MorganAsh updates MARS to support vulnerable customers

By Vriti Gothi

MorganAsh has upgraded its MorganAsh Resilience System (MARS), enabling firms to assess better and support customers facing multiple, overlapping vulnerabilities.

The enhancement marks a significant step forward in digital vulnerability management, reflecting the evolving regulatory and societal expectations under the Financial Conduct Authority’s (FCA) Consumer Duty. With its upgraded algorithms, MARS now captures and interprets multiple vulnerability characteristics and life events, while still delivering a single, objective Resilience Rating, a measure akin to a credit score, but designed to assess customer vulnerability.

The upgrade directly addresses FCA research, which highlights the disproportionate impact of compounding vulnerabilities. Traditional approaches often treat vulnerabilities in isolation, applying fragmented support mechanisms that fail to reflect the complexity of real-life circumstances. MARS overcomes this by digitally modelling the nuanced, interrelated nature of challenges across health, wealth, lifestyle, financial capability, engagement capability, and support networks. Each factor is assigned a severity weighting, ensuring firms can prioritise interventions where they are most needed.

A key innovation is MARS’s ability to trigger support not only from single circumstances but from their combined effect. For example, while a mild health issue or a life event such as divorce might not individually warrant intervention, their cumulative impact may lower a customer’s Resilience Rating to the point where tailored support becomes essential. The system also recognises family-based resilience, ensuring that financial planning for mortgages, savings, or retirement reflects household realities, avoiding unnecessary or duplicative support triggers.

Andrew Gething, Managing Director of MorganAsh, said, “We know from our own work looking after ill people that having multiple issues has a compounding effect, and while humans are great at recognising this on an individual basis, it is challenging to replicate digitally. The MARS development team has worked incredibly hard to model our algorithms to match reality, over many months, back-testing against real data. I am delighted this has now come to fruition and is being released for our customers, to further improve customer vulnerability management without increasing costs.”

Financial institutions and partners are already recognising the transformative value of these enhancements.