Financial services firms are failing to identify customers experiencing domestic and economic abuse and leaving many without appropriate support, vulnerability specialist and support services provider MorganAsh has warned.
New data from the MorganAsh Resilience System (MARS), a tool which helps financial sector workers assess, measure and manage consumer characteristics, reveals that only 22% of customer vulnerability assessments conducted on the platform included questions about domestic abuse.
Many firms omitted the questions altogether when carrying out vulnerability assessments. However, in assessments which included the relevant questions, 5% of consumers disclosed that they were suffering from some form of abuse.
“Many firms are at present opting to not to include coercion or abuse indicators within their vulnerability assessments, for fear of annoying their clients,” said Andrew Gething, managing director of MorganAsh.
“Social stigma on the topic, a finance industry predominantly managed by men, and fear of embarrassing conversations all lead to reluctance within the industry to even start to address the problem.”
The findings point to a systemic gap across the wider financial services sector, MorganAsh said, despite strong trade body and charity guidance including the charity Surviving Economic Abuse.
New guidance recently released by the Chartered Insurance Institute and the Personal Finance Society aims to give firms a practical implementation guide to managing customer vulnerability and focuses on the necessary IT systems, processes and data infrastructure required by firms.
But while some firms have adopted the guidance of charities and trade bodies, “this is mainly restricted to training frontline staff to be more empathetic and pick up the pieces when alerted to abuse – without making material changes,” Gething said.
“There is a need to embed identification, monitoring, support and reporting within firms in the same way as all other vulnerabilities. In truth though, there are still many firms falling short at this stage, lacking the knowledge, technology and data to identify and respond to customer vulnerability more broadly.”
The warning from MorganAsh comes amid growing focus on financial abuse and coercion, including a new nationwide campaign launched by AXA UK, raising awareness of the hidden signs of domestic abuse. The CII has also launched a new guidance paper on economic abuse for general insurance providers, working with SEA to support good practice in the sector and create better outcomes for victim-survivors of economic abuse.
