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Make vulnerability visible: A new standard for compliance and customer care

Written by Admin | Apr 9, 2025 1:26:32 PM

As regulatory expectations rise, financial services firms face a growing challenge: moving beyond complaint resolution to proactively identifying and mitigating customer harm. The FCA now expects firms to demonstrate their ability to spot signs of vulnerability before issues escalate.

With the latest release of our vulnerability labels, we’re extending our Risk & Compliance solution to help firms surface, segment, and respond to vulnerability risk with greater clarity and speed.

Why visibility matters

The FCA's recently published "Delivering good outcomes for customers in vulnerable circumstances – good practice and areas for improvement"  revealed that many firms continue to rely on narrow, surface-level data to monitor vulnerable customers. While 79% of firms track complaints and 78% use staff feedback, only 49% draw on direct customer feedback from vulnerable individuals, and just 36% use behavioural insights. This lack of breadth and granularity makes it difficult to identify harm early or track outcomes effectively.

That matters, because vulnerability signals often appear in unstructured feedback that traditional systems can't process:

  • Complaints referencing financial distress
  • Call centre transcripts highlighting health or life events
  • Social media and review feedback disclosing exclusion or unmet needs

Without the means to structure this data, vulnerability can remain hidden and unaddressed.

Our vulnerability label set

Built to help firms meet regulatory and ethical standards, our new label set identifies vulnerability across four dimensions:

  • Economic – e.g., financial instability or over-indebtedness
  • Physical – e.g., disability, mobility limitations or hazardous/unsafe living conditions
  • Psychological – e.g., mental health or cognitive challenges
  • Social – e.g., discrimination or marginalisation

How it works

Our vulnerability labels are applied to unstructured customer feedback—such as complaints, surveys, Trustpilot reviews, and social media—using the EQ Engine, which combines machine learning, generative AI, and large-scale human labelling to apply context-specific tags with precision.    Once structured, this intelligence flows directly into Analyse—our insight platform—where it becomes immediately actionable.

In Analyse, teams can:

  • Track vulnerability volumes and trends
  • View sentiment and themes
  • Detect root causes and early warning signs
  • Benchmark outcomes across products, channels and stages of the customer journey

In app visualisation of your vulnerability data

Supporting proactive compliance

Firms need to do more than monitor— they need to act. Our solution enables compliance teams to move from detection to intervention by surfacing the signals that matter most.

With vulnerability insights integrated into your core risk workflows, it's now possible to track exposure, prioritise response, and demonstrate accountability—without adding complexity.

Want to see how vulnerability tracking works in practice?