#debt-advice

Next steps: working with partners to inform our future development

Vikki Brownridge, Director of Charity Development at StepChange Debt CharityOver the summer, we ran a three-month consultation with our partner organisations to establish how we can best work together to tackle problem debt and ensure more people get the support they need. This week, we held an event in London to share their feedback, and explore our next steps together.As demand for debt advice increases, it’s more vital than ever before that organisations work together to support the millions of people experiencing problem debt in the UK.On November 20, at our ‘Stepping Forward Together: Bigger, Bolder, Better’ event, we invited representatives from the organisations we work with to an event to share the feedback they gave us over the three-month consultation period, and explore how this will inform the charity’s development.Our guest speakersWe were delighted to welcome Soulla Kyriacou of a blueprint for better business, who gave an insightful keynote speech on the importance of fairness in business and explored her organisation’s five principles of a purpose-driven business. Gareth McNab of Open Banking for Good gave an entertaining presentation on how open banking technology can be used to help people in financial difficulty. Later in the day, we also heard from Amy, a StepChange client who shared her experience of problem debt and finding a solution in a powerful and moving speech.At the event we announced a number of developments which will be launched in Q1 2020 that have been designed to improve outcomes for clients and to make it easier for our partners to work with us to help them. These include ways to reach people earlier to prevent them from falling into problem debt, solutions to improve accessibility to our services and to deliver increased engagement, and new MI data that we will be sharing with our partners, all of which will deliver an improved client journey and better outcomes.We’d like to say a huge thank you to all partners who provided feedback throughout the consultation either at our workshop and roundtable events, or through our online survey.The suggestions we have received have been invaluable in informing our development, and it’s incredibly important that we continue to work with our partners in a collaborative way to tackle problem debt in the UK.If you’d like to work with us more closely in 2020, or if you’d like to find out more about becoming one, visit our website.

Exposing the ‘clone’ firms imitating genuine debt advice organisations

By Richard Lane, Director of External AffairsStepChange is used to fighting battles - we’ve been doing it for years. We fight to get individuals a fairer deal, to support our clients where others have failed, and to try and make the changes needed to create a society free from problem debt.But there’s one battle which we really shouldn’t have to be fighting.Does something look off about this website?That’s because despite using “Steps to change your debt problems” and calling the website “Step Debt Support,” this website has nothing to do with StepChange.The same is true of 48 other websites we’ve had to work to take down this year — steptochange, stepdebtchange, stepdebtsupport, stepchanged, stepschange and many other varieties of our name we’ve seen.For many searching for debt advice, these impostors are the first thing they see.Every one of these has at one time appeared above the official StepChange website in Google’s search results. This means that for many searching for debt advice, these impostors are the first thing they see.This isn’t just happening to StepChange either. Many of our partners across the sector have been experiencing these issues too.Google do comply with our requests to have these adverts taken down. And they often do come down relatively quickly. But there is absolutely nothing to stop these companies from putting up another advert. And another. And another.Why is this a problem?The point at which an individual seeks debt advice is incredibly important. Our clients are often in desperate need of help — many are vulnerable — but these companies are steering people away from the impartial advice they need for financial gain.When an individual engages with these impostors, they’re being directed away from the not-for-profit, comprehensive debt advice services they’re seeking and towards profit-making firms whose motivation is the commission they make when people get onto certain solutions.But because they’re already in a complex and overwhelming situation, many don’t question these impostors, and end up taking up debt solutions which don’t work out for them. A few months later, and they finally reach the real StepChange, often with bigger debts than before.It’s become a constant game of cat and mouse that has been going on for far too long, so we’ve decided to act.For individuals to face this when they’re often at their most vulnerable is devastating. It should not be happening. It’s become a constant game of cat and mouse that has been going on for far too long, so we’ve decided to act.Examples of some of the adverts imitating StepChangeWe’ve decided to actIn the short term, we’ll continue to challenge and take down firms who are using our likeness. To do this, we’re going to work with debt advice services across the industry, as well as partners such as the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) to help identify and take down these illegitimate copycats as and when they spring up.We’d also like to work with Google and other search engines to figure out how we can improve their mechanisms for taking down impersonations. We’ve seen search engines remove payday lenders from paid search results in the past, so a precedent exists to suggest we can find an approach that works.In the long term, we need to see stricter regulation that stops these clone firms from taking advantage of people in difficult situations. For this to happen we need to see the Treasury work with the FCA to consider the case for making introducing debt management and debt solutions a regulated activity. This will require legislation, so it’s not going to happen overnight, but we’re confident we can get it done.For the moment though, we as an organisation, as well as friends and partners across the industry, are going to have to work together to raise awareness of these kinds of websites and try to guide those who need debt advice to the right places safely.If we work together, it’s a battle we can win.Exposing the ‘clone’ firms imitating genuine debt advice organisations was originally published in StepChange Debt Charity on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Working together to meet the demand for debt advice

A partnership approach is what will ultimately help us make inroads into the nation’s debt problems. How do we work with our partners in practice?By Vikki Brownridge, Director of Charity DevelopmentPhil Andrew, StepChange CEO speaking at Stepping Forward: TogetherWe’re enormously grateful for the funding that many partners provide which supports and underpins our ability to operate, and in turn helps hundreds of thousands of people to deal with their problem debt.One of the things we do is to make sure that our creditor and funding partners are involved in our development, and last week we held an event in Leeds to talk about our strategic direction, kick-off a 3 month consultation with them and to discuss some of our current and forthcoming ways of working projects.This reflects the collaborative approach we want to adopt, both with our partners and the wider sector, but also the need to recognise the pressing underlying scale of demand for debt advice. Addressing the market demand vs supply issue cannot be done in isolation, it will require a significant collective effort. These means we must all step up, together.Stepping Forward: TogetherThe event, ‘Stepping forward together: Gearing up for growth’, marks the start of a three-month consultation period with our partners to work together to help even more people struggling with problem debt.Our CEO Phil Andrew kicked off the day with an update on our four-year strategy, an overview of the funding issues facing the sector, and why we needed to transform the way we work, to maximise effectiveness and to add value to our clients and our funders.“ As a full service debt advice charity, giving people financial advice and getting them through debt advice where appropriate, we helped more people than ever before in 2018 — helping over 650,000 people, and completing over 306,000 debt advice sessions. It is deeply disturbing that we’re servicing such a high percentage of the UK population.”Caroline Siarkiewicz, Acting Chief Executive of the Money and Pensions Service (MaPS) led the next session, talking us through their vision, strategic goals and insights into the current debt advice landscape.Our transformational journeyAndrew Burgess, Head of Client Journey talking us through transformationAndrew Burgess, our Head of Client Journey, talked us through the process we’ve been on to transform our ways of working and development of our new debt advice and customer management system. As he explained:“Growth comes at a cost… Our decision to take a strategic review of change was not about a system upgrade, or even a process change — it was a change to our basic ways of working. We were clear from the outset that we wanted to put users at the heart of this change. That means change to the advice system, how we interact with clients, the way our teams are structured, and the types of work we do, as well as how we measure success.”Kicking off the partner consultationThe afternoon session featured collaborative working groups.During the working groups there was plenty of lively discussion, with representatives from around the charity hosting the groups discussing questions like:How can creditors refer people beginning to experience financial difficulty but before they’re in problem debt?What initiatives could we work on together to underpin responsible credit use?How can we work together on persistent credit card debt to get customers to take action?What kinds of technology might usefully help us to best deliver debt advice to vulnerable clients?A huge thank you to the representatives of all our partner organisations who attended the event and engaged so enthusiastically in the discussion groups. Your support and suggestions are incredibly valuable to us and will help us continue to work towards reducing the harm of problem debt, deliver high-quality advice and early intervention services to all people who need them.In November we’ll be hosting a follow-up event in central London where we’ll share our consultation findings and reflect on what they mean for the charity.In the meantime, we want to hear views from all of our partners. You can have your say and take part in the consultation by emailing your comments or suggestions to our consultation inbox.Vikki Brownridge is Director of Charity Development at StepChange Debt Charity.

What does debt advice achieve? A look at our latest report, ‘Measuring Client Outcomes’

By Josie Warner, Research Insight and Planning OfficerToday we’ve released our latest report ‘Measuring Client Outcomes’. I’ve been working closely on this pilot for the past two years (to the day!), and the importance for running this project still resonates as strongly today as it did on day one.This is something completely new for StepChange Debt Charity. The project is essentially a study that looks at what happens to our clients up to 15 months after their first debt advice session.‘Measuring Client Outcomes’ is focused on what happens to clients after debt advice across several areas of their financial situation, taking into account circumstances such as wellbeing and further susceptibility to income shocks.So why does this matter?Ultimately, this helps us gain a better understanding of our clients. We can analyse these results across many different types of client information which we gather at the advice stage, such as demographics, types of debt and recommended solutions. For this first stage we’ve focused on ‘vulnerability’ and ‘client budget’.By gaining a more rounded understanding of our clients, we’ll be able to have a better idea of what actually happens to them and why and how we as a charity can more effectively support them both through our service and our campaigning and influencing work.We obviously want to better support all clients towards becoming less vulnerable to debt in the future, and we particularly want to find out more about those who don’t progress on to managed solutions such as DMPs.What we have done with this project?We set this project up completely from scratch. With support from researchers at the University of Bristol, we developed an analysis framework and questionnaires through which we’d be able to gain and analyse results about how clients are progressing across a number of measures such as wellbeing, financial resilience and progress with their debts.To gather the data, we sent an email invitation to a random sample of clients, asking them to take part in an online survey. We initially emailed clients at three months after advice.Those who completed the first survey were invited to take part in the nine month survey and the process was repeated for the 15 month survey.This isn’t to say the methodology didn’t have its challenges: for example, we typically find older and more engaged clients were more likely to take part.However, it proved to be the most accessible and effective way for a large enough number of our clients to take part. This in turn provided us with a reasonably reliable set of results to analyse.Over time this data will continue to build to create a clearer picture, though we still have work to do to ensure that we’re able to survey some of our harder to reach client groups, either through this methodology or supplementing this research with other methodology types.Ultimately, it’s important for us to know about the outcomes of many different client types.Here’s what we foundThe results in the report are based on the results of 719 clients who completed at least the first three month survey. Some of these clients also went on to complete the nine and 15 month surveys, but the samples for these surveys at the moment is small due to usual drop off in survey completion rates, so we’ve chosen to focus so far on the three month findings.As mentioned previously, we’ll be able to conduct more meaningful analysis when we’ve conducted more surveys gaining data from greater volumes of longer term clients.1. Clients with positive budgets do betterThis won’t be news to those who’ve read the report, but positive budget clients (who have a monthly income already exceeding monthly expenditure) have better outcomes overall than negative budget clients (who have more money going out than coming in).This was expected, however it’s an incredibly strong marker in terms of whether clients are doing better or worse.We’re very hard pressed to find a measure where negative budget clients are doing better than positive budget clients.2. Vulnerable clients aren’t always doing worseI know I’m probably not alone in thinking that ‘vulnerable’ clients (with an additional vulnerability to their financial situation) do worse financially, and for good reason. There’s a lot of evidence even in our own data sets which supports this notion.Last year, our report ‘Breaking the Link’ highlighted that our vulnerable clients are often more likely to be behind on household bills, have stretched budgets, and are often simply at the sharpest end of financial difficulty.However, the data from the three month survey suggests that this isn’t always the case.For example, at three months after debt advice, vulnerable clients were more likely than clients with no recorded vulnerability to report progress on their debt problems. This is particularly the case if they had a positive budget, with 28% of this group saying their debt problem was completely sorted out just three months after debt advice.While this is positive, it does raise more questions than answers for vulnerability and starts to highlight the complexities that lie underneath, particularly when cross-tabulated against budget. This is something we’ll be able to understand more about in the next stages of analysis.3. Better progress with debts is linked to better wellbeingAt three months, we found that clients who reported better progress with debts also reported higher wellbeing scores, often in line with UK Office for National Statistics (ONS) averages.We used the ONS personal wellbeing indicators as another way of comparing the wellbeing of our clients over time against national averages and other studies.What next?We’re continuing to run these surveys at regular intervals to build a more detailed picture of what happens to different groups of clients after debt advice.This will enable us to better understand the needs of our clients and continuously improve our service, support and solutions for those in problem debt.We’ll also use this research externally to open a dialogue with creditors, charities and other organisations about what these results mean in a wider context of public policy. And we’ll use this to support our influencing work to ensure those in or at risk of financial difficulty are properly supported.In terms of the project itself, the next steps will be to conduct more in-depth analysis from questions raised in this report.The ability to track, compare and cross-tabulate different measures has already provided us with a huge amount of insight across this project. There’s a lot to do, but the exciting part is that our analysis so far has only scratched the surface.You can download our full findings and reflections for the Measuring Client Outcomes pilot project from our website.What does debt advice achieve? A look at our latest report, ‘Measuring Client Outcomes’ was originally published in StepChange Debt Charity on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.