They will have used customer service skills rather than compliance skills to do this, and this may decide where in a firm the issue of vulnerable customers is to be owned.

The Just report suggests that we are only at the start of what looks like quite a long journey to treating vulnerable customers appropriately as demographic changes in the make-up of the UK’s population put increasingly urgent pressure on companies to accommodate more people rendered vulnerable by illnesses or mental infirmities.

The statistics do not lie. In 1998, around one in six people (15.9 per cent) were aged 65 years or above in the UK. This increased to one in every five people by 2018 (18.3 per cent), and is projected to reach around one in every four people (24.2 per cent) by 2038, according to the Office of National Statistics.

There might be a need to use more new technology to identify specific vulnerabilities earlier. Babylon Healthcare uses artificial intelligence to uncover early onset dementia, for example.

Should the retirement market be following suit?

There is the prospect of developing a cross-industry blockchain solution for finding and unlocking all relevant policies belonging to someone who has just handed lasting power of attorney over to a trusted person to help children sort out the financial affairs of their elderly parents faster, for example.

There is certainly a need for more providers to be drafting in the specialists, currently found in the charity sector, to train staff on how to spot and support people with dementia. This sort of cross-fertilisation is beginning to happen now, Just’s research found.

It is clear from a thorough read of the Just report and the FCA’s new guidance on this important topic that there is a great deal of work for the industry still to do.

There is clearly a massive opportunity for individual companies (and the market as a whole) if they can be seen to treat vulnerable customers with greater care, compassion and expertise – serving them better as a result.

Any firms that fail to rise to this challenge will be left behind in a world where the concept of equal opportunities is widely accepted as meaning that we all have a duty to adapt our customer offerings, so that those suffering with vulnerabilities can still be fully included in society by making appropriate allowances for them or their carers.

Adrian Boulding is head of retirement strategy at Dunstan Thomas