More than half (53%) of adults in the UK are in some sense considered to be financially ‘vulnerable’, according to a Financial Conduct Authority study into the impact of COVID-19 on the lives of consumers.

The regulator’s Financial Lives tracking survey, together with a supplementary COVID-19 panel survey of more than 22,000 adults conducted in October 2020, revealed that 27.7 million adults in the UK display characteristics of vulnerability, such as low financial resilience, poor health or recent negative life events.

That is a 15% increase since March 2020, when the pandemic really began to take hold in...