The Financial Conduct Authority says the lenders need to offer payment holidays to customers who are struggling to pay because of the Covid Crisis.

It is likely that you will still be charged the interest during the payment holiday, so although you will have a payment holiday, by doing so will likely increase the cost of the loan overall. So if you can afford to it is most cost effective to maintain your payments.

You have until the 9th July 2020 to request the payment holiday, the 3 months will begin from the date its granted.

Payday Loan DO NOT qualify for the 3 month payment freeze, they do however qualify for a 1 month payment freeze, please contact them directly

No, Firms should not report a worsening arrears status on the customers credit file during the payment deferral period

Yes, we would encourage you to apply for this yourselves, and if possible to do online with your creditors. We have decided to offer an additional letter service as we know that some customers want the convenience, and are therefore more likely to request the 3 month holiday if we can make it as quick and easy as possible.

We work mostly with housing associations to support their vulnerable tenants, but we know just how many people are now struggling, following the Covid Crisis and wanted to do something more to make sure everyone who needed the 3 month payment holiday, had at the very least been made aware of it.

TellJO is a mission driven for-profit software company. We provide TellJO, a licenced product that allows organisations to identify, engage and support their vulnerable customers in a scalable and cost-effective way.

TellJO is the first to market software for engaging directly with vulnerable customers, the majority of customers experiencing vulnerability will not communicate with their Creditors, TellJO acts a trusted intermediary between the company and the vulnerable customer.

TellJO creates engagement with hard to reach customers.

TellJO offers many benefits; regulation for how organisations deal with vulnerability, is becoming increasingly stringent.

Gaining consent to profile vulnerability is critical, this cannot be done using big-data, without full clear “consent to profile” from the customer.

TellJO asks for explicit consent to profile at the start of the assessment.

TellJO enables organisations to reengage with disengaged customers, and understand the reasons for non-payment now, or in the future.

TellJO gives the opportunity for organisations to build trust.

At TellJO we believe if organisations are not offering social value to their customers, then their customer base will deteriorate as “trust” becomes a defining factor for the future of their business.

Many organisations have “vulnerability teams” which is brilliant to see, but remember, these teams, are only dealing with the vulnerable customers you know about, many of these will be the motivated few, or the customers facing deep entrenched crisis

You will not know the vast majority of customers that are struggling with difficulties, most of which will be your customers who also have arrears.

We believe TellJO to be cost positive and are working on this formula, so we expect for every £1 you spend on TellJO you will save more than a £1 on collection activity or selling debt cheaply.

We sell TellJO licence in 1,2 or 3 year periods, the price will depend on the sector and the amount of involvement TellJO has in supporting your Vulnerability Strategy and automation.

TellJO works in many customer facing situations.

We don’t expect organisations to use TellJO in their transformation strategies without first seeing results with their own customers.

So, we offer the opportunity to complete a 4-week paid pilot, prices range from £5000 to £50,000 depending on the size of the organisation.

If the organisation goes onto purchase a TellJO licence, we will refund the cost of the pilot against the licence.

Trust is critical to TellJO and we believe in a customer first approach, so have incorporated Privacy by Design into our assessment, so we ask for:

Clear Consent to Profile

Clear Consent to Process Special Category data (Health)

Clear to consent for TellJO to store the data, and signpost to support organisations

Clear consent to give data back to the originating organisation on customer vulnerability, statistically around 95% of customers give permission to share information to the organisation who sent them TellJO.

Clear ability for customer to revoke consent.

We will NEVER sell any customer data to a 3rd Party.

TellJO is a cloud-based software platform, this means:

All data is held on an encrypted Cloud Based System – We use Microsoft Azure

All data is vulnerability assessed weekly by Microsoft automated vulnerability audits

All data is only accessed by 2-stage authentication

There is no facility to download customer data from the TellJO platform.

No customer data is ever populated or moved by spreadsheet, email, server, mobile or office-based solution.

We will be able to tell you in advance the expected response rates to TellJO, based on one message you are generally looking at between 5 and 20% response rate depending on the quality of the data and the audience.

The level of current disengagement has little effect on response rates.

Around 68% of people who complete TellJO will identify as highly vulnerable, with many related issues, it will be no surprise that the biggest issues we see are related to mental health and debt, so we will discuss with you how you currently handle these are prepare you for the incoming data.

Any more questions, please feel free to contact me (The TellJO founder) on [email protected]