The Social Value Exchange appoints digital transformation expert Simon Holden of AND Digital as Non-Executive Director

LONDON, WEDNESDAY 8 JUNE 2022, 9AM: The Social Value Exchange, the online marketplace that maximises social and environmental value in supply chains, is pleased to announce the appointment of Simon Holden, Chief for Business Unit Success at digital transformation company AND Digital, as a new Non-executive Director.

The Social Value Exchange has seen enormous growth over the past 18 months, driven by a changing legislative environment that has seen Social Value become a mandatory part of public procurement. The team is growing to respond to the demand for our tech, and Simon’s appointment will support the leadership team as the business begins to scale.

Simon has played a big part in the growth and scaling of AND Digital over the last five years. As one of the first hires at the digital transformation company on a mission to close the world’s digital skills gap, Simon brings robust business and account development experience, and proven ability to scale and empower teams to the Social Value Exchange. His current role as Chief for Business Unit Success at AND Digital is focused on supporting the company’s various units and cloud and consulting at scale.

Founded in 2014, AND Digital has over 1,500 ANDis (employees) – all helping businesses accelerate their digital capabilities. It is the go-to partner for global organisations including British Airways, Diageo, and The Telegraph Group. By empowering organisations to build digital products, and grow internal capabilities, its focus is unlike traditional digital transformation consultancies. AND Digital places importance on helping drive innovation and setting customers up for long-term success by helping people within businesses develop world-class digital skills and capabilities.

Simon joined AND Digital to set up and build AND’s second Club, Club Dekker in London. A Club is the core building block of AND, and is where it builds the digital products for its clients and looks after its people. Each club is a distinct business unit of around 90 people with its own clients and unique culture. After four years Simon then moved on to leading AND’s most significant client accounts, and now supports the establishment and ongoing success of all of AND’s Clubs and wider Business Units.

Simon started his career in the British Army, completing five years with the Royal Artillery, leaving as a Captain. He then joined PA Consulting’s Government practice, working on technology programmes and projects with the Ministry of Justice, Olympic Security Directorate and Department for Education. Simon then joined Qedis (now North Highland), a boutique technology management consultancy, and worked across retail, public and legal sectors.

Commenting on the changes, the Social Value Exchange founder Dan Ebanks said: ‘I’m really pleased to have Simon on the team as we embark on a new phase of growth this summer. He’s played a big part in the incredible success story at AND Digital: the Social Value Exchange team will benefit from his invaluable mix of skills and experience of working in the technology sector and digital transformation.’

Simon Holden said: “I am thrilled to be part of the Social Value Exchange, which aims to have a meaningful and significant impact in local communities. I am impressed by Dan’s vision, drive and desire to build a scalable business whose growth tracks directly with the positive impact it has on society and the environment. It’s an exciting opportunity to again be involved in building another great business: I’m looking forward to helping Dan create a culture and structure where his teams can do their very best.”

About AND Digital

AND Digital accelerates the development of world-class digital capabilities. The go-to digital enablement partner for global organisations including BA, Diageo, Whitbread, Taylor & Francis and the Telegraph Group, AND Digital empowers organisations with the ability to build digital products AND grow their internal capability along the way. To achieve this, the company blends technical craft and digital product expertise with an award-winning learning and development ethos. Ranked 10th nationally in The Sunday Times 100 Best Companies 2019, AND Digital is also rated as one of The Next Web’s Top 5 fastest growing UK tech companies. AND Digital operates through an innovative series of nimble, Agile ‘Clubs’ across the UK in London, Leeds, Manchester, Maidenhead and Halifax – offering a flexible and highly responsive service to clients. It recently opened up its first international club in Amsterdam. For more information, please visit: www.and.digital

About the Social Value Exchange

The Social Value Exchange maximises Social Value from our customers’ supply chains and gets that value directly into local communities. We are the Social Value partner for large public and private sector organisations. The company applies sharing economy principles to its product development, using market design to ensure efficient allocation of resources to communities at the most efficient price. The Social Value Exchange is backed by Bethnal Green Ventures – Europe’s top ‘tech for good’ VC, the Community Impact Partnership and Nesta – the UK’s ‘Innovation Foundation’. For more information, please visit www.socialvalueexchange.org.

We’d love to hear from you…

Get in touch with the team.

Email: hello@socialvalueexchange.org

Telephone: 020 3488 6223

We’re on Twitter and LinkedIn too.

…for missing January’s newsletter. No excuses – it’s been such a busy time at work and at home that we had to let this slide.

Hopefully some of you out there will empathise with us here at the Social Value Exchange! The boss has had two kids at home, which has hampered his productivity, and we’ve seen partners come down with Covid.

New product

At the same time, the office is buzzing as we’re just about to ship a brand new product. We are a product business after all and it’s been great to see the development team get its teeth into something new. And to see just how productive they’ve been, especially in these unusual circumstances. Props!

It fits really well into our product portfolio and we’ll be shipping this in mid March, so definitely more to share with you in the next newsletter.

Carbon emissions project

We’re working with Balfour Beatty, Network Rail, Brent Council, Orbit and Ecotricity (the team behind this AMAZING thing) on a really interesting research project (funded by our friends at the Paul Hamlyn Foundation) that’s looking at how to reduce Scope 3 emissions (in the supply chain). Worth a look at this report to see why this is so important.

On the delivery side

We’re getting going with Sovereign Housing Association – we will have some big procurements going through the Social Value Exchange in the next couple of quarters.

We’re also getting going with Hackney Council, working closely with Jake Ferguson’s team Hackney CVS. Really excited by this – a really interesting place, great people, lots of challenges.

The team is also back in Birmingham, working on a secret project for the City Council – it’s been great working with the stakeholders up there and looking forward to sharing more next month #MatchMyProject.

Tackling digital exclusion

We’re talking to the London Office for Technology and Innovation and Nominet – exploring how we can use the Social Value Exchange to tackle the important and genuinely solvable problem of the ‘digital divide’. More on this next month.

Thanks for reading. It’s good to be back. We’d love to hear from you…

Get in touch with the team.

Email: hello@socialvalueexchange.org

Telephone: 020 3488 6223

We’re on Twitter and LinkedIn too.

Here’s what’s coming online soon…

Matching up suppliers and communities – nice to be back in product dev mode!

Have received funding from the Ideas & Pioneers fund to support our product work around reducing corporate carbon emissions.

Almost there 🙂

Really excited to be part of something that’s going to move the needle. Props to Wayne & team for putting together something that looks pretty special.

Partnering with one of our backers to deliver Social Value Brokerage training for housing associations.

hello@socialvalueexchange