Designing Financial Services for Everyone: Reflections From the SFE Customer Vulnerability Summit.

Published: 2025

I had the pleasure of presenting and facilitating workshops at the annual Scottish Financial Enterprise Customer Vulnerability Summit — a day spent with some of the most thoughtful people working in customer experience, vulnerability, and inclusion across financial services.

What struck me most was the quality of the conversation. Not the polished, panel-friendly version of these topics, but the real, honest, and direct exchanges that happen when a room is full of people who genuinely care about getting this right. People who want to design products, services, and solutions that support everyone — and particularly that support people when times are hard, which they will be, for all of us, at different points in our lives.

Why vulnerability is not a niche topic

There is a persistent tendency in financial services to treat customer vulnerability as an edge case — a special category of customer requiring special handling, separate from the main business of designing products and serving the majority.

This framing is wrong, and the summit was full of people who understand why.

Vulnerability is not a fixed characteristic of a small group of people. It is a state that any of us can move into, often suddenly and without warning. Bereavement. Serious illness. Job loss. A relationship breakdown. A caring responsibility that arrives overnight. The FCA's own research has found that a significant majority of UK adults display one or more characteristics of vulnerability — which makes it not a niche concern but a description of the customer base.

Designing for vulnerability, done properly, is not about building a separate track for a minority. It is about designing products and journeys robust enough to work for people on their worst days, not just their best ones. And products that work on the worst days tend to work better for everyone.

Lived experience as a design input

The theme I kept returning to in my workshops was the value of lived experience in proposition design.

We can theorise about what customers in difficult circumstances need. We can model it, map it, and build personas around it. But there is no substitute for actually incorporating the voices of people who have lived through the circumstances we are designing for — bereavement, financial hardship, serious illness, and the rest.

Lived experience is not a nice-to-have layer added at the end of a design process. It is a source of insight that reshapes the process itself — surfacing friction, assumptions, and gaps that no amount of internal workshopping would reveal. The organisations doing this best are treating it as a core input to innovation, not a validation exercise at the end.

Collaboration across the sector

The other thing that gave me energy was the appetite for collaboration. Customer vulnerability is not a competitive advantage to be hoarded. It is a shared challenge, and the firms that treat it as such — sharing learnings, comparing approaches, being honest about what has not worked — will collectively raise the standard faster than any single organisation working alone.

Here is to collaborating and learning across the sector, evolving proposition design processes for the future, and using lived experience to inform genuine innovation. Days like this are a reminder of how many people in financial services are quietly committed to doing exactly that.