MorganAsh has warned that those firms that haven’t integrated technology to complete essential vulnerability assessments run the risk of missing significant vulnerabilities among their clients.

Feedback from users of the MorganAsh Resilience System (MARS) has revealed that firms are not only getting to know their customers better – including long-term clients, but discovering vulnerabilities which they previously knew nothing about.

MorganAsh said vulnerability assessments have helped identify information that many people may not volunteer face-to-face, at least spontaneously, and can be hard questions for advisers to ask. In addition, assessments have helped uncover invisible vulnerabilities that advisers wouldn’t normally assume people have, the firm said.

Andrew Gething (pictured), managing director of MorganAsh, added: “You can know someone really well and yet still not know something important about them. Many material vulnerabilities aren’t apparent, aren’t volunteered and aren’t something you’d casually ask about. We often say that, like wealth, vulnerabilities aren’t binary. People aren’t just either rich or poor. In the same way, you don’t either know everything about someone, or know nothing.

“If there’s one consistent piece of feedback we get from customers, it is that they uncover significant vulnerabilities from consumers they have known for years. You can know someone well, but you can’t know everything. It’s no reflection whatsoever on an adviser or their relationship with a client. It’s normal. But it’s the gap that products like MARS and its objective vulnerability assessment are designed to fill.”

There is also fear that customers don’t like to talk about their vulnerabilities, but Gething says that this isn’t upheld in the real world.

“People are less happy talking about their finances,” said Gething, “we get very little push-back with our vulnerability assessments.

“With the right questions, specialist vulnerability knowledge and a lot of time, you could get similar results from a manual approach. But that’s the whole point of technology. It’s there to make light work of big tasks and lets you find things you wouldn’t otherwise have seen. We need smart tech to get consumer vulnerability right and to help meet the requirements of Consumer Duty.”