MorganAsh and PayPlan secure two awards for managing vulnerable customers
In a customer vulnerability first, MorganAsh and PayPlan won two joint awards from the Collaboration Network, for their collaborative work managing vulnerable customers.
The first award was a Special Award – ‘Beyond Compliance - Implementation of Consumer Duty Award’ which recognised that PayPlan and MorganAsh go above and beyond what is required in the Consumer Duty regulations to support vulnerable customers.
PayPlan has architected a robust end-to-end customer journey, including both digital and human-facing processes, which uses MARS (the MorganAsh Resilience System) to help identify customers’ characteristics of vulnerability. Judges were so impressed by the diligence and quality of the approach that the special award was created for the two firms. PayPlan’s approach include the use of technology – MARS – to remove subjectivity from the assessment, training, partnerships with firms which can offer meaningful support to customers – and going beyond simple ‘signposting’.
The second recognition of achievement was the Silver Award – The Vulnerability - Customer Disclosure Award (with PayPlan). It is often wrongly believed that customers will not be willing to disclose information about any vulnerabilities, or that they will feel uncomfortable doing so. This fear is unfounded – as people are less happy taking about their finances than their health and circumstances, and yet firms do this all the time. Indeed, data shows that 92% of PayPlan clients disclose personal circumstances, including job loss, divorce or mental health issues via a MARS assessment. This is way above the level achieved by many firms.
Andrew Gething, managing director of MorganAsh, says he believes that the awards recognised not just success, but partnership. “While MARS is a plug-and-go product, we’re also extremely open to firms who want technology to adapt to their way of working,” says Gething. “We worked with PayPlan extensively to adapt MARS to the way their firm works – it was a great experience – both sides learned a lot, and the end result was far better than either firm could have acheived on its own. This helped to inform quite a few changes to MARS, including more customisable question sets. I don’t believe that any vulnerable customer management product is as flexible as MARS, or a firm as flexible as us. We don’t say – ‘Here’s our software, off you go, we say ‘how does you firm work? How does our software need to work to support you?’ Managing vulnerable customers is a journey, and everyone is at a different point on that journey. It’s not just MARS which gets them there, it’s how firm leverage our experience and twenty-plus years’ experience of working with vulnerable people.”
You can find out more about why PayPlan and MorganASh won these two awards by reading the case study.
