Practitioner of the Moment       

 An interview with Youssef Achour*, CEO and Chairman of Up Group

Can you tell us more about Up group and its activities? 

Up group is a social economy pioneer in France and in Europe since 1964. We are a SCOP, société cooperative under French law. As such, we are a co-operative and participatory firm and a major player in France’s social economy sector.

Up group’s payment solutions offer very practical answers to very essential needs. We help companies improve the purchasing power and work-life balance of employees. We also help public authorities improve service delivery to citizens. Our focus is to facilitate access to food, culture, sports and leisure activities through a variety of specific vouchers.

Our solutions foster social dialogue within companies and with public authorities. The most known are meal vouchers, gift vouchers, service and social service vouchers. For example, at the height of the first wave of COVID-19, we supplied emergency social vouchers to the most vulnerable populations on behalf of the French and Italian governments. We like to call them smart currencies as they contribute to stimulating local economies and addressing people’s and communities’ needs.

What makes Up group’s governance model unique? 

Our governance is based on democratic rule: this means that each shareholder has one vote, regardless of status, seniority or invested capital. The principle is simple: "One person, one vote". Our majority shareholders and decision makers are our employees. They hold at least 51% of the capital and 65% of voting rights. Although not all employees are shareholders, all are entitled to become shareholders. They vote to select the company's Board of Directors, who in turn elects a CEO. Every associate employee is part of the firm’s governance. Through our products and services we try to involve employees and citizens in decision making as widely as possible.

What has been the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on your activity?

Over the last decade, our group grew internationally and is now operating in 28 countries. We also diversified our products and services. For the past two years, we suffered from the Covid crisis and experienced a growth crisis. Since then, we have been working to refocus on our priorities. Our main objective is to accelerate the digitalisation of our vouchers, because we think that digitalisation can help maintain and diversify our business. This is our core business. We are adapting our production tool to the technological evolution of the market and above all to the demand of our customers. We are building digital payment solutions that are easy to manage, distribute and track, in order to ensure that they hit their target+: help the target population, for the targeted need at the right time.

How do your values influence decision-making? What are your future projects?

Our values are the core of our activity. We put people at the centre, which means that we push for co-operation rather than competition; we want each of our actions to have a positive impact on the economy, on the environment and society as a whole. These are the principles that we spread in the 28 countries where we operate. We believe that we have more impact working with others: we collaborate with a wide range of other social economy players but also, more recently, with start-ups. We experience new ways of working and innovating to complete our service offering for the common good.

We have many projects: refocusing on Europe, acquiring digital native start-ups, developing new solutions around sustainable mobility, new services associated with restaurant vouchers, whose market continues to grow, multi-benefits, etc. More importantly, our commitment to the common good leads us to rebuild our corporate and business strategy around corporate social responsibility (CSR). In 2021, we established an unprecedented CSR strategic and operational steering committee to make sure the board of directors, the CEO and COO and every Direction in France and globally work together on this topic.

Visit the Up group website

To learn more about these topics, check out the OECD’s work on the social economy and the recent paper, Social vouchers: Innovative tools for social inclusion and local development.

*This interview was conducted with Anne Kjær Bathel in the framework of the OECD’s Local Development Forum. The opinions and arguments expressed herein are those of the interviewee and do not necessarily reflect the official views of the OECD or its member countries.