Monzo Staff Weekly Q&A - Vulnerable Customers Team! (#MentalHealthAwarenessWeek Special!)

At risk of sounding like a terrible person - I’m pretty indifferent to pets… I’ve never seen the appeal. :sweat_smile:

Pineapple is a crime against nature. Pepperoni all the way for me!

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Hmmm I suppose it’s okay as long as it’s not on my pizza!

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feel lucky to be doing this job at Monzo. There is a great culture and the rest of the organisation is really supportive of our work. It means we have a lot of freedom to go out of our way to help customers.

The saddest thing for me about debt is that for most people there are a range of amazing solutions out there but you have to get the right advice. It really saddens me when people internalise their debt problems because of feelings of shame or embarrassment as it means they don’t deal with it. I’m working with a group of other like minded people including some MPs on a campaign to get people talking about debt more openly to remove the shame. Much like how mental health is much more openly talked about now than it used to be.

I got really annoyed today about a headline in a paper about someone from reality TV who was “declared bankrupt”. The way it’s used as a badge of shame really annoys me because it’s a great option for some people and people shouldn’t be ashamed if it ever gets to that.

I haven’t really answered your question. But yes it can affect me but at the risk of sounding like I’m a robot I’ve kind of developed a thick skin. For other people we have a lot of mental health support at Monzo and we all have discounted access to apps such as Headspace to help deal with stress.

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Me too! :raised_hands:t2:

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We have a backlog of features here we want to implement to help vulnerable customers and a lot of our general budgeting features are useful anyway. But I’m afraid this is a bit of a cop out as I don’t want to promise specific things we might not deliver.

We are scoping out a self disclosure tool for customers to let us know about any vulnerabilities and how that might affect their relationship with money or Monzo. This is tricky though and needs to be implemented delicately.

I want us to get round to looking at the possibility of implementingthis in the coming year too.

We also need to crack on with third party access and power of attorney accounts too!

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Open banking does present better opportunities to work together in the future. But data sharing information about vulnerable customers is tricky.

For financial difficulties there are simple ways to help make things easier for customers. For example, a customer with a number of creditors may need to do a budget for all of them. But if we do it in the Standard Financial Statement format and allow the customer to export this then they can use it with all creditors.

I really, really want us to implement a version of this in the coming year too help people ensure priority bills are paid such as rent, utilities and council tax. I think the roll-out of universal credit has been a big problem for many people and for many reasons but one is getting used to budgeting monthly. I think this could help there too.

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Thanks for this question! During autism awareness week we released guidance for our customer support team with some handy tips on how to better support our customers with autism, but we are always looking to improve our training and there’s still a way to go.

The FCA with support from the National Autistic Society wrote an excellent guide on everyday banking. The guide adopts simplified terms which I think works well with what we try to do already. To quote Harry’s blog post: ‘finance isn’t as complex as banks make it sound.’

We try to use clear, simple language whenever we can and we try to design with this in mind. Features like in-app chat, targets and summary help make the banking experience more accessible for a person with autism but there’s lots more we could do. If you have any suggestions, feel free to share them!

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Yes, but I like tortoises more :turtle::turtle: I have two of them!

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Great question. We need regulatory permissions to give debt advice and we don’t have those! So you are right - especially for me as a former debt adviser sometimes I really want to tell people what to do. It’s easy to avoid giving debt advice though as we can just refer people to sources of advice.

There are amazing organisations out there such as National Debtline, PayPlan and Stepchange who we can refer customers to. We need to improve the referral process to make the transfer of a customer to them more seamless though.

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Veggie supreme always (but no mushrooms! :mushroom:) Pineapple on pizza is awesome though. Pineapple on everything! :pineapple:

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Any organisation that doesn’t read and use the FCAs Occasional Paper on Consumer Vulnerability is missing a trick. It’s amazing and is such a useful guide when setting up policies and procedures to help vulnerable customers.

We train our COps to identify the signs of vulnerability from conversational triggers (e.g. trouble communicating, references to carers or a divorce) or from transactional data (e.g. move from salary to disability benefits, potential victim of scam etc).

Then it gets more tricky because it involves a lot of judgement as to whether you should have a conversation and we have general guidance (e,g using the TEXAS procedure or CARERS drills) which are contained in the FCA paper.

For more common specific scenarios we build out guidance or training. We’ve had many successful cases where staff have decided to initiate a conversation about gambling as a problem for example, based on the transactional data. But we’ve also had one example where we tried to initiate a conversation and the customer did not like it at all. We are happy to take little, well thought out risks on opening up conversations if the benefits of what we are doing massively outweigh any potential negative impacts.

We have our team accessible too, so when a COp wants advice and support they get help from our VC staff in real-time. We will take over the conversation if it gets particularly tricky but our COps are amazing and pretty much always deal with things themselves.

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Dan actually wrote this reply but I’m answering on his behalf today because he is moving to Cardiff as we speak! He is in a car right now with more boxes than it can hold :package:

To answer your question:
It is! Natalie, Chris and I were all COps before moving over to this team. We’re our own team under the beautiful, all-inclusive COppy umbrella.

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Thanks Stuart!

I’ll take a look at the link :slight_smile:

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This would be great :+1:
I’ve been stuck with a maxed out overdraft for years and I’m terrified to contact the bank to get help as I’ve heard horror stories of people having to pay it all back within 30 days. Clawing my way slowly out of it now but if this was an option with my main account I’d defiantly have considered it

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Welcome to Wales Dan! Cardiff is a great city! (Not biased because I live in Wales or anything… :eyes: )
Hope you enjoy it here!

Thanks for answering on his behalf @natalieledward :slight_smile:

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The number varies quite a bit, but last month we saw 90 escalations.

I’d say we see lots of people escalated to us due to mental health, gambling addiction and communication issues but vulnerability is very complex and so it’s not always this clear cut.

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Dan’s answer:
It can vary a lot! We work mostly behind the scenes, helping the amazing people on the frontline when queries get tricky. We quite like having a ‘no such thing as a stupid question’ rule, so that everyone can grab us whenever they’re worried about something. The definition of a vulnerable customer is so broad, and there can be so many people that need a bit of extra support. But most of our time is spent with customers in financial difficulties, with gambling addiction, and with mental health issues.

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Dan’s answer:
Cats are excellent. We have a wonderful old man named Sylvester at my parent’s house. The previous owners moved out but he refused to, so now he lives on the sofa there and invites his fifteen aggressive cat friends over every night. Top man. (in spoiler tag thing) But I like dogs more - don’t tell Beth

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Dan’s answer:
Vegan everything, pineapple everywhere. Pineapple on pizza is the absolute greatest thing.

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