Speaking at the Building Societies Annual Conference today (8th May), Muna Yassin MBE, CEO of Rooted Finance, called out a poll result calling for greater financial education to support financial inclusion as “low-hanging fruit.”
Yassin explained that this answer risked forgetting that those in financial difficulty often “know where every penny is going” and do not need help understanding how to budget – instead, they need the awareness of and access to products and options that will support them.
Oliver Morley CBE, chief executive at the Money & Pensions Service (MAPS) agreed that product guidance should be a focus for the industry.
Richard Fox, head of UK public policy at Schroders, added that a focus on the need for greater financial education could, in fact, be damaging to progress.
He explained that the idea that increased financial education and awareness “takes time,” and can often be seen as someone else’s remit, means that industry stakeholders ultimately delay their own efforts to improve current systems.
Kate Pender, chief executive at Fair4All Finance, added that people facing financial issues – such as those experiencing financial abuse, for example – should be given a level of forbearance that is not currently the norm.
Pender called for greater regulatory and affordability flexibility, allowing lenders to take a customer’s track record into account, for example when they are searching for forbearance or debt consolidation following a financial shock, but have a strong existing record.
For Yassin, part of addressing financial inclusion is in accepting that Black and minority ethnic people are vastly more affected by financial hardship, and have less access to support systems.
In the first instance, she called for the de-aggregation of data around ethnicity, and a move away from treating non-White ethnic groups as a monolith.
