SEA was founded in January 2017 by Dr Nicola Sharp-Jeffs following her 2016 Churchill Fellowship to the US and Australia to learn about best practice in responding to financial abuse. The innovative projects that she witnessed made her determined to ensure that women in the UK received the same response.

Following media coverage in early 2017, victim-survivors of economic abuse began to reach out. These women would go on to become founding members of the Experts by Experience Group (EEG) that continues to shape our work to this day.

After seven successful years, Nicola Sharp-Jeffs stepped down as CEO in May 2024. Following a period as interim CEO, Sam Smethers was appointed as permanent Chief Executive in March 2025 and will lead SEA as we embark on our ambitious new three-year strategy.

Our achievements

Together, we’ve taken vital steps towards a world where survivors can live their lives free from abuse and exploitation.

• Working alongside the EEG, we successfully called for the Domestic Abuse Act (2021) to include a statutory definition of economic abuse and recognise this form of domestic abuse in law for the very first time.
• With the support of SafeLives, academic Casandra Wiener, victim-survivors and other groups in the sector, we successfully called for the legislation on controlling or coercive behaviour to be extended to post-separation abuse.
• We were shortlisted in the Campaigning and Advocacy category at the 2019 Charity Awards for our work successfully influencing the Domestic Abuse Act.
• We transformed responses to economic abuse in the debt advice, domestic abuse, and financial services sectors through our ground-breaking, National Lottery Community Fund-funded partnership with Money Advice Plus.
• We piloted the national rollout of the Economic Abuse Evidence Form – devised by Money Advice Plus – to financial services firms. The pioneering ‘tell us once’ system allows debt advisers to evidence a victim-survivor’s experience of abuse to creditors quickly and effectively. By streamlining communication between debt advisers and financial services, the EAEF speeds up decisions, reduces requests for further information, and spares survivors the emotional distress of repeatedly sharing their story.
• We collaborated with UK Finance on the development, launch and updates to the Financial Abuse Code to support financial services firms to better support victim-survivors.
• We worked with Women’s Aid to successfully call for an emergency flee fund for victim-survivors. The Flee Fund has since been expanded to provide financial support to victim-survivors to help them rebuild their lives after abuse.
• We collaborated with the financial services sector, prompting major changes in how they support survivors, including the introduction of flee funds, specialist teams, and the development of innovative products.

Our future

Our new three-year strategy [link] builds on everything we’ve achieved to date, setting out our ambitious vision for systemic change to support survivors, disrupt abusers, and prevent economic abuse. Our aim is to deliver meaningful and lasting change so that over one million women and their children can achieve economic justice, safety, and freedom.