Payments is a trust business. A processor is handed critical technology, sensitive data and services that reach a client's own customers, so its decisions become part of that client's service by default. That covers how reliably the platform authorises transactions, how carefully it handles cardholder data, how it responds when something goes wrong, and how the people running it behave day to day.
None of that is easy to prove. Any provider can describe itself as responsible and well governed. Getting a procurement or risk team to believe it is another matter.
That is what an independent standard is for. Thredd has completed the B Corp assessment and verification process and is now a Certified B Corporation.
B Corp Certification is awarded by B Lab, an independent non-profit, following a detailed assessment and independent verification. It looks across the whole company: governance, workers, community, environment and customers.
Certification reflects evidence that an external party has documented, reviewed and tested. It is independent, third-party verification, not a self-declared claim, and it should not be mistaken for an environmental certification.
The dependencies described above are hard to prove with marketing alone. A client cannot verify how Thredd treats its people, manages risk or handles a supplier dispute just by reading a website. That gap is real. Certification is what closes it, at least in part.
It gives clients, prospects and procurement teams an independent reference point for the questions they increasingly ask: how the business is governed, how it treats its staff, how it protects customers, how it works with suppliers and communities, and how it manages its wider impact. It does not replace the detailed evidence Thredd already provides on security and compliance. It sits underneath that evidence and strengthens it.
For the teams who actually evaluate a processor, this has practical use. B Corp Certification can support client due diligence, procurement exercises, requests for proposal, corporate reporting and stakeholder engagement. When a procurement or risk team asks for evidence on governance, ethics, employee practices, sustainability or customer protection, a recognised certification gives them a verified starting point instead of a set of self-declared assurances written by the vendor itself.
It also reflects an ongoing discipline rather than a one-off achievement. The assessment is a benchmark that identifies gaps and structures improvement over time, and B Corp is a standard that continues to evolve, so certification is a commitment to keep meeting it rather than a box ticked once. The certification itself is useful. The operating discipline behind it matters more.
B Corp Certification is not really about a certificate on the wall. It is independent evidence that the way we govern the business, look after our people and protect our clients' customers holds up to outside scrutiny.
The assessment looks across governance, workers, community, environment and customers. Thredd's strongest area was Workers, the part of the standard that examines pay and living wage practices, benefits, ownership, career development, policies, and the day-to-day experience of working at the company.
That is a useful place to be strong, because payments is a people business as much as a technology one. Implementation, scheme expertise, risk management and client support all depend on retaining experienced people in a market that competes hard for them.
Clients feel that indirectly: continuity in the teams they work with, and depth of expertise that does not walk out of the door mid-programme. An independent assessment confirming that Thredd invests seriously in its people gives clients evidence they cannot gather for themselves, evidence that shows up in the quality of the relationship over years rather than months.
A reasonable question from any procurement team, especially one already running its own supplier assessments, is how B Corp relates to something they may already hold, such as an EcoVadis rating, and whether the two are simply duplicating each other.
The two do different jobs. EcoVadis is used mainly in supply-chain due diligence, assessing environment, labour and human rights, ethics and sustainable procurement. B Corp looks at the company as a whole. One supports supply-chain assurance. The other supports broader corporate credibility and accountability. Holding both gives a fuller picture than either alone.
Governance matters more, not less, as Thredd develops as an AI-enabled business. B Corp does not assess AI systems directly. It shows that governance, accountability and impact on stakeholders sit inside the organisation using those systems. For clients weighing how a partner will handle new capabilities responsibly, that is useful context.
Jim McCarthy, CEO, Thredd, said:
"B Corp Certification is not really about a certificate on the wall. It is independent evidence that the way we govern the business, look after our people and protect our clients' customers holds up to outside scrutiny. The area we performed most strongly on was our people, and that matters to me: in payments, the standard of the service is set by the people running it. Trust is everything in this business, and this gives our clients a verified reference point rather than a promise. Responsible business is not separate from building trusted payment infrastructure. It is part of how we do it."
Certification extends Thredd's trust proposition well beyond technology, security and compliance, into questions about how the business is governed, how it treats the people who work there, and how it behaves when nobody outside the company is watching.
For a client, the sharper question is what to expect of any processor making similar claims. Was it tested by someone other than the vendor? Independent verification is the difference between a promise and a proof point. That distinction increasingly decides whether a client can trust what a processor claims.
Speak to our team about what a composable credit infrastructure looks like for your specific use case.
