MorganAsh has launched a calculator designed to help financial services firms gauge how many vulnerable customers they may have across their books.
The tool is aimed at a longstanding gap between the number of vulnerable customers firms are identifying and the higher levels suggested by wider industry research.
According to MorganAsh, many firms continue to identify vulnerable customers only in single-digit percentages, despite the FCA’s Financial Lives survey indicating that around half of customers may meet the definition of vulnerability.
The firm said this can leave businesses understating the scale of support required and allocating too few resources to deal with the issue properly.
The calculator uses established research into common characteristics associated with vulnerability to provide a broad estimate of how vulnerability may be distributed across a customer base.
Users move a slider to reflect the number of customers they have, with the tool then indicating how customers may fall into around 20 of the most common vulnerability cohorts.
MorganAsh said that, for example, a firm with 1,000 customers is likely to have around 440 customers who will not understand detailed financial information.
The firm said the output is intended as a statistical guide rather than a precise measurement, with the aim of helping businesses plan staffing, systems and support more realistically.
The launch comes as the FCA continues to press firms to take a proactive approach to identifying vulnerability rather than relying on customers to disclose issues themselves.
Andrew Gething, managing director of MorganAsh, said: “The FCA has repeatedly identified that firms underestimate how many of their customers are vulnerable, often by a significant margin.
“The reality is that customer vulnerability is far more prevalent than many firms consider or expect.
“The aim of our calculator is not to provide an exhaustive scientific result, but a statistical indicator of how many customers are vulnerable and in what ways.”
He added: “Insight is only the first step. Once firms have some indication of the scale of vulnerability, the focus must shift to managing customer vulnerability and putting the necessary processes in place to identify, monitor, support and report on vulnerability in a consistent and objective way.
“Recent guidance from the CII has set out a clear blueprint of what good looks like when it comes to IT systems, classification and data infrastructure, helping firms embed structured and fully auditable processes.”
MorganAsh said its wider MorganAsh Resilience System, known as MARS, is designed to help firms identify and monitor vulnerable customers in line with Consumer Duty requirements.
The platform is used across financial services and the utilities sector and can operate either as a standalone system or through API integration with other platforms.
