Angela Clements blogs about how ethical credit alternatives such as Fair for You will benefit not just those on low incomes, but everyone
I have lived and worked in Birmingham all my adult life, the last 10 years almost exclusively providing affordable credit as an alternative to high cost credit, firstly running a credit union and then Fair for You.
It’s a generalisation but on the whole our customers are women, in lower income households, with some caring obligation and in part-time work. ‘Managing mums’ is a term that has been coined in recent months. I would say these women are sassy, switched on, entrepreneurial, hard working, and not really managing very well at all. Or at least they are until something goes wrong when they need access to fair, affordable and well- designed credit.
I have sat in rooms over the last 10 years, hearing my customers talk about the need for financial education, budgeting and debt advice. I felt strongly throughout those years that they need better alternatives to the credit options that are currently available.
In 2014, a group of us spent hours listening to mums of younger children in Northfield, Birmingham tell us very frankly and openly about their experience with high cost credit. I went in there thinking I knew what Fair for You would look like, and I came out knowing what it had to look like.
Some amazing people and organisations have backed our work over the last three years, but we never lost sight of what we were told, and we delivered what those people needed.
High cost credit isn’t just expensive – all versions of high cost credit have that in common. But the other common trait is that it is designed for the benefit of the lender, and to take maximum extraction from the customers’ financial household.
The term the ‘poverty premium’ is used to describe the additional costs low income households – in other words those who have less consumer power – have when purchasing essential goods and services. Whilst the amount of that premium fluctuates in various situations, it is always consistent that the lion’s share is made up of high cost credit i.e. the additional cost of using credit when faced with emergencies. And the same households need credit when hit by emergencies, as they have less insulation and resilience to what to other people would be relatively minor emergencies. There seems little point in measures to address poverty in the UK, without removing the poverty premium.
On 22 March we release the third social impact report relating to the work of Fair for You, a national challenger to high cost credit that directly responds to all of the needs we identified in our research. Now I don’t just have the voices of the mums who came to all of the sessions we ran, I have thousands of voices of customers whose financial situation has been changed because they have access to an alternative. They prove every day, that they don’t need education and advice, they need better alternatives.
Fair for You is on line, available seven days a week, customer focused and a modern solution that uses multi-media communications including social media. Put simply, credit delivered with dignity and respect, designed to meet the lives of mums – and anyone else – who juggles, struggles and are not really managing at all.
And our customers love it – we are so proud to be rated among the highest financial services in the UK according to Trustpilot.
Please check us out and if you can support our work and our drive to change the way we lend to lower income households, then we would love to talk to you.
Angela Clements is the CEO of Fair for You
Read Centre for Responsible Credit’s Social Impact Report