UK Chancellor Rishi Sunak has had his work cut out for him over the past few months. Since his last statement in the Spring budget, he was forced to make revisions to the amount of money the government were willing to give out to help small businesses, and to those who were unable to work throughout the lockdown.
This has been imperative to the livelihoods of millions.
It's not an easy time. Now Rishi is hoping to further simulate the economy as we slowly come out of lockdown by offering money towards restaurants incentivising people to dine out, and by supporting those coming out of varying levels of school looking for a job on a volatile market.
At tomato pay, we have always opened up intern spots every year for young people coming out of university, or looking for a summer job to get more experience in the fintech industry across many disciplines - design, business analytics, marketing, communications and data science. Right now, we have two full time employees who started on internships, and as set out in our BCR Capabilities and Innovation Fund - we are committed to creating more jobs for young people looking to make their first step on the job market.
You can see tomato pay's comment on nurturing young talent following Rishi's Summer Statement in The Fintech Times.
Nicholas Heller, CEO and co-founder of tomato pay, who also helped set up the charity Founders 4 Schools to link all schools with inspirational business leaders, said: “Nurturing young talent is more important now than ever before. The job market is tough right now, so where possible, businesses should make a conscious effort to remember what it was like starting out, empathise and think about the impact you can make on a young person’s life by hiring and training them. In the long run this will benefit the individual, the company and the economy. We are thrilled to be working with untied who share our values and our vision, and it was a no-brainer going in on a joint bid together for our SMART initiative for the BCR Capabilities and Innovation Fund where we state our commitment to creating more jobs”.
Our partners at untied, also commented. Kevin Sefton, CEO at untied stated: "We believe strongly in supporting young people starting out and welcome the Kickstart scheme as a way to increase opportunity and representation. As a business we will treat Kickstart as an invitation to give people the break that they need and which can set them up for success through the rest of their lives.
We have used access schemes to recruit young people in the past. They have gone on to succeed here and around the world. We’ve learned that it takes commitment to get right and to be meaningful for all parties – which means money going to the person directly, and investing in their training and support.
Businesses will want clarity on eligibility and who they can hire. It would be a tragedy if young people end up trapped in a loop between leaving education, Universal Credit and Kickstart.
With our close partners tomato pay who themselves have hired three young people this year, we have just made a joint application for our SMART initiative to the BCR Capabilities and Innovation Fund to help SMEs with tools to manage their capital and tax. This included explicit commitments to creating jobs for those starting out. Kickstarters could enable us to do more."
You can find the full press release on our BCR Capability and Innovation fund bid here, a blog post on why helping sole traders with this challenge is critical to the success of the UK economy here, and untied's blog post on sole traders here.
To find out more about the initiative, our partnership with untied or if you are interested in partnering with us to create new SME-focused solutions, you can contact us at partner@tomatopay.co.uk
