It’s amazing how difficult those three words can be to answer. Who am I? Who am I? “Who the hell am I?”

It is during times like this, in difficult battles, like the one we are in for the protection and preservation of the unadulterated Individual Voluntary Arrangement (IVA) for people that I seek the answer myself of “Who am I?”

For me this tragedy perpetrated and fuelled by the Insolvency Exchange and their clients, (HSBC, Halifax / Bank of Scotland, Royal Bank of Scotland, Marks & Spencer Money and First Direct) is not a fight over money, but for me it is a fight for justice and maybe even, human rights. This desire and intentional exclusion of debtors from fair and reasonable repayment strategies like the IVA is nothing more than a pursuit of profits over people.

Some Insolvency Practitioners might be upset and fighting this battle because they fear the loss of their income if these changes come to be accepted. The reduction and permanent loss of IP income is a real concern and one which might come true without a fight.

To be honest, I support the Insolvency Practitioner’s right to earn any income, as much as they can from doing good things. Have a castle, have a tent, have a flat, I don’t care. I don’t care what you drive, your clothes don’t impress me, and I don’t care what kind of boat you have.

For me, Insolvency Practitioners are a means to an end. They are a qualified, talented and regulated professionals that can help bring justice to people in financial pain. Without highly compensated Insolvency Practitioners we are not going to have smart and intelligent professionals fighting for the rights and lives of debtors. Instead we’ll have sausage factories focused on the unit cost of cramming another person into an imperfect solution that does not fit and not thinking about the person behind the name.

Some Insolvency Practitioners are heroes. They offer services to the grandmother in tears, they’ve been known to help people buy cars when they’ve needed to get to work, some have given silent help to get families into a home, and more. Others are heroes to me because they care about providing the best service to the person in trouble and need. Some Insolvency Practitioners are my friends whom I respect and I am proud of and when they ask themselves “Who am I?” I think they may enjoy the answer they find.

We live in an imperfect world. There is pain and injustice, unfairness and dishonesty, given every day. In the world of debt advice, those of us on the front lines, hear stories of people being taken advantage of when they are in trouble. Some consumers have been charged large up-front fees to be put into an IVA, others have been shoved into an IVA with demanded payments that are too high to sustain, and the stories go on. But those stories are in the minority and certainly not the norm in the world of debt help. They stand out to us because they are so abnormal.

Now what is about to become normal in the world of debt help is the acceptance and perpetuation of hurdle rates, IVA exclusion and arbitrary fee caps for absolutely no good reason other than to protect the profits of banks. So when I ask myself, “Who am I?” I know that the pursuit of profits over the fair treatment of people is wrong.

Don’t get me wrong, I love to make money and I enjoy spending it but I enjoy making money by providing a good service and providing a benefit that makes the lives of people that turn to me for help, better. Banks on one side, offer this advantage, through the access to and use of credit people can have a better life. They can buy homes, send kids to school and have precious memories with their families. But on the other side it feels as if it is acceptable to purposefully punish people who are behind on bills they can’t pay.

I would love is to get the ring leaders at TIX and the creditors that feel that the “TIX Compliant IVA” is a fair and just action to really ask them what values and qualities inside of themselves makes them proud. Do they value the use of energy to purposefully and intentionally exclude people from fair, reasonable and sustainable solutions like the IVA? Can they honestly be proud of increasing the profits over treating people in pain fairly?

So while banks and their agents vilify those with debts and call them losers, thieves and worse, how can it be acceptable to neutralize all compassion for people in pain? What many lose sight of is that money problems and debt is not the result of a desire to screw the banks. It is the symptom and result of either overspending to mask or cover some pain or unconscious need or the result of unexpected episodes in life that leave us financially short.

Dear Mr. TIX, I would welcome you out of the ivory tower and strategy sessions to come and enjoy the front lines of debt advice. Go sit at a CAB or answer the phones at CCCS or Payplan. Come spend the day with me. But whatever you do, go listen to the words or look in the eyes of people in pain and turn to me and call that “just noise.” You may call me a radical and a bleeding heart, but trust me I am neither to an extreme. I guess what I am is just the son of parents that raised me to understand that some things in life are just wrong, cruel, mean and should not be tolerated.

If burying homeless children up to their heads in sand, setting them alight and smashing their skulls with hammers as they died would preserve the profits and cut the losses of banks, would that be acceptable?

And to that Mrs. HSBC, you are probably saying “stupid question” or "that was a cruel video"and you might even be calling me an asshole, but how is it much different than burying good people in debt up to their necks with hurdle rates, excluding them from competent professional advice by setting the income of IPs alight, and then denying them from access to an IVA that would resolve their problems in a reasonable and fair way?

The battle and fight over IVAs is not about IP income, it is about protecting the rights of good people to have fair and reasonable access to solutions that will allow them to repay their debt with responsibility and dignity.

If I died tomorrow I would hope that some would know that in my heart I fought for people that needed fighting for and tried to do the right thing whenever I could. When I ask myself “Who am I?” I want the answer to reflect the type of person I would want my daughter, my wife and my dog Dude, to be proud of.

So go ahead Ms. HBOS and RBS, turn to your friends Marks and Spencer and ask yourself, “Who am I?” Do you like what you see? Can you say you’re the proud child of good parents? Would you be ready to go home tonight and tell your kids that you had a good day putting profits over people? Is that the type of person that would make your children proud?

If you are involved in this fight and want to share information with me to expose this injustice in the works, you can contact me in confidence. Together, let’s work to do the right thing and not put the love of money over the love of our fellow man that just wants a fair chance to repay their debt.

If you can’t reach out to me to help, then do something just as brave and sign the online petition to preserve the rights of consumers and for banks to do nothing more than just honour the Banking Code they choose to serve.

Go ahead, I dare you, ask yourself, "Who am I?"