Sharon Collard

Chair in Personal Finance

Professor Sharon Collard is Research Director at the University of Bristol’s Personal Finance Research Centre. Her research explores the intersections between vulnerability and personal finance. For example, the Centre has examined ways to address the Poverty Premium faced by low-income households; and delivered a programme of work on how financial services firms identify and treat consumers in vulnerable circumstances.

In 2019, the Centre launched a three-year strategic partnership with GambleAware – the MAGPIE programme – to examine the role of financial services in reducing gambling harm.

Sharon is also a Research Affiliate at the University of Sydney; a member of the UK Financial Services Consumer Panel, a statutory panel that represents the interests of consumers in the development of policy for the regulation of financial services; the UK Financial Inclusion Commission; the government’s Financial Inclusion Policy Forum; and is on the Council of the Pensions Policy Institute.

Designing social-purpose FinTech: A UK case study using grounded innovation

My talk will describe new insights into the design, implementation and evaluation of social-purpose fintech using the case study of Nationwide Building Society’s Open Banking for Good programme. This programme used a Grounded Innovation approach to bring together user experts (Charity Partners), solution experts (Fintechs) and process experts (Nationwide’s OB4G team) to solve real and grounded challenges faced by millions of people in the UK who are financially struggling — where ‘real’ means evidenced challenges that exist, and ‘grounded’ means involving both experts that understand the challenge and users that regularly face it.