Match the Cash Limited, trading as Guarantor My Loan and Share My Loan, launched a loan product after using customer vulnerability software from MorganAsh.
The firm trialled the MorganAsh Resilience System (MARS) in mid-2024, aiming to better spot customers with vulnerability issues and to meet Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) Consumer Duty rules.
The trial brought in a vulnerability assessment during onboarding, which most customers completed in a few minutes with high completion rates.
Match the Cash wanted to make sure this did not interrupt their normal sign-up process.
As a result of using MARS, Match the Cash collected extra information, including on consumers’ health and lifestyle.
This allowed them to lend to more people who might previously have been turned down by their standard algorithms, which rely on credit and open banking data.
The company found that in many cases, the new data meant people they would have declined before were now able to be approved.
Meet the Cash now plans to roll out MARS across all operations and use the additional data to further improve lending decisions and design new products.
Andrew Gething (pictured), managing director at MorganAsh, said: “We have always believed that the more information you have on a consumer, the more you understand them – and therefore then the better the chances of matching financial products to their needs.
“This more accurate matching then leads to happier customers and, over time, increased trust, loyalty and commercial benefits.
“It is great to see Match the Cash Limited experience these commercial benefits so quickly, as well as helping those who they could not previously loan to.”
Chris Markland, compliance manager at Guarantor My Loan and Share My Loan, said: “Adopting MARS has been a big win in several areas: for those people we couldn’t previously loan to, we are helping them with their financial difficulties, while the extra information we gain is giving us a strategic advantage over our competitors by being more flexible with our standard lending criteria.
“We have also used MARS data within our product design framework, which helped launch a new loan product at the start of the year.
“With the ongoing cost of living challenges, and impending changes to the benefit system the demand for credit is not diminishing.”
Markland added: “Understanding the personal circumstances is becoming even more important to manage credit risk.”
Rob Johnson, senior business development manager at Policy in Practice, said: “Due to a lack of awareness there are a huge number of consumers who are not claiming the benefits to which they are entitled; the consumer vulnerability assessment is a great way to trigger a check on their benefits entitlement.
“Using software such as MARS makes incorporating an income maximisation check into a customer vulnerability assessment easy for firms to adopt.”
