Creating a more financially inclusive society

Financial exclusion continues to cause harm in communities across the UK. Addressing this helps to realise the potential of all UK citizens, contributing to inclusive growth across society.

CHASM research has consistently highlighted the need for a National Financial Inclusion Strategy and the benefits for individuals and society as a whole.

In a significant step towards implementing such a strategy, December 2024 saw the inaugural meeting of the UK Treasury’s new Financial Inclusion Committee. The Financial Inclusion Committee’s mission is “to tackle barriers to individual and households’ ability to access affordable and appropriate financial products and services”, and it is charged with advising the government on the development of its financial inclusion strategy.

The select group of 14 Committee members includes CHASM Professor of Practice, Martin Coppack. Martin is the only academic on the committee, which also comprises representatives of industry, consumer groups and regulators.

Martin has a wealth of CHASM research to draw on. Maintaining our longstanding role as a provider of robust, independent statistics and analysis relating to financial inclusion, CHASM has undertaken three pieces of work in the last year designed to contribute to the development of a National Financial Inclusion Strategy.

Adele Atkinson and Louise Overton produced a comprehensive overview of the state of financial inclusion in the UK in 2024. This work, commissioned by the Financial Inclusion Commission (FIC), provided evidence to reinforce the need for a strategic approach to tackle financial exclusion and to inform the direction of the Government’s new strategy.

Alongside Dr Özlem Ögtem-Young, Adele, and Louise subsequently collaborated with FIC on a comprehensive qualitative study of financial exclusion in the UK, drawing on the perspectives of people with lived-experience of financial exclusion and stakeholders working with excluded groups. You can read the full reports: Financial Inclusion in the UK and Achieving full financial inclusion in the UK: current realities and potential solutions

Commenting on the reports, the then FIC Chair, Chris Pond, (now Chair of the Financial Services Consumer Panel), commented:

In another piece of work, CHASM’s Adele and Martin also collaborated in delivering a summary of recent literature looking at potential policy levers for financial inclusion, on behalf of the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). This work was prepared for an internal audience of regulators seeking to learn from international experiences and academic analyses.

Stakeholder Engagement

Reflecting the level of expertise in financial inclusion and exclusion within CHASM, the team has been invited to share their insights with a wide range of audiences. Here, we cover a small selection of such opportunities.

Earlier in 2024 CHASM hosted a roundtable discussion with the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) Chief Executive Officer, Nikhil Rathi, along with Marie Roberts and Freddie Steven. Nikhil and his team were responsive to CHASM’s evidence and underscored the FCA’s commitment to financial inclusion.

In August, Professor Adele Atkinson addressed the 2024 Global Forum for Financial Consumers at Cornell University. After discussing the research objectives and research design of Achieving full financial inclusion in the UK: current realities and potential solutions and Financial Inclusion in the UK, Adele highlighted some of the underlying challenges and barriers to financial inclusion, including issues with financial products. One of Adele’s key messages, about the value of learning from people with lived experience, raised particular interest amongst the largely quantitative audience and led to some great discussions. She also contributed to a panel discussion of Fair Finance and Financial Inclusion.

October saw CHASM joining forces with the Financial Inclusion Commission (FIC), at a House of Lords event, to present key research findings from the first two publications. This Parliamentary event was followed by an online research launch enabling Louise and Adele to widen CHASM’s engagement with industry, media, practitioners, and third sector representatives.

A wealth of engagement effort has continued through 2025, with CHASM’s Professor Coppack, instigating a financial inclusion roundtable with Fair4All Finance and Aspen Institute, to draw on the US experience in drafting a National Strategy for Financial Inclusion (25 March) in London. They were joined by The Aspen Institute’s Kate Griffin, Director of Programmes, Inclusive Financial Systems, and Erin Borg, Associate Director, Inclusive Financial System – both integral in the creation of the new national Financial Inclusion Strategy in the USA, facilitating input front the civil society perspective.

Held under Chatham House rule, the event provided an ideal environment to identify shared challenges and discuss pathways for success and performance metrics. The group’s ideas include the need to focus on positive trends rather than arbitrary targets when measuring financial inclusion; and seeking new ways to disaggregate non-prime borrowers to better price risk.

Recently Adele also shared findings from the work with the FIC at a policy and practice event in Frankfurt, hosted by the German Central Bank, alongside findings from her collaboration with the University of Tartu on financial wellbeing. In a keynote speech she encouraged policy makers and practitioners to consider the human perspective and lived experience of people facing exclusion and entered into a lively discussion about addressing the challenges of different groups of the population.

Financial Inclusion – Where next?

Once the Government has finalised its plans for a national strategy all eyes will be turned to the data that monitors its progress towards implementing and meeting its targets. CHASM has already secured funding and started work on developing a new Financial Inclusion Monitor

This new monitor series will ensure there is a robust measurement of what it means to be financially included in the UK today, which will also be mapped to the new Financial Inclusion Strategy to provide a comprehensive measure of progress. It also responds to the needs of Government and other stakeholders for a reliable compilation of statistics that can be used to assess progress towards key targets.

Martin Coppack, CHASM professor of practice and member of the Financial Inclusion Committee, comments:

“Due to intense collaborative campaigning, we now have a vehicle for addressing the systemic issues that lead to financial exclusion and being charged more for being poor. The UK government has created a new Minister-chaired Financial Inclusion Committee, tasked with creating a UK National Strategy for Financial Inclusion. It has also given the Financial Conduct Authority a new ‘must have regard’ to financial inclusion, to begin immediately.

“To help shape the new Financial Inclusion Strategy and future regulatory and business activity, as well as monitor progress, we will robustly measure what it means to be financially included in the UK today. The way this measurement is created and then used is key to achieving success. We will be working with others to make sure this measurement is as helpful and relevant as possible.”

The Monitor will contribute to change in three key areas

• The creation of a new gold standard tool for measuring financial inclusion that is recognised by those with the power to make the changes we need to see.
• The creation of a method of recording progress over a five-year period for holding government, regulators and businesses to account for activity to increase financial inclusion and reducing the poverty premium.
• Ultimately being a contributing intervention that leads to an increase in people being financially included in the UK and a reduction of poverty premiums.