Vulnerable customer calculator

How many customers can you expect to be vulnerable and in what way?

Our vulnerable customer calculator enables you to estimate the number and types of vulnerable customers you have, based on known percentages of common vulnerabilities.

The vulnerable customer calculator lets you input the number of customers you have, and will estimate how many of these are vulnerable, and in what way. It’s not perfect, it’s an indication, because people are people and no group of any given size are the same. But – as an example – say you have 1,000 customers, it is likely that about 440 of them may not understand detailed financial information. New users of MARS often comment that they have had a customer for many years and didn’t know they had a newly discovered vulnerability.

Instructions

Use the slider below to adjust the number of customers to suit your firm. You will see an expected average number of people with each characteristic of vulnerability.

Vulnerable customer calculator

Range: 50 to 10,000

How many vulnerable customers have you got? 

According to the FCA’s Financial Lives survey, around half of all people are vulnerable at any one time. Live data across all MARS customers tallies with this. And yet, many firms struggle to identity anywhere near this amount.

While the 50% estimation may seem high, you only need to look at the statistics behind some common vulnerabilities to accept its accuracy.

Why the disconnect? 

And yet, many firms feel that not many of their customers are vulnerable. Why? Usually, they just haven’t asked; many vulnerabilities aren’t visible, or perhaps evident on a digital journey.  

See for yourself 

Armed with these estimates, firms should be able to create strategies for the better identification of vulnerable customers.

Calculations and assumptions 

  • The percentages of each vulnerability come from research from a charity in that area. We recognise that for many of these, different research can deliver different results. But all of the percentages chosen come from publicly available and generally recognised research or studies.

  • Why is there no total? Because people can have more than one vulnerability, a simple sum can create a total greater than the population size. Therefore, an estimate would be needed (one which factored in the average number of vulnerabilities per person) to realise this more accurately. And we don’t really need it, because we know that around half of any group of people will be vulnerable in some way.

  • This is not an exhaustive list of vulnerabilities. There are many more, this calculator is simple to provide estimates of some of the most common.  

Sources 

It’s fair to say that different sources may quote slightly different percentages for some of these vulnerabilities. In all instances we have used a leading source, or percentages from an aligned research study or charity. Statistics may vary based on age, gender or socioeconomic status; we try to take an intelligent average. We also try to use UK sources where available.  

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