Credit Awareness Week returns for its fifth year

Returning for its fifth year in 2021, Credit Awareness Week has always been designed to empower consumers to improve their financial futures, by helping them understand their credit data and how it can help them achieve their aspirations.

The campaign centrepiece is a survey of more than 2,000 UK adults; a representative sample whose answers reveal how ‘credit aware’ people around the country actually are, how often they’ve checked their credit report and whether they know their credit score.

Already conducted by YouGov for Experian earlier this month, the research will provide comprehensive information on how consumers – by gender, sex, age, region and other characteristics – engage with and understand their own credit data.

It will also reveal how the pandemic has precipitated many individuals to check their information, but also general willingness to share data under open banking, and how many people know why credit information is important.

As the campaign has being running for five years, the 2021 results will show behaviour trends over that period and incremental successes in enabling more consumers to understand this information – and what it can determine for them.

Analysis of the survey results will be published exclusively on the Credit Strategy website on Friday 19 March.

As well as the research, Credit Awareness Week runs officially between 22 and 26 March, with Credit Strategy’s upcoming broadcast event, the Parliamentary Briefing, providing a platform to share the results, in a broadcast interview with Lisa Fretwell, managing director of data services at Experian.

Other speakers at the Parliamentary Briefing include economic secretary to the Treasury John Glen, Steve Coppard, deputy director for the government debt management function at the Cabinet Office, and Simon York, director of the fraud investigation service at HMRC.