Co-producing financially inclusive systems for a sustainable and just world

Throughout the pandemic, Toynbee Hall, a community hub and University Settlement, supported 17 Londoners to capture their communities’ experience of lockdown. The peer researchers were all from communities most affected by the health consequences of the pandemic and its economic impact. They asked what drove that disproportionate impact and what could prevent it from occurring again in any future external shock. Their findings and policy recommendations are captured in Pandemic Stories (pdf).

As a long-standing social reform organisation, today Toynbee Hall supports so-called “hard to reach” communities to be co-designers, co-investigators and co-producers of new insight and innovation aimed at transforming the social and economic systems within which we live, so that those systems – and the products and services within them – positively contribute to creating a fairer and happier future for all.

A consistent theme throughout our community conversations is the mismatch between what people think financial services firms should care about (good customer outcomes, equality and the climate crisis) and what they actually prioritise (profit). So whilst we collaborate with intrepreneurs and entrepreneurs to design better products and services, we also explore what drives firms’ behaviours and decision-making, including the socio-political environment which shapes the regulation with which firms must comply. Our consensus is that the prevailing economic model of competition both fails consumers now and threatens our global future. In this session we’ll explore how co-creating with people experiencing exclusion and discrimination can not only increase financial inclusion, but also shape a more sustainable and just society.

The Speaker: 

Sian Williams is Director of Innovation and Policy at Toynbee Hall, a social reform charity in London’s East End, where she leads work on ensuring people with lived experience of exclusion and hardship are directly involved in shaping better policy and practice solutions. Sian has also led Toynbee Hall’s UK-wide financial inclusion and wellbeing work since 2009.

She is a member of the Financial Inclusion Policy Forum, Access to Cash Review Panel and Access to Cash Action Group, the Link Consumer Council, the Pay.UK End User Advisory Council and the UK Finance Consumer Advisory Group. She is also Chair of the financial system and banking reform think tank, Positive Money, Vice-Chair of the Financial Inclusion Commission, and a Non-Exec Director of the Financial Inclusion Forum, a UK-based group sharing international learning on financial inclusion.

Before joining Toynbee Hall, Sian was a British diplomat, with postings in Hong Kong and Beijing.

Image: Based on Tomas Petz' photo on Unsplash