At Monzo we know that your mental health profoundly impacts how you manage your money. As the long term effects of the pandemic are emerging, we’re expecting to have more conversations with our customers about how their financial situation is impacted by mental health problems.
People with mental health problems are three times more likely to be in financial difficulty than those without.
- research carried out by Money & Mental Health Policy Institute
We’ve worked with the Money and Mental Health Policy Institute to improve our accessibility for customers with mental health problems, by becoming the first bank to take part in its Mental Health Accessible Lite programme. The Mental Health Accessible Lite programme is designed to provide an overview of a firm's accessibility for people with mental health problems.
The Money and Mental Health team spent three months in early 2021 reviewing our policies, procedures, training, product and service. This month, they shared their findings with us, which include where we’re doing well and what we’ll do going forward.
Where we’re doing well
We do a lot of work to understand the needs of our customers with mental health problems.
Our tone of voice guidance means the language used in our communications is simple and easy to understand.
Customers can easily find the help section in our app and search for information they need.
We offer a gambling block with a cooling off period to our customers, to help people control gambling spend when unwell.
We offer the Share With Us tool, which allows our customers to safely disclose any circumstances they’re dealing with to us in their own words to describe their needs.
What we’ll focus on next
We’ll review and update our policies to ensure consistency across all of our support channels and teams.
We’ll add more detail to our specialist training around the access needs of customers with mental health problems, and share our training more widely with other teams across Monzo.
We’ll review how easy it is to access our different support channels, and give step by step instructions and information about what to expect to make customers feel more at ease.
We’ll increase how often we monitor and evaluate our approach to mental health accessibility.
We’ll develop more ways to offer customers a personalised banking experience, for example allow customers to set communication preferences in the app.
We’re committed to making improvements based on the recommendations in the programme, and we know how important this will be to customers in the year ahead. We owe a big thank you to the team at Money & Mental Health Policy Institute for their support on this. We’re excited to tackle the work, and we’ll post an update later this year to share what we’ve done so far in our mission to better support customers through mental health problems.
I’m delighted that Monzo has worked with us on our Mental Health Accessible Lite programme. Just signing up to be evaluated in this way highlights Monzo’s commitment to test and challenge itself to be better for its customers. In the three months we have partnered with Monzo, it has proved to be an organisation that has a genuine understanding of how mental health problems can impact its customers and a desire to do more to support them.
- Helen Undy, Chief Executive of Money & Mental Health Policy Institute