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Vulnerability
Affordability Index
(VAI)
Home > VAI
Use VAI to assist in identifying potentially vulnerable customers who may need your support
Introducing Vulnerability Affordability Index (VAI)
- Identify vulnerable households, UK wide in the areas of affordability, poor health, disability, poor English skills and many more.
- Pinpoint households who have suffered a recent bereavement.
- Gain insights into low income households who are just about managing.
- Understand key property and household insights including areas of depravation, poorly insulated homes, rural areas & poor or no broadband access.
Identify potentially vulnerable customers, and meet regulatory requirements to protect them.
Data Heads’ Vulnerability Affordability Index (VAI) enables organisations to identify potentially vulnerable customers on their database across the UK, in accordance with the FCA consumer duty guidance and other regulatory requirements around the identification and fair treatment of vulnerable customers.
VAI will help identify who on your customer base might be potentially vulnerable in one of 4 key categories; Financial Resilience, Health, Life Events and Capability in order that you can carry out your own due diligence and put in place appropriate support and care.
Comprehensive data for every UK household
Effective consumer vulnerability identification requires a comprehensive dataset. Matching your customer data to VAI provides insight into identifying those who may need your support.
The VAI Model
Each household has been scored across each of the 4 categories of vulnerability with a score ranging from those most likely to be 0 (no vulnerability) to 9 (highest vulnerability). Each VAI licensee can select their own score across each of the categories to set their own vulnerability threshold to act upon.
This data is used to build out a UK wide model using disaggregation methods to estimate low level geographic values. The modelled data is then tagged at household level for ease of matching by the client. The process has undergone extensive evaluation and has proven to provide a fully comprehensive means of compliantly identifying levels of vulnerability within the 4 key categories of risk.
Modelled information for 29.5m households, providing a measure of vulnerability from 0 to 9 across 4 key measures of vulnerability:
Financial Resilience
Model based on loan applications, income over expenditure, pensioner income
Health
Census self-reported health and disability data
Life Events
Major changes which may effect a household permanently or temporarily
Capability
Index of multiple deprivation, poor literacy skills, poor English language skills, low levels of education
Unlock consumer Vulnerability Affordability Index (VAI) benefits
Understand Consumer Vulnerability
Understand the nature and scale of consumer vulnerability within your target market and customer base.
Regulatory Compliance
Meet Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) guidelines & support vulnerable customers effectively. Ensure GDPR compliance – no PII data is shared.
Complete UK Coverage
Utilise fully compliant data variables for the whole of the UK. Identify vulnerability drivers & create customer support strategies.
Updated Quarterly
The VAI file is updated quarterly in order to respond proactively to changes in customer risk levels.
Compliance
VAI is a modelled dataset using non-personalised data from different sources. These are open-source Census and ONS data (presented at Output Area level); Predictor which is financial affordability data (presented at Output Area level). The whole dataset is then tagged at household level for ease of matching so no personal data is used in compiling the register.
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