Last week, the Bank of England raised interest rates for the twelfth time in a row, further squeezing household budgets in an effort to curb the UK’s high rate of inflation. This has come at a time when many households are already struggling with the cost of living.
Rising food, fuel and energy prices have left an increasing number of people unable to keep up with their expenses. In fact, according to recent figures, around 700,000 UK households missed a rent or mortgage payment last month, unable to withstand this financial shock.
This is why financial resilience has become more important than ever in 2023. The Fintech Pledge is a UK fintech industry initiative to drive 10 million actions that improve consumers’ financial resilience by 2025. At Aro, we’re proud to have joined the campaign in order to help our customers improve their financial lives.
What is the Fintech Pledge?
The Fintech Pledge is a campaign launched by Zopa to improve consumers’ financial resilience. The target is to generate 10 million actions that will put people in a better financial position. The actions include:
- Moving savings from low to high interest yielding accounts
- Signing up to a credit building tool to understand your credit score
- Using a debt consolidation tool to save money
- Switching to lower-priced utility bills
So far, the Fintech Pledge members have completed over 3 million actions to improve the financial resilience of their customers.
Who will benefit?
The Fintech Pledge is making numerous fintechs sit up and pay more attention to how they can support their customers become more financially resilient. This may be by using their own products or by directing customers to complete actions outside of their offering.
The aim of the Pledge is to make 20% of the UK adult population more financially resilient by 2025. By bringing together numerous fintechs, we can work together to drive positive change for our customers.
How are Aro contributing to the Fintech Pledge?
Here at Aro, we’re supporting households by helping them to save money by consolidating their debts. Our pledge contribution is to save customers £100 by debt consolidation. Since joining the Pledge, we’ve helped 3,751 people improve their financial resilience in this way.
Our Chief Growth Officer Andy Fisher is our Senior Sponsor of the Fintech Pledge at Aro.
“We are delighted to have joined this fantastic initiative led by Zopa to improve the financial lives of people in the UK and build their resilience in what is a testing time for household budgets.
“It is core to the Aro mission to help consumers shop around to find the best borrowing products for their circumstances. In a market with an abundance of choice where many people lack the confidence to make decisions or fear the consequences of applying for credit, our platform is crucial to helping people navigate the borrowing market.”
Aro is delighted to be part of such a brilliant industry initiative, and we look forward to continuing our support of the Fintech Pledge over the next two years.
