Zopa employees can now work wherever they like, including 90 days abroad

 It’s a tough time to be in charge of a company office. To encourage employees back to the office, stay fully remote or move to some sort of ‘hybrid’ model. It’s the question on everyone’s mind.

Zopa has become the latest fintech to play their hand with a new policy for the rest of 2021 allowing employees to work wherever they like, including from abroad for 90 days.

Revolut was the first fintech in the UK to announce a radical new model, similar to Zopa albeit with 60 days of abroad working. GoCardless subsequently announced their own version trumping Revolut with 90 days as with Zopa's new model.

The policy is a ‘test and learn’ approach, though, Zopa says, with the long term model assessed based on business success, employee satisfaction and organisational resilience.

Four in five (80 per cent) of Zopa employees say they are keen to have a blended working week, spending time both in the office and at home. The neobank has around 450 staff.

Zopa’s Chief Customer Officer, Clare Gambardella said: “Zopa as a business has been able to achieve a huge amount in the last year while our teams were working from home. However, we are aware that the pandemic environment isn't representative of a sustainable ongoing model for us or our people.” 

“By testing and learning with our employees throughout 2021, we can understand how a distributed working model functions in the longer term and what the differing preferences are for the people throughout our business. Our goal is to find a model which enables both Zopa’s continued growth and our ability to attract and retain the best talent.”

During the pandemic Zopa obtained its full bank licence, launched savings accounts and credit card while seeing its customer base grow 27  per cent.