This webinar explores the need for a consistent approach to communicating customer vulnerabilities.

When people make judgments about another person’s characteristics, those judgments are shaped by personal experience and often reflect unconscious bias—or even prejudice—in vague and imprecise ways. For example, phrases like “slightly deaf” or “seems a bit down” don‘t provide much useful information.

What’s needed is an objective assessment, a structured way to measure identified vulnerability characteristics, and a shared vocabulary to express them. This ensures consistent data that everyone can understand.

In this webinar, we break down these challenges and show how organisations can move beyond subjective descriptions to a robust, objective, and consistent means of communication.

Overview

• The problems with individuals’ subjective decision-making

• Subjective versus objective decisions

• Why consistency is needed

• The need for a common vocabulary, or classification lexicon, that everyone understands

• The difference between recording an individual’s vulnerability characteristics and recording their needs

• Why MARS uses a Resilience Rating—what it is, what it does, and how it works

• Why someone isn’t inherently vulnerable: assessments need to identify characteristics of vulnerability alongside products, as it is the interaction between the two that creates the potential for poor outcomes

• Using digital systems, human agents, and even healthcare professionals to identify and classify vulnerabilities

• Privacy and GDPR implications

• Understanding vulnerabilities within family groups

• Communicating how the compounding effect of multiple issues can create greater vulnerability

• Why consistent classification is vital to ensure meaningful reporting

Guest

Our guest this month is Vanessa Riboloni, Head of Research and Insight at the Chartered Insurance Institute (CII), where she leads research initiatives that support the development of professional standards, good practice, and advocacy across the insurance and financial planning sectors. Vanessa was the driving force behind the CII’s vulnerable customer management guidance, published in November 2026, much of which focuses on the need for structured data underpinned by objective identification and supported by a common vulnerability lexicon.

Next webinar

In our next webinar, scheduled for 23 April, we examine how customers’ vulnerabilities can be managed and monitored over time, particularly across product lifetimes. This includes the role of good, structured data, supported by the objective classification techniques covered in this session.