This update comes at a difficult time for households across the country, especially those already in vulnerable circumstances and as the cost of living continues to grow the outlook for many is bleak. This reaffirms how important the work we’re all doing to increase access to fair and affordable products and services is.
- Dormant Assets Scheme – We’re pleased that financial inclusion will remain a named cause of the expanded Dormant Assets Scheme. In the meantime, we’ve been asked to deliver an additional £45m from the existing scheme to tackle the cost of living – Find out more in the update.
- Financial Inclusion Plan – We’ll be publishing a plan that documents how the whole sector can collectively and permanently improve the way financial services support customers in vulnerable circumstances in the UK. There’s more on this in our update.
- Investing to grow provision through community finance – Last quarter we deployed £4.3m as part of our mission to increase the availability of affordable credit. We launched a pilot with My Community Bank to see small value loans appear on price comparison websites and have been working with the community finance sector to raise awareness of credit unions and CDFIs.
- An update on our research projects– We recently published our Banking Response to Covid-19 report, and our Payroll and Deductions lending reports.
- Segmentation model – Over 150 organisations have already downloaded our segmentation toolkit. We’ll be holding a webinar in the coming weeks looking at some updated insights from our latest consumer survey– we’ll share more information about this in the coming weeks.
