Tuesday 13th January 2009, 10:31Vision into Reality: Financial AdviceThe FSA announced their regional pilots recently to provide generic financial advice (Money Guidance) to support people to manage their financial situation. For me, it is the beginning of a large scale new part of our business. We have been running a smaller prototype for a while, having put considerable effort into a review by a chap called Thoresen which set out a government strategy for supporting people in the UK to make the most of the money they have.
Before that we had helped vulnerable DWP clients open bank accounts to receive their benefit and state pension payments electronically. But our journey on this started seriously 7 years ago. We recognized that many of the people we dealt with had challenges in managing their finances. Jon Trigg – one of our team – saw the potential for A4e to develop a relevant offer.
Our vision to tackle poverty and debt in particular began to form. We explored poverty and debt in the countries where we work now – UK, Israel, France, Germany and Poland – and in those countries where we are developing new services – India, South Africa and the US. We looked at working poverty and debt/financial issues for people out of work. In South Africa we found a like-minded bank – Capitec – who helped us shape our thoughts and ideas on banking for people in poverty.
There was lots of challenge around our Board table – what had we to offer? There was skepticism internally – what could we do? But people like Andy, Chris, Liton and Andy (to name but a few) began to bring this vision to life. Several years on, the UK is on the verge of having one of the most important public services to tackle poverty and develop a modern social policy and welfare state. I have argued for the last 5 years that poverty is one of the key areas we have not yet developed a coherent set of policy and public services for – this is just the beginning.
We will need to work in partnership – with other suppliers, with the financial sector, with credit agencies and with parts of government. There was a load of tosh in the papers recently about the reform of the Social Fund in the UK. No-one is proposing making the poorest people in society worse off. We are in dire need of new ideas to stop encouraging dependency – we need to help people make better financial decisions, bring competition in lending to the poorest sectors of society to reduce the ludicrously high and non-transparent interest rates. We need to help people have better financial options not continually borrow without changing behaviours. And of course we need an emergency, safety net – that never has been, nor should be in doubt.
This needs new services – delivered by public, private and third sector organizations. But we need to go further. And quicker. We will get this new pilot service up and going in March in the North West. I have also asked our teams to work with DWP and other partners to explore how we make similar services available through our welfare services around the UK. People will need this service now, over the next 12 months, and we cannot wait for a national roll out. A4e has to find ways to extend this service until the national programmes kick in, and we need to develop a similar model in all countries we work in.
The ethos of the business over the last 20 years has been to go the extra mile. We need to do our utmost to ensure the best of everything we have to offer our customers finds its way into all our services. This is hard. It’s about joined up services in a public service market that has rigid boundaries between departments. It’s what we’re here for. It’s our vision and strategy. Turning the vision into reality. Days where we add another element to that energise me, but there’s always so much more to do….
Back to Mark LovellContact Mark Lovell |
Mark Lovell Archive
|