Meet Jim Islam, OneFamily’s new Chief Executive Officer

I was the eldest in the family, with three younger sisters. I grew up in the subcontinent and, in that part of the world, being the eldest son in itself brings a lot of responsibilities from a very young age.

The difficult part was, and the financial circumstances were such, that I really had to focus on studies, and that's why social mobility is very important for me.

Given the financial circumstances under which I grew up, I was actually a young adult from a very young age.

Lack of financial products and solutions can create immense difficulties in people's lives. I have personally been through that especially when I was very, very young.

So, the solutions and products that we provide to our customers, those are the solutions and products that will inspire better futures.

So, that is what we need to do: deliver on our vision.

OneFamily as an organisation, first of all, it's a mutual. Thinking about the customers and everything that it does is built into the organisation's values and ethos, because, at the end of the day, our customers are our shareholders.

We listen to our customers, we take the feedback on, and we shape it in terms of how we shape our services, whether it's customer service or whether it's our products.

And if you think about the challenges that we currently face, the need to build financial products that create financial resilience – that's what OneFamily is already very good at, but that's where we have a bigger role to play.

What is becoming clearer [is] that individuals will have to take greater responsibility for their own financial protection and financial resilience. Somebody has to play a role in filling in that gap. Mutuals used to do that hundreds of years ago, and I see OneFamily as playing a very important role in plugging and bridging that gap.

My hope is that we'll really establish ourselves as the modern, dynamic mutual in the UK.