The UK Cards Association (UKCA) and the Finance & Leasing Association (FLA) have co-published a guide for lending to vulnerable customers, together with a data related report. The guide is designed to help finance providers identify and support customers in vulnerable situations when applying for credit, whether face-to-face, over the phone, online or through an intermediary.

The guide has been developed using the experiences of 1,666 staff across 18 finance providers to address the issues they face when managing credit applications from vulnerable customers. The guide focusses on supporting customers with a mental capacity limitation that may affect their decision-making abilities, although the guide also recognises that customers can experience other forms of decision-making difficulty. A new protocol – BRUCE – has been designed to help staff look for clues in a customer’s behaviour or speech which could indicate a problem with remembering, understanding, communicating or evaluating the credit options being discussed, and the customer making a decision about entering into a credit agreement.

View New industry guide on lending to vulnerable customers, 14 June 2017