Leading the way

Our first responsible business report launches today

A year ago, WeTransfer became a certified B Corporation. It’s something we’re proud of. We’re one of the first global tech firms to achieve this status, joining like-minded companies in seeking to use business as a force for good. Meeting B Lab’s exacting criteria for certification took dedication and hard work, focusing on five “impact areas”—community, customers, the environment, governance and workers.

Inspired by this transformative experience, today we’re publishing our first ever responsible business report, From A to B Corp (and beyond): Our road to responsibility. It’s a brand new project, sitting alongside B Lab’s own reporting, and it will be an annual fixture, constantly evaluating our current position and our future direction across those impact areas.

You can read the report here, and I really hope you do. It looks back at our journey to achieving B Corp status, and the progress we’ve been making since. Earlier this year, for instance, we took a crucial step in fulfilling our commitment to sustainability, achieving climate-neutral certification, and started out towards our long-term objective—becoming a carbon-positive business.

We’ve also been embedding responsible decision-making across the entire company, reinforcing the strong, positive values that we’ve always believed in. We’ve set up internal programs to promote conversations around mental health; we’ve been engaging with the open-source community, offering financial support to both niche projects and well-known organizations; we’re implementing sustainable-purchase policies and adopting strategies to reduce commuting and business travel; and we’re currently establishing new practices to drive diversity and inclusivity in both our recruitment and our work environments.

At the same time, we’re expanding our rich relationship with the creative community, building new partnerships with inspirational projects and talented artists, many of them through our acclaimed editorial platform, WePresent. To pick just two, we’ve been working with the Union of Concerned Photographers, a photography collective that exposes the harmful effects of human activity on ecosystems; and supporting Robogee, an award-winning robot built by young Syrian refugees, which has evolved into a powerful storytelling platform, giving these children a place to express their stories and their talents. 

This new report is explicit on all these points. We want it to challenge us, to hold us accountable, and to ensure that we always put responsible business at the heart of our approach, embedded across the firm and everything we do.

By publishing From A to B Corp (and beyond): Our road to responsibility—by sharing our progress, our learnings and our ambitions—we hope to lead by example, encouraging dialogue and championing positive change in the technology sector and beyond. WeTransfer has always done things a little differently. From day one, we’ve sought to balance people, planet and profit. Today’s report is another important step in that journey. 

The report is published online today, and can be downloaded here: https://we.tl/responsibility

Illustrations by Mark Conlan