Case study
Fair4All Finance helping make financial services fairer for everyone
Summary
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. With the cost-of-living crisis having negatively impacted the financial landscape for so many people, Fair4All wanted insights into the needs and behaviours of financially vulnerable people to better support them in their work.
Company size
50
Industry
Financial Services
Products used
Challenge
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.
Understand customers in vulnerable financial circumstances
Develop strategies to make financial services more accessible
Solution
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.
Results
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.
The findings will enable Fair4All Finance to share insights in three different ways, with credit unions and community finance providers, mainstreams banks and internally.
