Key has been working with the firm over the past year to help develop and refine its MorganAsh Resilience System (MARS) which was launched in April. Key’s advisers will trial MARS when advising clients.
The tool provides a resilience rating which the firm describes as being similar to a credit score. This rating aims to make assessing a person’s vulnerability more consistent and easier for advisers and lenders to provide solutions for clients.
Rather than focusing on a person’s vulnerability, MARS aims to assess their resilience when it comes to their health, wealth or financial circumstances and gives an insight into how well they would cope with changes.
It can be used as a standalone tool or integrated with a firm’s CRM.
Will Hale (pictured), CEO of Key, said: “Everyone is vulnerable at some point whether due to their health, finances or life events and how this impacts them differs from person to person. 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.”
He said he was “delighted” to be working with the MorganAsh service.
He added: “At Key, we are committed to helping customers achieve the best possible outcomes and as part of this, we are exploring this pilot with MorganAsh. 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.”
Andrew Gething, managing director at MorganAsh, said: “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.”
He added: “When looking at vulnerability and resilience, older borrowers can be amongst the most vulnerable. Key is therefore leading the market in being the first equity release broker to adopt the MARS system. The fact that they are also working with us to refine our system for later life lending shows how seriously they take providing best advice and finding the right solution.
“Ultimately, the more we all know about individual customers, the more certain we are that we can provide them with the right outcome.”
