Partnership with Santander funds SME Growth Club and visiting Fellows at Cambridge Judge
Strengthening its partnership with Cambridge Judge Business School, Santander UK, through its SME support programme, Breakthrough, is supporting a new SME Growth Club to help British enterprises develop their management and processes to enable growth.
The partnership will also fund new visiting Fellows over the next three years and includes cooperation on seminars, conferences and other projects.
The new UK SME Growth Club, which will launch in the coming months, will engage with 10 small-medium sized enterprises (SMEs) from the Cambridge cluster, elsewhere in East Anglia and London. Each participating company will be visited by a member of the Cambridge Judge faculty to assess their needs, and then action plans will be developed to tackle strategic challenges.
The aim of the Club is to significantly enhance the performance and competitiveness of the companies by developing their managerial capability, setting attainable objectives and monitoring progress through key performance indicators.
Santander will fund a Santander Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Cambridge Judge, enabling academic visitors in business and finance to spend time at the University of Cambridge and provide a lecture and seminar series. This complements the partnership agreement signed in 2008 through the bank’s Santander Universities Global Division, which has benefited the School’s students and academics through funding for Fellows, scholarships, entrepreneurial activities and other projects.
As part of the City Speakers Series of the Master of Finance (MFin) programme at Cambridge Judge, Steve Pateman, Executive Director and Head of UK Banking at Santander UK, spoke at the School on 22 January on the economy and the role of banking. Steve joined Santander in 2008, joined the Santander UK board in 2011 and became Head of UK Banking in 2012.
The University of Cambridge is among universities across the UK which benefit from scholarships provided under the Santander Universities SME Internship Programme. For each participating university, the programme offers 25 scholarships of £1,500 each to benefit current or recently graduated students who do a three-month paid internship with an SME.