We know that the Covid pandemic has hit the financial resilience of our clients hard (see our work here). We know as well that this picture is reflected across the country the Money Advice & Pension Service estimating that the need for debt advice will increase by over 1 million during year, and FCA noting that nearly 27.7m adults in the UK are potentially financially vulnerable.
The first step in building in your financial resilience is to get the right advice. However, finding and getting the right type of advice is complicated. There are hundreds of different websites, organisations and services – often confusing and full of jargon.
To address this problem we’ve worked with Impact Edit (part of Studio Graphene) to build an easy to use Online Advice Tool to help you navigate the complex advice system.
The tool is now live and ready to use and by asking a few simple questions we can help you find the right type of advice, in the way you need, from the right organisations. We’ll also send you a referral plan so you have a record of what we’ve advised and freedom to review it in your own time.
One of the first referral partners we’ve worked with is InBest and rather than refer you benefits support we’ve put a Benefits Calculator on our website. The calculator will give you get a free and impartial assessment of all the benefits you are entitled to and what you have to do to claim them.
We know that many of our clients underclaim benefits and many more aren’t even aware of what they could claim. Hopefully this tool will help people get the money they’re entitled to.
Over time we want to continue to develop this service by building closer links to the referral organisations and link users directly to them, as well explore opportunities for using open banking and other data sources to improve the user experience and quality of the advice given.
The tool represents a real cross collaboration in Fair Finance with members of our debt advice service in Fair Money Advice contributing their knowledge and insights in helping to design something useful and relevant for our clients.
We want to thank Shift Design who helped us in developing the tool, its decision logic and testing the user experience. Through the process of development, we really understood how underdeveloped the money management sector is, the difficulty in developing a useful referral network; and how much effort is being duplicated.
Finally we are grateful to J P Morgan Chase Foundation who supported us in researching, designing, testing and developing this tool
Fair Finance has been set up to tackle financial exclusion and build financial resilience. We have always been more than a loans or advice organisation, we are focused on improving our client’s financial wellbeing. We are constantly looking for ways to serve our customers better and have a positive impact on their lives.
This tool, alongside our other services, represents just one part of that vision. If you have ideas on how we can improve, want to partner to make it better or help us get to more people please do let us know and contact us directly: Info@fairfinance.org.uk. We want to hear from you
