By Marlee Ribnick
Every day, financial institutions — all too often unknowingly — serve a group of customers who are fighting or recovering from a silent, devastating and unidentified personal battle: survivors of domestic abuse. According to the National Network to End Domestic Violence, 99% of domestic violence cases involve financial abuse, in which abusers limit their victim’s access to assets like cash, credit lines and vehicles. It also can include blocking economic opportunities through employment and education. And though financial institutions are well positioned to help, data from Freeform.org claims that 75% of survivors never seek help from their bank. This is a hefty service gap for the 40 million Americans who experience this kind of abuse. But banks can position themselves as active resources.
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“Survivors are more likely to interact with a bank than they are a domestic violence service provider such as a hotline or a shelter,” says FinAbility founder and CEO Stacy Sawin. At their best, Sawin said, banks are a place where they can find support and build trust.
To do so, banks need to understand how financial abuse operates, explains Christa Kuberry, FinAbility’s director of partnerships. This can be challenging, because abuse is perpetuated “through things that are not so explicit like exploitation and control and sabotage.”
“Financial abuse cannot exist without emotional abuse,” says Joleen Fuller, director of programs at FinAbility, explaining that survivors have “a lot of shame” as they move through the world with a lot of debt, which often was coerced. Many survivors are in debt because it was their only choice to get themselves, and their children, to safety, Fuller said.
Some traditional banking practices can unintentionally enable abuse, Kuberry says. When survivors flee without documentation, for example, rigid ID verification can become a roadblock to survival. She also noted the perils of paper statements unknowingly being sent to addresses that are monitored by abusers. The intricacies and challenges go on.
Sawin notes that financial institutions aren’t always interacting with domestic violence victims at the point of acute crisis and fleeing — those moments are a small percentage of a survivor’s experience. “Pre-relationship, during … [it] can be a decade-long process of rebuilding their finances.” Banks can be present through every stage.
By employing trauma-informed principles to current practices, banks can start to knowingly serve survivors without an overhaul of policies — “not through complexity or policy,” says Kuberry, but through existing practices.
FinAbility isn’t drawing this conclusion alone. The firm formed a banking financial advisory board consisting of bank leaders who work together to build applicable and achievable programming and resources. “We are thinking about survivors and being survivor-focused in our content as well as understanding how this would function and be viable for a bank,” says Kuberry.
Angela Scott, commercial bank marketing director at Columbia Bank in Tacoma, Washington, is a recent addition to the board. “I saw Stacy speak at an Oregon Bankers Association event,” Scott says, who heard her story and was inspired by FinAbility’s mission. She learned that financial abuse is prevalent across class, economic spectrums and gender, something she wished she knew during her early career as a teller.
“When we think about domestic violence, we think about that as physical. I don’t think that enough people are aware of how deep this can go from the perspective of financial abuse,” says Scott, who notes that developing that expertise can help banks identify early red flags that, without training, may seem more benign. “It doesn’t start as a whole ripping away of financial autonomy. It’s a very slow build.”
To be clear, FinAbility is not positing that frontline staff become advocates or professionals in this space. Fuller said the aim is to build a “culture of support” in the banking system, to ensure bankers know where to call and where to look when they see a red flag. Connecting clients with the National Domestic Violence Hotline is a great start (contact information below). “Be mindful of how to hand over that information confidentially,” Fuller adds. (She suggests leaving helpful information in the restrooms.)
Scott describes years of sitting across from customers and getting an unnerving feeling that something deeper was going on. “How do you go beyond a gut feeling? Real, practical guidance and contextualizing the red flags to look for,” she continues. She knows this strategy can work for addressing the financial abuse that accompanies domestic violence — because banks have already made strides doing the same to combat elder financial abuse.
When survivors look for financial education, they do so with caution. Many survivors have been made to feel like they’re incapable of managing money, or they’ve not had access to money at all. Their entry point to financial education isn’t a standard entry-level course.
To address this need, FinAbility offers a financial mentorship program to train volunteer financial services professionals on the basics of domestic and financial abuse. Bankers are paired with a survivor who wants to restart their financial journey, often while dealing with fallout from the abusive relationship. The program has no mandated curriculum and is survivor-led. Participants also benefit from a savings match program.
With the partnership of its banking financial advisory board, FinAbility is exploring the possibility of creating a certification program for frontline staff. The firm is in conversations with several organizations about piloting this initiative. The goal? To implement awareness and systemic change in lockstep with their financial industry partners. Together, they aim to develop financial institutions that survivors can bank with and trust.
