September activity update
We continue to make good progress on all workstreams connected to our first focus area; affordable credit, please read on for the latest progress.
Scaling affordable credit pilot
Over the summer our due diligence team have completed visits to each of the five organisations participating in our pilot scale up programme. We then brought together the five providers at a workshop in Leeds to share feedback and recommendations, and to start pulling out areas of best practice and common concern.
These insights will shape the next steps for the scale up programme and the support we offer each of the participating organisations. They are also being fed into our Theory of Change for the affordable credit sector.
Developing a Theory of Change for the affordable credit sector
Our work to develop a Theory of Change for all those working in the Affordable Credit Sector has three phases;
- Workshop with the foundations, research organisations and statutory bodies operating in the affordable credit space facilitated by Aleron, our consulting partner on this work. From this, they drew together an updated Theory of Change which was circulated to attendees of the workshop to get further feedback.
- Workshop with some affordable credit lenders (in this instance our pilot organisations) to test and refine the work.
- The final phase of this project, which is pending, will be engagement with consumers to ensure that the consumer voice is strong and guides all our work.
Data and credit scoring for consumers in vulnerable circumstances
We were commissioned by the government’s Financial Inclusion Policy Forum to lead a sub-group in reviewing whether increased data sharing could improve the ability of vulnerable consumers to access affordable credit. Since July we’ve met with more than 30 stakeholders across government, industry, civil society and the affordable credit sector.
We will continue to meet with credit unions and CDFIs to learn more about how they make lending decisions and to assess their infrastructure and capacity to take advantage of new data sources. We are also organising further meetings with mainstream lenders to determine what would encourage them to make use of alternative credit data sources.
This work will conclude on 7 October when we present our findings back to HMT.