‘They just pound you’
We’re using these questions to design a service that helps people find their way out of debt, using early, sensitive interventions.
Last week, we interviewed one man who receives multiple texts every week from debt collection agencies. It’s been that way for years.
‘They just pound you, don’t they?’ he said. ‘I don’t know how they get my number. They offer to reduce payments but I can’t afford them. I just ignore them.’
Yet the FCA expects financial services firms to enter into a dialogue with people just like this – and to show a positive outcome.
In our prototype, the man’s bank invited him to disclose information about his situation – not just his debt, but things that might be affecting how he managed his finances.
Some people will run a mile at the very idea. And if you’d heard this man describe his life experience you might have expected him to be one of them. But it wasn’t as straightforward as that.
Rather than feeling ‘pounded’, he found the experience unexpectedly helpful.
Though he had expected to be pressured into an unrealistic commitment, he said the suggested monthly repayment felt transparent and personalised because it was based on accurate information from his bank account (using an Open Banking service). And it showed that it understood his world: ‘you don’t get paid regular each month’.
That income and expenditure assessment also gave him something unexpectedly valuable – a breakdown of his monthly spending, which he could use to think about how and where he spends his money.
It built trust. It made him think that the journey, and the bank, was on his side. ‘If they’ve done that for me, they might be able to help with other debts.’
(Just because someone’s been in debt for a long time, it doesn’t mean they want to stay there.)
