Why taking the right risks, on the right people, is at the heart of what community lending is supposed to do. Richard Kirtley, Sep 04, 2026 There is a slightly uncomfortable contradiction at the heart of responsible lending, and it is one I have been thinking about quite a lot over the last few weeks […]
The green transition asks us all to change how we live and work. But what happens when millions of people and small businesses simply don’t have the economic capacity to make those choices? Richard Kirtley, Aug 21, 2026 Off the back of a record-breaking summer for all of the wrong reasons, something that I’ve been […]
If we really want growth in every postcode, we need to make sure opportunity and finance reaches every postcode too. Richard Kirtley, Aug 14, 2026 There was some unexpectedly good news about the British economy this week. The latest figures show that the UK economy grew by 0.4% in the second quarter of this year, […]
What thirteen years of lending has taught us about enterprise, poverty and potential. Richard Kirtley, Aug 07, 2026 For much of the past few weeks, we’ve been doing something that, if we’re honest, doesn’t sound particularly exciting. We’ve been poring over spreadsheets, checking repayment histories, mapping application journeys, reviewing borrower characteristics and analysing every loan […]
Happy Birthday, Purple Shoots! Richard Kirtley, Jul 24, 2026 Thirteen years is an odd anniversary. It’s long enough to know whether an idea works, but short enough to remember why you started. When Purple Shoots was founded in 2013, the proposition was remarkably simple: people who had been excluded from mainstream finance still had good […]
Richard Kirtley, Jul 10, 2026 There are certain words that become so universally admired that, over time, they stop describing anything particularly well. They become badges of virtue rather than definitions. We hear them repeated so often, in so many different contexts, that we stop asking what they actually mean. Community, I would argue, is one […]