Economic abuse and coerced debt – part of a number of vulnerabilities that UK legislation is designed to prevent and punish – aren't easy problems to solve if advisors don't know where the sources are, who is affected, and when. A new UK business has been set up which uses modern tech to help solve the riddle. We talk to its founder.

Millions of UK citizens face financial vulnerabilities that go beyond levels of income, including dangers of domestic abuse, fraud and coerced debt. A total of 33 firms have signed the UK Finance Financial Abuse Code; they must be fully compliant by 1 November this year. The clock is ticking.

But the problem is knowing when and where these cases of wrongdoing take place. It turns out that AI might help be part of the solution. 

Last week (19 June) the Home Office and the organisation Surviving Economic Abuse published polling from Ipsos, among 5,000 adults, and six banks – Monzo, TSB, Metro Bank, Santander, Revolut and HSBC. The poll found that one in six men aged 18 to 24 do not see taking out credit in someone else's name as abuse, four times the rate of men aged 45 to 54.

“That's coerced debt sitting inside ordinary financial products, and the generation now forming wealth relationships is the least likely to name it. It shifts the story from `does this happen?’ to `the next cohort of clients won't even recognise it’,” Caroline Wells (pictured below), who has founded the business, Iris, told this publication. Iris, a UK-registered company, is a signal-processing engine with confidence scoring – deterministic, auditable, not generative AI.

Caroline Wells

Wells, who spent 25 years marketing wealth and financial services, including stints at Coutts, Barclays and CBRE Investment Management, argues that the gap in information about such abuses needs to be closed if lawmakers’ good intentions are to become reality. 

Iris is backed by founder capital, Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme (SEIS)-qualifying investment and a technology investor. Ian Ewart, who has been involved in several businesses, and served in senior roles at Coutts and Barclays, advises Iris. Wells works with the domestic-abuse campaigner Carol Whicher, who has led the fight to make Clare’s Law work as intended. (The law is the UK’s Domestic Violence Disclosure Scheme.)

The name “Iris” is for sight and perception, the iris of the eye and the Greek messenger goddess. The firm’s full name is Iris Anticipa Ltd. “Anticipa” comes from the Latin for foreseeing. 

“The service for wealth and investment managers will screen client communications for the harms inside advised wealth: economic abuse and coerced debt, domestic abuse surfacing as financial control, and romance and investment fraud targeting older clients,” Wells explained to WealthBriefing in a note. “It deploys inside the firm's own perimeter – nothing leaves the bank. Client data isn't sent to any third party and never trains an outside model.”

Iris does not scan single messages, but it reads behavioural patterns across whole conversations – the sequence of pressure, control and instruction that builds over months, invisible in one transaction at a time. Each alert carries a confidence score and an audit trail that a firm can put in front of a regulator. 

“The engine also reads the advice relationship itself – third-party pressure inside suitability and advice meetings, including direction from off-camera on-video calls,” Wells continued, noting that the last element is important for wealth managers, because advisory meetings are the wealth channel and untouched by retail tools.

There are tailwinds behind such innovations: Besides the UK Finance Financial Abuse Code, there is also the offence of failure to prevent fraud under the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act (in force on large organisations since September 2025). The Consumer Duty regime, in force since July 2023, requires firms to prove that they serve their clients’ best interests and perform as advertised.

There’s a major problem. Wells referred to the Financial Conduct Authority's Financial Lives survey count, which gives 26.4 million UK adults – 49 per cent – with characteristics of vulnerability. Surviving Economic Abuse's Ipsos polling puts economic abuse at one in seven UK women in a single year.

Vulnerabilities
The topic of vulnerability has been an industry talking point for some time. While there are concerns in some quarters about the dangers of misusing technology – as in the furore about social media platforms’ use by the young – technology can also help solve problems or at least flag them. 

The UK-based technology firm working with financial advisors, EV, referred in a note back in November 2020 about “how technology can help protect your most vulnerable customers in financial services.” In January 2024, Anna O’Carroll, a senior associate at law firm Kingsley Napley, talked about vulnerable clients, such as the elderly.  

There are other examples of firms raising awareness and steering staff to be alert for problems. For example, about a decade ago, Julius Baer told advisors that they need to be more alert to signs of clients’ cognitive decline. To a degree, this also demonstrates the enduring importance of the wealth manager as "trusted advisor." See another example of what the sector says it has been doing in this respect.

An understanding of vulnerability fits with the theme of “protecting the client” that this publication sets as one of the central issues for wealth management today. It can range from using legitimate privacy protection methods through to using lasting powers of attorney, trusts, privacy protections and vetting family office staff.

Red flags
Wells said Iris can create a red flag where generative AI is being used in messages to a client – scripted grooming runs at a different tempo from a human voice.

“Every hidden harm has its own distinct shape: coercion, fraud, elder abuse, financial exploitation. Behind the engine sits our authority selection methodology – we assessed 1,300 detection methodologies drawn from regulatory and safeguarding authorities across 17 source jurisdictions and retained just over 1,000 of the most robust,” she said. Nine patent families protect the Iris architecture: seven have been filed, covering 46 specifications and 900-plus claims; two further families have been drafted. The areas covered – 43 in all – range from retail banking to dating platforms.

Not-for-profit
Alongside the engine licensed to firms, Iris is establishing a not-for-profit arm aimed at the other side of the same problem, Wells said, which is helping survivors of domestic and economic abuse evidence the coercion and coerced debt carried out in their name. 

“Where the wealth-management service runs inside a firm’s own perimeter, the charitable arm is built for the people the harm happens to, giving them an auditable record of a pattern that rarely leaves a single transaction to point at,” she said.

“I’m doing this because I’ve watched how invisible coerced debt is, including close to home. Debt taken in someone’s name, under pressure they can’t easily prove, surfacing later as theirs to repay. That’s why the charitable arm matters to me as much as the commercial one,” Wells said. 

Coercion and cuckoos
Harms inside wealth cover areas such as economic abuse and coerced debt, domestic abuse surfacing as financial control, elder exploitation, and romance and investment fraud targeting older clients. 

There are terms such as “coerced debt” and “cuckooing” that advisors must become aware of. 

“Coerced debt is debt an abuser forces, deceives or controls someone into taking on in their own name. What sets it apart from every other form of domestic abuse is a third party: the lender. The loan is real and the contract is enforceable, so freeing the victim means dealing with the debt, not only with the person who engineered it,” Wells said. “Around 1.6 million UK adults have lived it, yet almost seven in 10 have never heard the term. Most never get help: 58 per cent of those affected in the past year didn’t seek debt advice, 48 per cent take a hit to their credit record, and only 28 per cent secure any write-off. A conviction changes none of it. You can watch the abuser found guilty and still owe the full sum.”

“I draw a direct parallel with cuckooing, the taking over of someone’s home to run crime through it, which parliament made a standalone offence in the Crime and Policing Act 2026,” she said. 

Iris operates a licensing model and is deployed inside a firm: “Nothing leaves the bank, we never see client data, and none of it trains an outside model. We maintain the methodology and scan the regulatory horizon; the firm runs the engine on its own systems,” Wells said.

Call to action
Wells said further action by lawmakers is needed.

“Coerced debt is solvable. The fix is shared across every institution that touches it, and each needs to take the part that’s theirs,” she said.

“Lawmakers can create a clear route to discharge a coerced debt once the coercion is evidenced, the way a fraudulent transaction is reversed, and extend that remedy to cohabitants who currently get nothing.

“Creditors, banks and beyond, can read for the pattern at the point of lending rather than wait for a disclosure form, and treat coerced debt as the Consumer Duty expectation it already is. The FCA and UK Finance can turn the voluntary Financial Abuse Code into a supervised expectation evidenced by detection. And the credit reference agencies can give a file a way to show a debt was taken under coercion, with a route to repair the record the abuse damaged,” she concluded.