THE SERIES
Five works.
One case for change.
A manifesto asks for reform. These five works turn evidence into a public case for changing consumer credit, from the authority a borrower holds to the response when illness disrupts a household. Each takes a distinct problem, examines competing explanations and develops what institutions could do differently. The first establishes the wider argument; the others pursue its hardest questions. Their proposals remain open to challenge. The ambition is change that can be built, tested and judged by what it achieves.
Planned publication dates. Later works remain in development.
December 2026
01
Humanise Consumer Finance
The Life After The Decision
Follows credit into the life after the decision, connecting lived experience with new research, practical design and institutional responsibility. A foundation for reform that can be tested and put to work.
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Credit makes a promise about tomorrow. Once an application closes, a household must live with the repayment, the terms and the help available when circumstances change. A successful transaction does not settle whether the relationship is working.
Humanise Consumer Finance develops that argument through five movements. It examines fractures in the system, follows the consumer’s experience, proposes five theories for research to test, sets out a practical blueprint and considers the governance needed to sustain it.
The theories remain unvalidated. Their purpose is to make research useful in decisions about access, ongoing use, financial strain, repayment after default and repair of the credit record. The blueprint asks how institutions could respond more intelligently without surrendering accountability to technology.
Written for practitioners, researchers, regulators, investors and builders, the manifesto carries the argument from the harm people encounter to changes institutions can investigate, implement and judge by their consequences in people’s lives.
March 2027
Credit With Agency
When the Borrower Holds the Pen
Examines what changes when consumers hold meaningful authority over their credit relationships, including an agentic institution designed around that authority. Influence must reach the decision, with responsibility clear on both sides
02
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A borrower can receive options without having much influence over the terms that matter. Credit With Agency examines a stronger possibility: consumers who can shape the relationship from the application through everyday use, difficulty, recovery and repair.
Its most ambitious question concerns the institution itself. What would a credit institution designed around consumer agency look like, with agentic AI helping to run it? Consumer representatives, institutional agents and people would need to communicate through digital and spoken channels, with clear authority to act.
The design must confront unequal bargaining power, conflicts of interest and the costs of flexibility. A consumer’s agent should not become another route through which the institution gains control. Affordability, lawful decisions and commercial viability remain necessary.
The proposed institution is a research and design challenge. Its test is whether consumers gain usable influence, whether delegated powers can be limited or withdrawn, and whether the arrangement improves their treatment.
June 2027
03
Afraid to Ask
The Silence Between Hardship and Default
Follows the fear and silence surrounding financial difficulty and the institutional responses that can deepen it. Asking for help should lead somewhere useful, without becoming another burden for the person asking.
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A diagnosis, lost income, separation or bereavement can alter the ability to pay before a credit record shows a problem. The person may need help while also fearing what disclosure will change. Letters remain unopened; conversations become harder to begin.
Afraid to Ask follows the distance between difficulty and disclosure. It examines illness, mental health, caring responsibilities, hidden and coerced debt, then the letters, calls and records through which institutions respond. The household and the credit account may tell different stories.
Silence is not the whole explanation for default. Nor can a sympathetic conversation restore an income. The book distinguishes pressures people bring into a relationship from those that its terms and contact practices can add.
Its reform argument concerns help that is safe to seek and capable of changing something. A disclosure should reach a person or process with authority to respond, rather than require another account of the same distress.
September 2027
04
Fair by Omission
The Discrimination Credit No Longer Names
Examines how unequal treatment can travel through apparently neutral data, models and decisions. Leaving a characteristic out does not certify fairness; the outcome, its explanation, and the standard applied must withstand scrutiny.
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A model can omit a person’s race, sex or origin while other information carries their effects. Fair by Omission examines how unequal treatment can survive through the ordinary materials of lending, without assuming that every difference proves discrimination.
The inquiry follows geography, inherited disadvantage, thin credit records, training data, pricing and the use of credit information beyond lending. It asks what happens when a decision appears consistent but the conditions that produced its inputs were not.
The difficult comparisons remain visible. How should risk be measured? Which fairness standard governs the decision? Does automation narrow unequal treatment or reproduce it? How reliable are the classifications used to test the result?
The argument reaches into agents that can negotiate and act. More personal interaction must not become a new channel for prejudice. Reform requires scrutiny of inputs, processes and outcomes; explanations people can challenge; and continuing evidence that an apparent improvement actually lasts.
December 2027
05
Cancer and Credit
The Case for Taking the Loss
Cancer should not leave a household negotiating alone. This manifesto explores authorised AI support and who should carry unavoidable financial losses, giving families more room for treatment, recovery and life.
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Cancer changes the work of living while financial obligations continue. The World Health Organization’s 2026 report puts annual new cases at about 20.6 million. Behind that scale lie different households, resources and possibilities for support.
Cancer and Credit asks how advancing agentic AI could help people carry less administrative burden: assemble permitted information, find support, prepare requests, and pursue agreed arrangements with credit providers. Spoken and digital agents would act within authority the person understands, with human help available and health information protected from unrelated reuse.
The ambition goes beyond a more helpful conversation. It examines who should carry losses a household cannot reasonably bear, and how lenders, insurers, public arrangements or collective funding might share that responsibility.
This is the series’ most ambitious proposal: a global programme of research and reform. Its assistance must be tested for usefulness, accessibility and harm. Technology cannot make an unaffordable obligation affordable by explaining it more fluently.
A planned series from FinToMe Limited.