Marking its 2nd anniversary, Dynamic Planner’s Financial Wellbeing Questionnaire has been enhanced to understand client needs and differences even more comprehensively.

Dynamic Planner, a UK digital advice platform, has found that the overall proportion of clients with high levels of vulnerability has decreased over the past year.

Between 2023 to 2024, Dynamic Planner's Financial Wellbeing Questionnaire found that 6.26 per cent of clients were highly vulnerable in terms of their resilience. Since then, in the most recent year from 2024 to 2025, this has dropped to 3.09 per cent, supporting the Financial Lives Survey latest 2024 findings.

Vulnerabilities mentioned in the report include physical disabilities such as mental health, addiction and physical disability; bereavement, income shock, domestic abuse and caring responsibilies; erratic income, low savings and over-indebtedness; and low confidence in managing money, poor financial literacy, learning difficulties and poor command of English.

The proportion of clients with moderate vulnerabilities also reduced year-on-year across the four characteristics, with more clients being viewed as having a low level of vulnerability. This could indicate that for the more serious conditions, clients are receiving welcome support and guidance that has proven reassuring, the firm said in a statement. Again, it supports the Financial Conduct Authority’s (FCA) observations that firms are beginning to make changes to treat vulnerable customers fairly, but there is still room for improvement.

The analysis comes as Dynamic Planner marks the 2nd anniversary of its Financial Wellbeing Questionnaire, originally launched in 2023 to meet the requirements of Consumer Duty, with changes and enhancements to help advice firms understand client needs and differences even more comprehensively.

Changes include that the questionnaire being more aligned with key questions and the algorithm of the FCA’s Financial Lives Survey. Vulnerability data can now be recorded across the four vulnerability drivers as well as the related characteristics; this allows advisors to explore more deeply which factors are leading to client vulnerabilities so that they can provide appropriate support.

Reports can be created listing client responses to all questions along with any useful information or contact details for clients. As a result, firms can explain clearly any actions they might need to take.

The questionnaire is now fully integrated across the entire Dynamic Planner platform so that it can be distributed through Fact Find invitations – the results, including a vulnerability status selected by the advisor, can be recorded on the client’s personal dashboard.

“At any point in time, a client can be considered vulnerable, whether due to a life event that causes them to become temporarily vulnerable or to a permanent change, for example due to a health condition,” Dr Louis Williams, Dynamic Planner’s head of psychology and behavioural insights, said. “Driven by consumer duty and the FCA’s increasing focus on vulnerable clients, we’ve seen significant levels of adoption over the past two years since launching our Financial Wellbeing Questionnaire, and now in line with advisor feedback, this new version is fine-tuned to support them even more. Available within our suite of client profiling questionnaires it powers the identification of vulnerabilities with technology, enabling advisors to assess individual clients across four key areas: health, life events, resilience, and capability; record and update a vulnerability status, and configure a report that can be shared with clients. 

“Importantly, we give control to the advisor to assess each client and uncover factors the client themselves might not consider as indicative of being in vulnerable circumstances.”