Liberty Story
Liberty is a non-bank lender, founded in 1997 on the premise of fairness and financial inclusion. Operating within the Australian and New Zealand lending sectors, the company’s purpose is ‘To help more people get financial’. Liberty achieves its purpose by offering home, motor, personal, business, commercial and SMSF loans, as well as investment and insurance products.

Liberty’s values are Fair, Learning, Accountable, Invested and Resourceful and it deploys these values in everything it does. Liberty is committed to helping people lead better lives with finance. It wants to have a positive, ongoing impact on the community.

Liberty Financial Group listed on the ASX in December 2020 and today comprises a team of more than 500 people and manages $13 billion in loan assets. Over its 25 years, Liberty has helped more than 600,000 customers get financial.

Liberty is the only Australian non-bank that is B Corp certified1, making a pledge to be held accountable to high standards of performance and transparency. B Corps demonstrate through action that they understand the value of positive social impact. As a B Corp, Liberty seeks to balance profit and purpose.

Culture and strategy
Liberty’s culture is closely aligned to its strategy and supported by its vision, mission and values.

It’s vision is to be the leading finance group that champions free thinking, through its mission to provide free-thinking finance.

Together these cultural elements encourage and support team members to bring their authentic selves to work to create a happy, high-performing team. A team whose characteristics are collaborative, diverse and supportive of customers and each other.

Liberty’s culture is built on an entrepreneurial, free-thinking ethos, constantly innovating to evolve the business to better support customers and business partners with streamlined solutions. It’s this ethos that enables Liberty to improve financial accessibility in the community.

Liberty’s employee value proposition is to empower and support team members to achieve maximum personal and career growth. It believes that individuals will experience optimal growth in an environment where challenge intersects with opportunity. It strives to deliver these two drivers of growth for all team members.

In Liberty’s view, good leadership is at the heart of fostering this desired culture. Liberty helps its leaders to be effective in guiding the culture by supporting and empowering them to make informed and accountable decisions for the welfare of their teams.

Education, training and development
At Liberty, careers are tailored to each individual. Whether joining the company as a graduate or as an experienced professional, Liberty offers continuous learning and development opportunities to foster both personal and professional growth.

Learning at Liberty took many forms through the pandemic, but with the theme of diversity and inclusion and resilience. This strengthened the team’s capability to support customers in a time of crisis.

However, Liberty believes that the most powerful form of learning is peer-group training. Every department has developed a series of induction and training modules to help new people learn the requirements of a role quickly and effectively.

Human resource strategies
To deliver maximum value to the business, the human resource strategy, developed by the Culture and Community team, operates in accordance with four guiding principles:
• Put team members’ needs first: A happy team will deliver happy customers.
• To create an agile, high performing and learning culture through initiatives of innovative goal setting, agency, inclusivity and learning.
• The Culture and Community team provides advice, guidance, support and empowerment to leaders.
• All individuals at Liberty are encouraged to understand and appropriately exercise their agency.

Liberty takes an integrated approach to performance improvement and performance appraisals. For Liberty it begins by seeking clarity and alignment around the business strategy and agreement on the skills and behaviours needed to deliver the strategy.

All roles at Liberty have clear performance measures. As a people business, it’s significant that 60% of KPIs measure behaviour against the values. The remaining 40% of KPIs measure output and outcomes. The emphasis is on how people collaborate.

Liberty has worked hard to position the review process as constructive and supportive of team members’ personal growth and development.

Health, safety and satisfaction
Liberty develops and maintains a healthy, safe and supportive work environment that is conducive to overall wellbeing and productivity in many interconnected ways. This includes:
• developing a supportive culture
• ensuring workplace safety
• maximising workplace flexibility
• designing the office for people and collaboration
• going above and beyond with facilities for the team
• looking after personal health and wellbeing
• supporting families of team members
• building inter-team connections
• managing through the uncertainty of the pandemic.

All these factors combine to maintain a strong and committed team. They enable Liberty to recruit talented people and provide extraordinary and unwavering support to its customers. This was borne out in the most harrowing times of the pandemic, when the Liberty team remained calm and responsive to its customers’ needs. Phones were answered, problems solved, loan applications sorted and loans settled. The team didn’t miss a beat and stayed happy along the way.

For information about Liberty Financial, visit liberty.com.au