The Cost of Fragility: What New Data Reveals About UK Consumers

Most of your customers are vulnerable. They just haven’t told you yet.

Vulnerability now affects the everyday UK consumer base, and the vast majority of organisations are spotting it too late, if at all. Two-thirds of households have already turned to high-cost credit to cover essentials, and almost 4 in 10 were still showing signs of vulnerability more than a year after a life event.

Download our new research report to uncover the hidden scale of financial fragility and learn how to act faster.

What you’ll find inside:

• • The real scale of vulnerability: Get the full picture of UK household financial stress, including the 39% of people who remain vulnerable beyond the FCA’s 12-month definition.

• • Emergency borrowing patterns: See why 66% of people are relying on high-cost credit for essentials, and how this acts as a critical early warning sign.

• • Persistence problem: Understand the long-term impact of life events like redundancy, illness, and relationship breakdown, and why monitoring should extend beyond 12 months.

• • Key drivers of risk: Discover how employment precarity (only 31% of respondents were in full-time work), demographics (68% female respondents), and household structure amplify financial strain.

• • Impact of interventions: Learn what 549 Hope4U interventions and £550,000 in financial uplift tell us about which support strategies work best.

• • Best practice framework: Implement a practical, 5-part framework to meet Consumer Duty expectations, detect risk earlier, and evidence timely support.

Don’t wait for your customers to speak up. By then, it’s often too late.

Know Your Vulnerable Customer (KYVC) brings together multiple data sources to give you a real-time, complete view of at-risk customers, allowing you to act before the damage is done.

Want to see the data in action? You can also Book a free KYVC Proof of Value.