There's a picture most organisations carry in their heads of the employee who's struggling with money.
Junior, probably.
Renting, certainly.
Somewhere near the bottom of the pay scale, the person the hardship fund was designed for and the discounted shopping platform was bought for.
New insolvency figures suggest that picture is out of date.
Nearly 12,000 people went formally insolvent in England and Wales in June, according to the Insolvency Service, 16% more than a year earlier.
One in every 369 adults has now been through an insolvency in the past twelve months, up from one in 413 the year before.
Statistically, they are on your payroll.
What matters is where the growth came from.
It wasn't debt relief orders, the solution for people on low incomes with next to nothing behind them.
Those actually fell.
The rise was driven entirely by individual voluntary arrangements, up a third on last year and at their highest monthly level in over three years.
An IVA is the classic route for someone with a salary and a mortgage, because it requires regular repayments and, unlike bankruptcy, doesn't automatically put the house on the line.
The fastest-growing group of insolvent people in Britain, in other words, are people with steady incomes and homes of their own.
Employed, mortgaged, and formally unable to pay their debts.
Why financial stress at work goes unseen
These are precisely the employees your financial wellbeing programme was not built to catch.
They earn too much to feel entitled to help and too little to absorb a remortgage that has added hundreds of pounds a month to their outgoings.
They have the most to lose from admitting difficulty, because in plenty of workplaces a mid-career manager confessing to money problems still feels like a career risk in a way it never quite does for someone on an entry-level wage.
So they say nothing, service the debt with more debt, and eventually turn up in the Insolvency Service's spreadsheet rather than in anyone's one-to-one.
Salary, in other words, has stopped working as a proxy for financial health.
A financial wellbeing strategy that quietly assumes the strugglers sit in the bottom two pay bands has stopped being a strategy and become a comfort blanket for the people who wrote it.
It gets harder from here
The backdrop is not improving.
The Bank of England held rates at 3.75 per cent in June, but two members of its own committee voted to raise them, and Goldman Sachs has said there's a low hurdle for a couple of hikes this summer if energy price pressures keep building on the back of the Middle East conflict.
The Bank itself expects inflation to rise through the second half of the year as higher energy costs work their way into household bills.
For a homeowner rolling off a fixed-rate deal, every part of that sentence is bad news.
Mortgage pricing follows rate expectations, energy bills are heading up again just as winter arrives, and the group already driving the insolvency numbers is the group most exposed to both.
Should employers pivot their financial wellbeing support?
Not another poster campaign.
The useful moves are structural.
Strip the means-testing mindset out of financial support at work, in design and in tone, so that a departmental head can use it as unself-consciously as an apprentice.
Signpost free, regulated debt advice prominently.
Train managers to drop the assumption that seniority means solvency.
And treat the remortgage moment the way good employers treat parental leave or bereavement, as a known life event with known pressure attached, worth acknowledging before it becomes a crisis.
None of this is expensive.
Most of it is a change of aim rather than a change of budget.
The June figures will be forgotten by August.
The people in them won't be, at least not by their mortgage lenders.
Worth checking whether your employee financial wellbeing strategy would have spotted a single one of them.
Written by Caroline Chell
Head of Communications
