Powering trust in the UK’s Crisis Resilience Fund ecosystem

Vouchsafe is seeing unprecedented interest from schemes distributing money from the government’s new Crisis Resilience Fund.

The last few years have put real pressure on household finances, especially through rising energy and living costs.

At the same time, a growing support ecosystem has emerged, led by local authorities and private sector delivery partners, administering payments as cash, vouchers or bill support. The Crisis Resilience Fund is now the main vehicle for much of this support in England.

These services do some of the most important work in the country, but they face a difficult balancing act.

The application process needs to stay simple, because the people applying are under pressure and need help quickly. But where money, vouchers or bill support are being distributed at large scale, it becomes an obvious target for fraud, especially repeat applications made under different identities.

That is the challenge for scheme operators: keep fraud under control, meet funder requirements, and don’t make the journey so difficult that real applicants give up.

Organisations must explicitly set out how they plan to verify identity and eligibility as part of their CRF delivery plan.

Why these service users need a different approach

Users of these schemes tend to be more vulnerable, whether that’s because of lower digital confidence, limited access to devices or unstable housing.

This group is also much more likely to be among the 11 million affected by ID poverty. Traditional identity verification with a passport or driving licence is likely to be a serious barrier to them.

How Vouchsafe is helping

Vouchsafe is helping several of these services verify users in a way that is safer, more inclusive and better suited to the real world.

Our smart lookups allow lower-risk users to be verified entirely in the background using trusted data sources, without frisking them for documents.

From an accessibility point of view, this is the best possible user experience, because everything happens automatically and silently. This kind of verification gives very high conversion rates, so support reaches people faster.

But not everyone has a strong UK data trail. Where a smart lookup doesn’t return a good result, or where impersonation is a risk, Vouchsafe also supports classic identity and address verification, including a very wide range of photo ID and proof of address documents.

Our identity verification includes two industry firsts, for users who are badly served by legacy document checks:

• automatic support for eVisas; users provide their share code which is instantly validated with GOV.UK, completely eliminating document fraud
• a vouch from a trusted referee, to help users without good photo ID to get verified

Vouchsafe helps organisations replace legacy document checks with safe, easy digital ID acceptance, with inclusive fallbacks for those without.

If you want to add inclusive identity verification to your service, book a conversation or get a free 14-day trial, no credit card required.