Recap: our workshop on ethnicity, money, mental health and experiences of discrimination in financial services

With a new year comes an exciting opportunity to try something different, and for us at Money and Mental Health, our first event of 2025 did just that.

For our upcoming research project, we wanted to build on the qualities which we think make our work so valuable: the voices of our Research Community and the input of our Professional Network. That’s why we were excited to bring people from these groups together for a workshop looking into the experiences of people with mental health problems from minority ethnic groups when engaging with financial services, such as banks, insurers and credit unions.

Our Research Community is at the heart of all we do. Whether it’s completing surveys or participating in focus groups, all of our work is informed by their ideas and experiences. However, we wanted to go further with this project by trying a new, more participatory approach to research.

To do this we partnered with Toynbee Hall, enabling us to learn from their expertise in participatory research methods. We invited experts by experience to shape the research from the very beginning: from deciding what questions to ask in a national polling exercise; to conducting peer-led interviews; and then through a collaborative workshop.

This was a chance to bring together experts by experience with financial services professionals to explore ideas for how financial services can better meet the needs of customers from minoritised ethnic groups with mental health problems.

The event kicked off with a presentation of our preliminary research findings by Francesca Smith, Senior Research Officer at Money and Mental Health. Our past research has shown that  the combination of having a mental health problem and being from a minoritised ethnic group can present compounding barriers to good financial wellbeing.

In particular, we identified that experiences of discrimination and poor quality of support when engaging with financial services is a key source of harm for this group. Francesca shared some exclusive insights into the new research, which will dig deeper in order to understand specific drivers and themes behind these experiences.

We then heard from Naheen, a member of our Research Community who participated in this research. She spoke about her challenges engaging with financial services as a person from a minoritised ethnic group who lives with mental health problems. 

She shared that she often felt dismissed, ignored and rushed by financial services on the basis of her name, and her ethnicity. This left her feeling excluded, and impacted significantly on her mental health and self-esteem. It also made her more anxious when engaging with services going forward, and more reluctant to disclose her mental health condition, which risks her missing out on vital support.

Then, it was time for breakout groups – with everyone involved. 

Each group had a mix of financial services representatives, experts by experience and discussion facilitators. Every group was assigned a question to explore on a different theme – from improving accessibility, to understanding opportunities and barriers in the regulatory landscape – and a case study scenario to stimulate the discussion.

It was encouraging to see just how willing participants were to share their experiences, listen compassionately and collaborate to find solutions, which left us all only wishing the day was longer!

A key aim of the workshop was to find tangible changes financial services firms could begin to implement into their day-to-day work with customers. So, we concluded the day by asking each participant to consider the abundance of ideas discussed and write one take-home point that really resonated with them on a post-it. These ranged from greater transparency in decision-making to more impactful training for staff, giving us much to think about as we draft the report.

For now, we will be using the insights gained from this event to help shape the policy recommendations for the report, which will be published this Spring. 

We want to thank all attendees who took part in this event, and Toynbee Hall for their ongoing support with this project. We are excited to further develop our ways of conducting collaborative research, and look forward to similar projects and events in the future.

There are lots of ways to stay in-the-loop with this project and our other research. 

If you are a professional, we’d love to work with you. Please consider signing up for our Professional Network where you’ll receive updates on our work, including this project, and invitations to our events. 

If you have experience of money and mental health problems, or care for someone who does, and would like to be involved in our work please consider joining our Research Community, a group of thousands of people who make our work possible. 

You can also learn more about this research project by contacting Francesca Smith at [email protected].