Fair4All Finance helping make financial services fairer for everyone

About Fair4All Finance

Fair4All Finance is a not-for-profit organisation driving change in financial services to help millions of people in vulnerable circumstances. It works with organisations to increase access to fair and affordable financial products and services across the UK.

Highlights

• Developed a bespoke segmentation to better understand and help the millions of people in financially vulnerable circumstances in the UK
• New segmentation helped to collaborate and deliver more applicable financial products and services to those usually excluded
• Consolidation and blending of data from multiple sources to provide a detailed view on financial situation across the UK

The Challenge: understanding of the financially vulnerable population and their financial needs

Depending on the definition across the industry, up to 21 million people in the UK are thought to be in vulnerable financial circumstances. To fulfil their remit, Fair4All Finance aims to better understand this broad group of people and their different needs.

Most off-the shelf segmentations pull apart the population based on age and affluence. By segmenting this group along more behavioural lines, Fair4All Finance aims to develop strategies and work with the industry to make financial services more applicable and accessible to the financially vulnerable population.

Huge parts of the financial system don’t work for large portions of society. Products and services are designed around people with predictable lives and predictable incomes. There’s a huge chunk of the population that doesn’t work for

– Lauren Peel, Head of Markets, Consumer Insights and Product Design, Fair4All Finance

The Solution: a distinct segmentation that defines consumer groups and their needs

Fair4All Finance partnered with CACI and Trajectory, a research agency, to develop a segmentation solution tailored specifically to Fair4All Finance’s objectives, through consolidating and blending data from multiple sources. The solution made use of Fresco and Ocean to build a segmentation at a UK-wide level.

In order to identify key segments within the financially vulnerable population, a number of statistical methods, including correlation and principal component analyses, were applied to identify core features of importance. These driving variables showed discrimination and relevance across the financially vulnerable population.

The results: creating assets and personas based on the data

Six new segments of financial vulnerability were created using the data and then sized across the UK population to understand the spread of segments across geographies. The iterative process taken to develop the segments, ensured the final solution could be constantly adapted to make sure it was meeting Fair4All Finance’s end goals and aligning with its objectives.

A knowledge sheet was also created, which profiled each segment across more than 900 demographic, lifestyle and attitudinal variables from CACI data and specific behavioural characteristics from the research data, giving detailed insights into the key characteristics of each segment compared to the financially vulnerable population as a whole.

This allows the segmentation to be truly actionable as any organisation using it can delve into the detail and understandings that will help inform business decisions or product development

– Lauren Peel, Head of Markets, Consumer Insights and Product Design, Fair4All Finance

The Benefits: enabling internal and external insights

The findings will enable Fair4All Finance to share insights in three different ways, with credit unions and community finance providers, mainstreams banks and internally.

It will help us be more effective in the work that we do. With a better understanding of who the customers are and what the customers’ needs are, we’ll be able to better tailor and prioritise activity that needs to happen

– Lauren Peel, Head of Markets, Consumer Insights and Product Design, Fair4All Finance

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