There's a risk that people in vulnerable circumstances could fall through the cracks, which is why financial services needs to do more to help Britons, the head of Phoenix Group's customer vulnerability has warned.
Riffat Tufail, who leads a team of 10, told FT Adviser it was imperative that financial services organisations and advisers helped people understand their options, make financial decisions and guide them through vulnerable situations and circumstances.
She hailed consumer duty as focusing the collective minds on vulnerability, and revealed some of the findings from recent work Phoenix Group has done to explore vulnerability and consumer psychology around finances.
FT Adviser: How has consumer duty helped focus our minds on vulnerable customers?
Riffat Tufail, head of customer vulnerability at Phoenix Group: "For us, consumer duty was just a continuation of the work and the journey that we have been on since 2018, 2019.
But we believe consumer duty raises the bar again, and helpfully.
It has created the right focus across financial services and given us this common language to understand what are good outcomes, and what is the risk of harm.
The challenge now is to make sure we tailor and adapt our processes and services, to make sure that if someone is in a vulnerable circumstances, they are getting the best possible outcome.
Consumer duty has galvanised a lot of the energy and the focus on the market on 'service', which is very much at the heart of what advisers are doing anyway.
Our job is now to make that positive outcome and value tangible for the customer, whether or not they are vulnerable."
FTA: Talk to us about some of the research you are doing, and why?
RT: We are very much insight led.
Every year for the past three years we have done research with customers right across the brands to understand the scale and the nature and the types of vulnerabilities they are being challenged with.
We ask them about their experiences and their expectations.
A lot of the time it is not bell and whistles - they just want us to embed in our processes their need for empathy, for flexibility, or for that human touch, and this is very much at the core of what we are designing.
We are in a journey now to share our learnings with other firms and we want to hear from others, too. We want to talk with the third sector, advisers and other financial services firms and learn from them.
I have this utopia I would like to get to, where we can create a baseline for anyone in vulnerable circumstances, which is formed from where we have excelled in different areas.
We have been holding a series of discussions. For example, we had an internal summit for the top 50 leaders in our business to get them used to the new strategy and framework. Then we extended this to the Scottish financial partnerships through Scottish Financial Enterprise.
