Staying in control of payments and data – and why it’s so important to people with mental health problems

Buying something from the shop or from a website is part of everyday life. Nowadays, all we need to do is just tap our phone or click ‘buy now’. 

The same can go for sharing our data, accepting cookies is just a step to access the website we want to look at. How we pay and interact online has changed significantly in recent years and is set to continue to change rapidly. It can be hard to keep up with the new technologies being proposed.

But just because there is innovation, it doesn’t mean that people don’t want something that has been fundamental to how we pay for a long time: control. Giving people control over how they pay and what data they share is a fundamental part of the recent Consumer Vision for Payments which we at Money and Mental Health support. This post is about why we think this is so important for people with mental health problems.

Wanting control is something that has come up consistently in our work with our Research Community, a group of over 5,000 people with lived experience of mental health problems. Symptoms of mental health problems like difficulty processing information or increased impulsivity can make it hard to manage our spending or understand what we’re agreeing to. So control isn’t just about having a choice of payment. It’s about being able to pay for things in a way that helps us manage our spending and avoid financial harm. 

This is why so many Research Community members have told us they use cash for their spending. Cash can feel tangible and real compared to spending with a card, digital wallet or online. It can be much easier to see how much you’re spending and set a budget than when using digital banking. It can also feel more secure when people are worried about online scams or hacking. Cash can therefore be a payment method that gives people control when they’re unwell and feel unable to control their spending. 

There are many people with mental health problems who feel confident using other payment methods. However, it can still feel easy to spend money, especially online, when there isn’t much friction in journeys. For example, in online shops, you can save your card details and then next time you can pay with one click. This can be nice and convenient but can make it hard to feel in control when you’re unwell.

Banks and others in the payment ecosystem can help give more control and visibility to customers through tools that help them manage their spending or money. Most banks offer their customers a gambling block on their cards which stops them from spending on gambling sites. This can prevent financial harm at a time when someone might be most struggling to control their spending.

While there are payment methods or tools that can give people more control, sometimes when we’re really struggling with our mental health we need the support of someone we trust. However, at the moment it isn’t that easy to give someone else control over our finances when we need it. 

You can go down the authorised route, like Power of Attorney, but this can be hard to set up and gives someone a lot of ongoing control, when what you might need is something light touch for a short period. There are some tools offered by some banks, like notifications around spending to a trusted person, that don’t need this formal authorisation, but those third party support tools aren’t that common. 

Instead, people with mental health problems and other circumstances, like a learning disability, are often using unauthorised workarounds, such as giving someone their card or online banking log-in details. This puts people at significant risk of fraud or financial abuse. That’s why we support the Vision and the call for more safe routes to enable trusted third party support.

When we’re going through a period of poor mental health it can be really difficult to manage our essential service accounts, like banking or energy, and interact with our providers. These providers can make it easier for us to do this through reasonable adjustments and asking about what support we need. 

But it can be so challenging to disclose your circumstances and your needs to one provider, let alone every single company you’re a customer of. So being able to disclose your support needs once and for this to then be shared with all your providers, known as tell us once, could make a huge difference. However, our recent research on this topic found that lots of people with mental health problems were supportive of the idea but concerned about things like whether they’d be in control of their data.

That’s why we think giving people control and choice over what is shared, with whom and when is a fundamental principle for any data sharing system. The proposal in the Consumer Vision for a smart data-enabled system is one way that this could be achieved. 

Beyond being in control of the information you share about what support you need, we also think control is essential in other types of data sharing systems, like open banking. We will soon be publishing a report on what we can learn from open banking as sharing expands into open finance and smart data. This includes how we can embed control in these systems from the beginning.

Innovation can have many benefits. Sometimes these are unknown until they become part of our everyday lives. But innovation can also leave people behind or create systems that make it harder to stay in control of spending when struggling with our mental health.

The Consumer Vision is an important step to ensure that the experiences and views of a range of consumers, including those with mental health problems, are embedded into future innovation in payments and data sharing.