Key has announced it is to work with MorganAsh on a pilot scheme to use the firm’s new adviser tool.

The tool helps to support later life lending advisers in identifying, assessing and managing client vulnerability.

MorganAsh launched its MorganAsh Resilience System (MARS) in April although the firm had been working with Key since last year to test the interaction with consumers. MARS provides an objective ‘Resilience Rating’ similar to a credit score and has been designed to provide a more consistent approach to managing client vulnerability, making evaluating consumer vulnerability easier and more consistent.

The system and its rating methodology enables lenders, and particularly advice firms, to provide more robust solutions based on a personalised understanding of individual client circumstances. MARS provides ratings which reflect every aspect of a person’s characteristics or resilience, including health, wealth and life events.

Both Key and MorganAsh believe that having a more consistent method of assessing customer characteristics and vulnerability will enable a “more robust understanding of need”, and therefore deliver a better customer outcome.

Key CEO, Will Hale, commented: “To ensure that we are delivering the best possible outcomes for all customers, we need to move beyond simply identifying vulnerability and look at the more holistic concept of resilience and how support needs to be tailored according to individual circumstances.

“We are therefore delighted to be working with the new MorganAsh service which provides a simple, objective and consistent way of better understanding an individual’s vulnerability via a ‘resilience rating’.

“The industry needs more initiatives like this, and we would like to add our voices to those of leading figures from organisations such as the Association of Mortgage Intermediaries and the Vulnerability Taskforce who welcome this as a step forward for the industry.”

Managing director at MorganAsh, Andrew Gething, added: “It is odd that there is a consistent method of assessing credit risk within the lending market, but, until now, there has been nothing to assess vulnerability risk. This represents a clear gap in a firm’s understanding and is almost guaranteed to lead to inconsistent outcomes.

“Initial work on vulnerability has focused on training, but firms have quickly realised that to reach consistency in assessments the training overhead required is extensive and hence costly. The MARS tool greatly reduces the training and assessment burden from advisers so delivering vulnerability management efficiently.”

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