Money Advice Trust and Elephants Don’t Forget Partner to Provide Vulnerable Customer Training Support for Financial Services Firms
The Money Advice Trust, a national charity working to prevent financial difficulty and remove problem debt from people’s lives, has partnered with Elephants Don’t Forget, a leader in AI-driven employee competence and performance solutions, to improve how financial services organisations support and train their staff to understand customer vulnerability.
The partnership initiative brings together expert content from the Money Advice Trust’s ‘Supporting Customers in Vulnerable Circumstances’ training material, which will be deployed using Elephants Don’t Forget’s continual knowledge and competence improvement solution, Clever Nelly.
The specialist training intervention question set has been specifically designed to continually assess, test, reinforce, and help to embed vulnerability knowledge for staff across five key categories:
– Knowing what vulnerability is
– Identifying a vulnerable customer
– Recognising what they are vulnerable to
– Knowing how to talk to a vulnerable customer
– Recording needs and signposting
The question set will be available free of charge to all mutual Money Advice Trust and Elephants Don’t Forget customers.
With planned enhancements and ongoing revisions to improve the content, the partnership will also look to introduce additional sub-sector-specific questions to further provide a more detailed and personal learning experience for firms’ employees.
The Money Advice Trust will also deploy the questions within their own debt advice services, National Debtline and Business Debtline, to support their advisers.
Additionally, an annual benchmarking report will be produced to allow organisations to compare their performance in this area across the industry.
Dan Gray, CEO of Elephants Don’t Forget, commenting on the partnership, said,
“The financial sector has a responsibility to not only serve its customers, but to protect them, especially those in vulnerable situations. Our partnership with the Money Advice Trust allows us to combine our award-winning AI technology with their deep expertise, creating a unique and powerful tool that helps firms genuinely commit to their customers’ support needs and deliver consistently good outcomes.
We’re not just offering a course; we’re giving firms a way to embed this critical knowledge across their entire workforce, ensuring that every customer interaction is handled with the care and understanding it deserves.”
The support initiative was formed in response to industry feedback and associated challenges cited by firms in research conducted by Elephants Don’t Forget.
In May 2025, Elephants Don’t Forget polled 783 senior financial services professionals to gauge their confidence in their approaches to employee vulnerable customer training effectiveness.
When asked: “How confident are you in your frontline staff in recognising and responding to potential characteristics of vulnerability based on their current training?” the responses revealed a significant confidence gap. Only 5% stated they were very confident, while a combined 26% were either only slightly confident (23%) or not at all confident (3%).
The research also strongly reinforced that human interaction remains the most effective method for identifying vulnerability. By a considerable margin, 85% of professionals polled stated that ‘staff actively listening and asking questions’ to encourage disclosure was the most effective method, followed by ‘training staff on specific prompts/wording’ (52%).
For more information about the partnership, please contact Elephants Don’t Forget for further details.
