Why Inclusion Must Grow as Your FinTech Business Grows

How Flagstone Is Building a High-Performing but Human FinTech Culture

In the latest episode of FinTech’s DEI Discussions, Nadia welcomes Angie Borst, Head of People at Flagstone, for an in-depth exploration of what it truly means to build an inclusive, high-performing culture in today’s FinTech landscape. Drawing on fifteen years of experience across multiple industries and company stages, Angie reveals how inclusion has become the heartbeat of Flagstone’s people strategy. not an initiative on the side, but a way of being.

As a FinTech recruitment business, Harrington Starr continues to spotlight leaders like Angie who are shaping the workplaces of the future. This conversation goes far beyond theory, offering actionable insights into how organisations can put people at the centre of their business while driving innovation and growth across the FinTech sector.

A Career Defined by Variety, Purpose, and People

Angie Borst’s career journey spans over fifteen years in HR, touching sectors as diverse as not-for-profit, aviation, FMCG, healthcare, e-commerce, and SaaS. She began her professional path in the not-for-profit world, where she first discovered the power of purpose, seeing first-hand how deeply employees engage when they feel connected to a mission and a brand. That early experience built the foundation for her people-centred philosophy, one that values identity, belonging, and engagement above all else.

Her global perspective grew as she worked in Australia with brands such as PepsiCo and Cathay Pacific, before returning to the UK to support start-ups, scaling SaaS firms, and the NHS. Each role gave her the chance to build and refine people frameworks at different stages of organisational maturity, from laying HR foundations to designing progressive, culture-led strategies. The result, she says, is a “well-rounded practitioner” who thrives in both strategic design and hands-on delivery, always ensuring the person remains at the centre of every decision.

That mindset perfectly aligns with Flagstone’s mission, and with what FinTech businesses increasingly need in a competitive talent market. In a sector defined by agility, technology, and transformation, Angie’s approach emphasises humanity as a performance driver.

Empowerment Through Simplicity: The Flagstone Mission

Flagstone’s mission is simple yet powerful: to help people make their cash work harder. The company offers a transparent, accessible platform that gives customers better access to competitive savings rates while removing the complexity of managing money. At its heart, Flagstone’s purpose is empowerment, giving individuals the confidence and control to manage their finances easily and effectively.

This sense of empowerment extends beyond customers and runs deeply through Flagstone’s internal culture. The business operates on three core values: Forge New Ways, Surpass Expectations, and Community Counts. For Angie, these aren’t empty statements; they actively guide decision-making, hiring, recognition, and accountability throughout the organisation.

“Forge New Ways” represents the company’s dedication to innovation. Employees are encouraged to challenge the status quo, experiment, test, and learn, values that align closely with the FinTech sector’s agile DNA. Flagstone’s operational model, built around tribes, squads, and pods, fosters collaboration and ensures teams are aligned toward shared goals. For Angie’s people team, that same iterative spirit drives continuous improvement. Whether rebuilding the company’s performance framework or introducing new inclusion initiatives, her focus is always on listening, adapting, and evolving.

“Surpass Expectations” embodies accountability and excellence, the commitment to go beyond what is expected, whether for clients, colleagues, or oneself. It reflects a growth mindset that resonates strongly across FinTech, where adaptability and continuous improvement are essential for success.

Finally, “Community Counts” speaks to Flagstone’s belief that success is collective. The company prioritises wellbeing, empathy, and mutual support, recognising that great results come from great relationships. Community action is also central to Flagstone’s identity: teams give back through volunteering, fundraising, and charity partnerships. Angie recalls how ten colleagues recently abseiled down St Thomas’ Hospital to raise money for a London children’s charity, an experience that brought the team closer and reinforced the company’s belief that community truly counts.

Together, these values create a culture where people feel safe to bring their whole selves to work, innovation is encouraged, and inclusion is embedded at every level.

Inclusion Powers Performance: Defining a North Star for DEI

For Angie Borst, inclusion has never been more critical than it is today. In a climate where the global conversation around diversity and inclusion is becoming increasingly polarised, and in some organisations, deprioritised, she believes it’s essential for FinTech businesses to stay firm in their commitments and clear on why inclusion matters.

At Flagstone, the team has faced moments where global events have affected colleagues’ mental health and sense of belonging. Angie describes how these challenges have reinforced the importance of proactive inclusion: making sure people feel supported, connected, and understood. In response, Flagstone has invested more time and energy into DEI over the past year than ever before.

Early in the year, the company partnered with the consultancy The Unmistakable to conduct a full diagnostic of its inclusion landscape. Around a third of employees took part in listening groups and one-to-one sessions, and the consultancy helped the business examine its people data in detail. This comprehensive review offered both insight and challenge, prompting deeper critical thinking about what inclusion means in practice.

From this work, Flagstone defined its North Star for Inclusion: “Inclusion powers performance. We see and value every person, fostering fairness, belonging, and shared success.”

For Angie and her team, this statement is more than a slogan. It connects inclusion directly to performance, making diversity not just a moral imperative but a business one. It’s a belief that fairness, belonging, and shared success drive results, and that when people thrive, businesses do too.

Flagstone has also launched an Inclusion Hub to ensure ongoing accountability. Supported by cross-functional working groups, or “pods”, the hub reviews key people areas such as performance, learning, feedback, and community through an inclusion lens. These pods ensure inclusion isn’t treated as a side project, but as a fundamental principle woven into everyday processes.

This approach reflects a vital message for the wider FinTech recruitment and business community: inclusion should not exist on the periphery of strategy. Instead, it must sit at the centre of how performance, growth, and success are defined.

Rethinking the Power of People Policies

When Angie talks about the power of people policies, she doesn’t mean static documents. She means the systems and frameworks that shape how employees experience work, the structures that drive fairness, culture, and performance.

Over the last two years, Flagstone has been trialling a performance system that resonated strongly with its teams. The framework was built on the principle that how employees deliver their work is just as important as what they deliver. Behaviours aligned with company values are weighted equally with business results, capturing the essence of Flagstone’s philosophy: “high-performing but human.”

However, as the business grew, it became clear that some aspects of the system were limiting rather than enabling performance. Scoring inconsistencies, lengthy calibration sessions, and certain language choices, such as “consistency”, unintentionally created friction, particularly for neurodiverse colleagues.

Rather than make small adjustments, Flagstone decided to rebuild the performance framework from the ground up. Guided by inclusion principles and data-driven thinking, the company’s dedicated Performance Pod, a cross-functional group, is co-creating a new system that prioritises flexibility and clarity. Role-specific scorecards are being developed to define what excellence looks like at every level while recognising that high performance can take many forms.

This redesign embodies Flagstone’s inclusive philosophy: creating systems that enable individuality instead of constraining it. For Angie, that’s the true power of people frameworks, when they not only drive commercial performance but also create conditions for every person to thrive in their own way.

Evolving Through Listening

A recurring theme throughout Angie’s discussion with Nadia is evolution, the understanding that inclusion and culture are living systems that must grow as people and businesses do. For Flagstone, evolution begins with listening.

The company invests heavily in understanding what people value, using engagement surveys, pulse checks, feedback sessions, and open conversations to gather insight. Over the past year, Flagstone has modernised its benefits and reward approach to offer more choice and flexibility, acknowledging that different employees value different things.

Angie’s vision is to build a suite of tools and resources accessible to everyone, removing the need for employees to self-identify with a particular diversity label to access support. By making these resources universally available, Flagstone ensures that inclusion is proactive, not reactive.

The company’s rapid growth, expanding its workforce by a third in just twelve months, has brought new perspectives and expectations. This growth has prompted a renewed focus on progression and fairness, helping employees see clearly how they can develop their careers in directions that suit them best. The systems supporting this growth are deliberately flexible, designed to accommodate diverse paths and ambitions.

Angie’s advice to other leaders echoes her philosophy of curiosity and co-creation: test, evolve, and never assume a people strategy is “done.” Because people change, and so does the world around them. The most resilient FinTech cultures, she believes, are those that grow with change rather than resist it.

Inclusion Through Action, Not Intention

Towards the end of the episode, Nadia and Angie explore how inclusion moves from awareness to action. For Angie, it begins with leadership, with senior teams modelling curiosity, humility, and vulnerability. Leaders who are open to learning, willing to admit mistakes, and able to speak honestly about progress set the tone for the rest of the business.

Inclusion is built through daily choices: designing processes that remove bias, creating policies that reflect real lives, and giving people a voice in shaping their environment. But it also requires courage, the courage to look at what isn’t working and to iterate or even start again when necessary.

Crucially, Angie believes inclusion should not sit solely with the people team. It must be embedded in how executive decisions are made, how success is defined, and how people are developed. When inclusion is integrated into the fabric of an organisation, it becomes self-sustaining, a natural part of how the company operates, rather than an external programme that can fade away.

Leadership vulnerability plays a major role in sustaining this culture. When CEOs and executives model openness, sharing their own mistakes, listening actively, and showing kindness and respect, they give permission for everyone else to do the same. That’s when inclusion becomes not just an initiative, but a shared way of being.

The Flagstone Way of Being

What shines through most strongly in this conversation is Flagstone’s belief that inclusion, performance, and humanity are inseparable. The company’s people strategy connects fairness and belonging with business success, proving that inclusive workplaces are also high-performing workplaces.

For FinTech businesses navigating talent shortages, cultural evolution, and rapid change, Flagstone’s approach offers a model worth studying. It demonstrates that inclusion is not a soft concept but a strategic advantage, one that improves engagement, retention, innovation, and overall performance.

Through initiatives like the Inclusion Hub, performance pods, and flexible progression frameworks, Angie Borst and her team have shown that when employees feel seen, valued, and supported, they deliver their best work. And by tying inclusion directly to performance, Flagstone ensures that fairness and belonging are measurable parts of success, not optional extras.

Nadia closes the episode by celebrating Flagstone’s “way of being”, a mindset of constant evolution, listening, and learning. The conversation is a reminder to every FinTech leader, HR professional, and recruiter that inclusion is not a destination but a journey. It’s about progress, not perfection, and the courage to keep walking the talk.

At Harrington Starr, we’re proud to amplify stories like this through FinTech’s DEI Discussions, showcasing the leaders shaping fairer, more inclusive workplaces across the financial technology sector. As a FinTech recruitment business, we believe the future of hiring and leadership lies in cultures that empower people to thrive as themselves, because, as Flagstone proves, inclusion truly does power performance.