The woman at the other end of the line sounds frantic. She’s been ill and needs help sorting out some payments, but when Meg fromNationwidecalls, she starts to talk about other things that are on her mind. Less than half an hour later, she confides that she’s thinking of suicide and has even worked out how and where she could do it.
On another day, a follow-up call to someone who reported being a fraud victim quickly takes a troubling turn. The woman’s account has been used without her permission, but it was an abusive partner rather than an unknown scammer who was to blame.
When Nicky asks her to explain what’s happened, she tells a harrowing story involving a sexual assault and years of financial and coercive control. She had thought her former partner was taking her phone to stop her from using it, but he was actually using it to raid her accounts.
These are glimpses into the work of Nationwide’s specialist support team, a group whose job it is to help vulnerable customers. The building society let me listen to some of the many and varied cases its staff deal with on a daily basis.
The calls highlight how money worries often go hand in hand with other problems – and, it seems, how difficult it can be for people to access help elsewhere.
“Every single week we’ll see a brand-new situation, and I think it depends very much on what’s going on in the outside world,” says Shannon Hancock, the specialist support team manager. “You may have heard of [the Netflix TV show]Adolescence– that has drawn calls from people in a similar situation.” A small number of cases they have dealt with have involved exploitation – for example, children being blackmailed to send nude photos – and the team has acted on safeguarding concerns.
Most banks and building societies have similar teams in place, although the type of help they focus on varies. Nationwide’s team was set up 10 years ago, and its original focus was on supporting the building society’s members (its equivalent of customers) who were having problems with payments because they had cancer. It worked closely with the charity Macmillan and helped people find and access any help they were entitled to, as well as addressing any problems they were having with their mortgages or other Nationwide products.
A decade later, it’s helped more than 100,000 people, and the workload has evolved. A big part of the now 50-strong team’s job is to handle payments for people who can’t bank online or get out to a branch. These customers have been identified, or have come forward, as being in need of extra help or support.
Tina Grainger, Nationwide’s head of specialist customer support, says some people ring 100 times a month over a period of years for this type of help. But alongside those cases are the more complicated issues involving domestic abuse, bereavement or incapacity. For these, says Grainger, “there are not black and white solutions, but we have the time, we have the mandate and we have the resources”.
Calls like the ones above are “the lowest volume, but they are the highest impact”, she says. Support is given to those taking them but, Grainger says: “Not everyone could be on our team. You have to have a high level of resilience.”
There are about 350 calls a day and, although most are not dramatic, they are all important to the people involved. I listen to a call in which Sarah speaks to a man who had fallen behind on his mortgage after his disability benefits were stopped. His family had stepped in and cleared his debt, but the team wanted to be sure that he was happy with the arrangements. During a long chat, Sarah checked if he needed help challenging the benefits decision, or with payments. When he said he felt guilty about getting his family’s help, she was kind and reassuring. When she told him: “If you do ever start experiencing financial difficulty, just reach out to us – we do have teams who can help,” his relief was audible.
Calls can last from 10 minutes to two hours – the team typically work from home, and there’s no clock ticking down or screen telling them that people are waiting. Listening, it’s striking how valuable it is for people to be able to talk to someone who has plenty of time, with the clout of a big organisation. When the team calls the police or someone’s doctor (with their permission) to report an emergency, things happen.
As a result of the calls I heard, payments were sorted, the woman whose former partner had raided her account was refunded, and the woman contemplating suicide got help from her doctor. They were lifechanging – and sometimes lifesaving – conversations.
- In the UK and Ireland,Samaritanscan be contacted on freephone 116 123, or emailjo@samaritans.orgorjo@samaritans.ie.In the US, you can call or text theNational Suicide Prevention Lifelineon 988, chat on988lifeline.org, ortext HOMEto 741741 to connect with a crisis counsellor. In Australia, the crisis support serviceLifelineis 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found atbefrienders.org