Transforming Financial Services: Inclusion and Accessibility in Banking

This episode explores the vital role of accessibility in fintech, highlighting efforts made by industry leaders to create inclusive financial solutions for individuals with disabilities. Through personal stories and expert insights, the discussion underscores the importance of understanding unique user needs and fosters a call to action for the industry to innovate and collaborate towards meaningful change.

• Kathryn Townsend discusses her dual role in promoting accessibility 
• Emphasis on the importance of language in shaping perceptions of disability 
• Addressing the specific needs of deaf consumers in financial services 
• Project Nemo’s focus on amplifying the voices of individuals with learning disabilities 
• Insights from Mark and Emily on navigating finance with learning disabilities 
• The Fintech Fringe Innovation Challenge aims to foster innovative solutions 
• Urgent call for the fintech community to prioritize disability inclusion

Chapters

• 0:00 Inclusion in Financial Services Accessibility
• 13:03 Financial Inclusion Fintech Innovation Challenge

Transcript

0:00

Hello and welcome to AXSChat. I'm delighted to welcome you all today. It's going to be a busy one, there's six of us on, so organise chaos. Firstly, welcome to our guests, Kathryn Townsend, Emily Baum and Mark Horrocks. Kathryn, I've known you for a long time. were at Barclays, now you're at the UK's global, actually the world's biggest building society nationwide, but you also have the role as government disability champion for the financial sector. Emily and Mark, you've been working on great project, project Nemo about disability inclusion in the FinTech sector, so lots to talk about. So maybe start with you Kathryn and say welcome to the show and please tell us a little bit about what you're doing in your role of head of accessibility and customer vulnerability nationwide. Thanks, Neil, and thanks everyone for having us on today. I'm really delighted to be here. Obviously, we've crossed paths over the years in this wonderful world and family of accessibility. You get to meet some incredible people like yourselves. so, yeah, guess day job here at Nationwide. been here for two and a half years, leading customer vulnerability and accessibility, and I was doing that at Barclays Bank before. Interestingly, I just want to call out this word vulnerability upfront because I know it can rub some people up the wrong way and I just want to get that out there. I, we and generally the banking industry do not believe that disabled people are vulnerable, but if the banks fail to make their products and services accessible, they will put customers in a vulnerable circumstance. Whereas other types of vulnerability, people are inherently vulnerable due to other characteristics, but just want to call that out. Language is important and I get that. But I'm a big passionate, I'm really extremely passionate about accessibility and that really stemmed from working in the branch design space where we had to make sure that physical spaces were accessible. So working at Barclays in the branch design team, actually how do you refurb a branch and make sure it's more accessible than you found it? We hadn't necessarily translated those same principles to all of the other channels and interactions. This is going back 10, 15 years. So the journey's been to apply inclusive design thinking to multi-channel access and the regulations have also changed a lot in that time as well and really caught up. So there's been a bit of carrot and a bit of stick in this, in the space of banking, which has meant that there's been a lot of change and a lot of opportunity to improve things for consumers. And I'm really delighted to do that now here at Nationwide and, you know, not having the same kind of environment. It is a different environment being in a building society. We don't have shareholders, we're here for our customers, we're purpose driven and we have a real proud branch network. So we are committed to investing in the high street and have 605 branches in the UK. And so that kind of idea of it's not digital first or digital only, it's your channel, your choice, your way, depending on your needs. And that's especially important for disabled consumers. And as you mentioned, Neil, I wear another hat as as the government disability and access ambassador. And that's been a pleasure to do that for the last three years. And I'm just in my final year in that role. And I can tell you a little bit more about that. But in a nutshell, that's me. Thank you very much. I think, you I'm aware of the ambassadors, but people outside of the UK probably aren't. We do know one other, Hector Minto, he's quite visible, but has been doing stuff in the tech space. But can you explain a little bit about the rationale behind the ambassador role? Because I think the UK is pretty unique in having these. Yeah, definitely. So there's roughly 20 different ambassadors. So think about your different industries from tourism, rail, retail, and there's a banking ambassador. And these are voluntary roles. We're not paid for these roles. And it's got an open brief, really, to help improve the lives of disabled people relevant to your sector, just using your knowledge, skills and experience. And they're normally a fixed three-year tenure. because of the government changeover in the UK, that's why I've been asked to stay on for an extra year, which was a really sensible and pragmatic solution. And so, you know, with that role, it could be really broad. We know there's so much to do on accessibility. And I was really conscious of not wanting to try and boil the ocean and then look back after my time had finished and not have delivered anything. I wanted to try to focus on... some particular areas. And so I identified through speaking to my counterparts, my peers across the other banks and building societies, thinking about what are the things that were on their pads around where did we see collective industry opportunity to drive change and make a difference within that three year, four year period. So the first priority was around support for deaf consumers. And I've done a considerable amount of work. on this over the last few years because, and I put myself in this bracket when I say this, about 10 years ago when I was at Barclays we worked on some amazing innovation to introduce digital access to interpreters and I genuinely thought brilliant, we're done, that's fantastic, onto the next challenge to solve. We've solved it for deaf customers, we've made digital interpretation a reality so people can get it on demand. But there was a nuance to thinking about what really are the other needs of deaf people? Have we really addressed everything? And we really hadn't. And that became clear to me by spending more time with the deaf community that it wasn't just about digital interpreters. And so we've been able to focus on that through my industry work and actually drive change. And some of the things for people on this call and listening, you know... A lot of people don't recognise that just putting something written down in front of a deaf person doesn't make it accessible. We can't say, but I sent you a letter, because that person's first language is sign. It's not English or another written language. So we have to think about what's the first language of that individual and have we made that communication as accessible as it can be? And a lot of people don't necessarily recognise that. They think, well I can offer it in written language. So We're on a journey to raise awareness of the needs of deaf consumers and put a spotlight on the solutions because the solutions are out there now. Technology is really catching up. And so It's about helping the industry to move forward. And I chair an industry group for one hour a month. And I've now got 35 different firms representing the biggest names on the high street in the UK, the biggest banks, building societies. probably covering most of the consumers in the UK. And We come together and we're sharing best practice, we're exchanging sort of appropriately, of course, tips and tricks on, how do we tackle this? What are the needs? What are the issues? What are the insights? And it's a model that's really worked. We've been able to evidence through data and we publish a report on an annual basis that this approach is driving change. We've seen in the last two weeks. Two banks in the UK launch new accessibility services for deaf people because of the work that we've been doing together. And I know you as Kat, not as a friend. So if people have heard of Kat Townsend, this is who we've got on today. And Kat, first of all, thank you for all the work and the leadership you've done. I, of course, am joining from the United States, where things aren't quite as bright and shiny over here. So I just want to say I'm very, very grateful for the work that's being done in the UK and Europe just to make sure we can be meaningfully included. Kat, do you mind telling us why Mark and Emily have joined us and maybe bring that part of the conversation? Thank you. absolutely. So my other priority as ambassador was to amplify the voices of people with a learning disability, because when I sit in circles and discussions, I don't hear enough discussion about disability inclusion, first and foremost, but even in those conversations of disability inclusion, where's the conversation and voices of people with a learning disability? So I've been trying to amplify that and raise awareness of how we can... how industry should be, should be thinking about these users. And so I met Jo Duard, who isn't on the call, but is the co-founder of Project Nemo that's looking to drive disability inclusion in the fintech sector. I met her last year and we got heads together. We could see that we were both spirited, passionate individuals and we sat down and we wanted to work on something together with my ambassador role and her role. And Jo describes this as, with all of the other work that she's doing with Project Nemo, she's not looking for something different or special treatment, she's looking for inclusion. But when it comes to learning disability, we do need to think differently. We need to think about purpose-built products and services that really cater to the needs of that person and their trusted supporters, which is different to other types of disability inclusion. So we got heads together. We're working on an amazing, exciting project which I can let my colleagues tell you about on the call and that's where I got to meet Emily and Mark on this current initiative around tackling safe spending for adults with a learning disability. And Kat, before you do that, can I just make one more comment since I did? I just do want to note that I really appreciate all the work that's being done to make sure people that are deaf can be included. Because I just did want to make this point because so often that community is not included in meaningful ways, only because they speak a different language and we're not sensitive to it all over the world. So I just did also want to really, really applaud you for all of that work. something that we can learn a lot from here in the United States. But I am excited about Project Nemo. And I know that Mark and Emily and I both have really amazing children, grown children, and I guess all of us, with intellectual disabilities. So I think I know right away why Mark and Emily really wanted to jump in here and be part of making a difference. So back over to you, Kat, so you can introduce them. Well, I will hand over and I'll let maybe Emily go first because we met first and then I'll hand over to Mark. So Emily over to you. Thanks Kat and I have to say I'm also a founding member of the Kat Townsend fan club because the stuff that this lady does puts us to shame and I feel like, you know, she's a positive example for us all to follow. So I had the pleasure of meeting Kat and I'd known Joe for years in the FinTech space, but I ambushed one of their meetings when I heard of the stuff that they were doing as a parent of a now adult child that has cerebral palsy as well as autism and other complex disabilities, knowing what she has to face on a day to day basis, both in general life, but also with how she interacts with her financial services products and the expectations. But for me, it was very fresh. She'd got to the state of 18 and the world was telling her she was an adult. And a lot of the controls and the guardrails that I could put in place as a parent suddenly disappeared and I was powerless. So I suppose meeting Kat and starting to talk to Joe more about Project Nemo came at a really fortuitous time where I was starting to think, what can I do with somebody with expertise and knowledge in the financial services set space in products in. consumer behaviours, what can I actually physically do to drive change? I don't want to just have lots of well-meaning conversations. I want to actually do something that's going to be in the hands of those people that need it most. And unfortunately, this is a segment that is just growing, whether people are being impacted through dementia and Alzheimer's on the on the higher end of the scale, although we are seeing in the UK an increase in younger people developing dementia and Alzheimer's, or whether it's the increase that we're seeing of people being bored, kids being bored with learning difficulties, or those that acquire brain injuries along the way, the market, unfortunately, the audience is growing. So the problem is still going to get bigger and bigger. So I decided it was time that I wanted to do something and Kat was very kind and Joe was very kind to let me join in on this party and then we had the pleasure of adding Mark to our band. Mark, you're on mute. Yeah, thanks, Amai. Yeah, I guess my route into the Project Nemo team is very similar to yours. A combination of industry experience and lived experience. I've been working in FinTech for a number of years and as we know, what FinTech is about is about using technology to improve the way that financial services are delivered. to consumers and through B2B channels. What that usually involves is, for example, now the removal of cash and the increase of digital, improved user interfaces, and getting smarter and smarter, and probably using less human interaction. So at the same time, parallel to that, similar to Emily, I've got a a 19 year old son, Alexander, with Down syndrome. so, while working FinTech, I've been watching his journey through financial services, but what happened in September of last year is he left home. He went away to a college for a three year course, vocational course, like any other college, and all of a sudden, he's not gonna be at home anymore, we're not gonna be there to... to look after him and guide him through. So I had to look around the market and say, well, what is there out there to give to our designers so can go away? But the truth is, there's also sorts of little solutions. There's bits and pieces of solutions from the front end onboarding all the way through to payments and through to sort of dashboard information. But it's not all in one place. So I met Joe and we had a meeting of minds. So we agreed immediately that through a combination of understanding what's going on in FinTech and your own lived experience, Project Nemo could actually tackle this problem. So I joined the team to tackle a specific channel which is looking at existing functionality and how we can harness that. And just to add to what Mark just said, a lot of the community use, parents have found hacks and workarounds with existing products that are out there, whether you use kids' cards, prepaid cards that are directed specifically for children, whether you have a Challenger Bank account and your parent has your PIN number and your logins and manages your balance and sweeps money to you. parents of kids with learning disabilities, we all find ways to leverage the market to create a solution and it is a half-hearted hack, if you will, just to make sure that you can provide some form of independence. but at the same time in safe environments. And this has very much led to the initiative that Mark's gonna talk to you guys about a bit more because it's all those hacks that kind of made us go, why are we doing this? We're smart people. can we tell people what Project Nemo is? I don't think we've done that. Why don't we tell them? I'm going to pass over to Kat for this one. So, Jo says that she did a lovely post actually about a year ago saying it was probably a year ago that she came up with this idea of wanting to tackle disability inclusion in FinTech. She'd seen firsthand as a CEO in a FinTech that through championing the voices of different groups, where was the disability inclusion? wasn't happening enough. and she could see that through her role as a leader and as an ally and she wanted to supercharge that. So she's been self-funding this initiative and driving such amazing change in the last few months just that she's been doing this to really drive that disability inclusion in FinTech. And she's got a new disability inclusion category in the Payments Association Award, which is a huge... awards programme in the UK for banks and fintechs that happened last October which is what Nationwide actually won the first disability award which is how we then sat down and nominations are open right now so if banks are doing brilliant stuff for disabled consumers nominate nominate let's get that recognition out there their deadline closes on the 31st of March I think in the Payments Association Awards So when Joe and I sat down and we identified that we both felt really strongly about learning disability inclusion, we wanted to host an event. So on 6th December here at Nationwide's offices in London, we had the most amazing event. Around 80 people from regulators, banks, building societies, fintechs, charities, people with lived experience came together and we had a roundtable discussion on this issue. and was incredible. We've actually got a two minute video and I hope we can share a link to when this goes out that really brings to life that event and also includes some of the amazing stories of individuals like Mark and Emily and their children talking about why this is so important. So off the back of that event, we've got incredible momentum and we're driving four work streams. I'll just give a brief summary and then we're going to go a bit into more detail on. Workstream 3, is really exciting and Mark will tell you more about that one. But Workstream 1 nationwide is really proudly supporting this work stream, which is to do new research and insight with people with lived experience to provide an open source report which will set out the user needs. So in the round table, people were saying, oh, but what do people really need? Do we really know? And how many people does this affect? know, the stats are out there, but they're not in one central place and we don't have current user needs defined for this audience. So we're working on the publication of that report and it should hopefully be out in the spring and that will be available to everybody to really drive change in this area. And we hope it will be a prompt and a call to action on industry. The second work stream is legal and regulatory. How do we look at what the law and regulation says and where there are nuances and tensions? In the UK, for example, the Mental Capacity Act defines that somebody should be given the least restrictive solution in a banking context or any context. Banks like to go for the most restrictive and say, give us your legal authority to act on this person's behalf because it's clear and it's controlled and banks like that sort of black and white. But those things are in tension. So we're really looking at how we can explore what's the appropriate solution for the person in the middle that doesn't remove their independence. And then we've got Workstreams 3 and 4, which are all about FinTech. So Mark, over to you on Workstream 3. Yeah, thanks Kat. So, work in three is to capture all the existing functionality that's out there within the FinTech world. One of the things that came out of the event that Kat mentioned was a general agreement, as I said earlier, that there is functionality out there through different suppliers, know, small suppliers, medium sized suppliers, that does part of the job, but not all of it. So we thought, what is the best way of taking this forward and engaging with the FinTech community? And the thought was, well, let's run a challenge. Let's go out to the FinTech community. So what we're running is the FinTech Fringe Innovation Challenge. And that is being run in partnership with Pay360, And Pay360 is, I think fair to say, UK's, certainly the UK's largest payments event. And it would claim to be slightly broader than that. And that takes place at the end of March, but also partnering with Fintech Fringe. And Fintech Fringe is a relatively new organization that runs events within the Fintech space to promote fintech companies and some partner them up with larger suppliers within the ecosystem. But they also run a platform called the fintech forum and that platform is what enables us to run a challenge. And the way it works is we have, we've launched a challenge and described a problem statement and that problem statement is Okay. And underneath that problem statement, we provide a bit of background. That challenge is launched on the platform with the problem statement. It is supported by supporting materials that any interested FinTech parties can go and access and look at. and decide whether they want to participate. It enables them to submit a form in their interest to participate. And then they have until the end of February to submit their solution to the problem statement in either a five minute video or in a short deck. What we wanted to do was open it up to all types of media. What we're looking for, ideally, is fintechs that can provide solution to the challenges. And they can either be... Well, ideally, they would be end-to-end solutions that are both consumer and B2B partner channel. In terms of the timeline beyond the entry into the competition, We'll be completing the judging quite quickly by the end of March. We'll select probably four to five winners and those winners will be invited then to showcase their solutions at the PATHE 360 conference on the 26th of March. We have a slot of about 90 minutes to showcase. And so what's in it for the FinTechs, there's 6,000 participants at the Pay360, which is a huge audience. So it gives them a chance to reach that sort of audience, to also pitch to much larger partners, and hopefully then take their solution onto proof of concept. And out of that, we hope we will then capture all of the ideas that are out there and consolidate them into an end-to-end solution. So that is the FinTech Challenge. We're very excited about it. It has actually launched on the website, but we're running on Monday afternoon at 3 p.m. UK time a live stream on the platform to digitally launch the the competition. So, very exciting. Sounds very exciting. know Antonio wanted to come in here, so go ahead. So we know that, you know, fintechs and banks, know, everyone is proud of their own apps and systems. Sometimes it represents the way how they differentiate from each other. But in this particular case, how we make sure that there's the navigation and the standards across the different entities participating somehow came to a common point. So if you are a customer of fintech A, or then Cosmo or Fintech B, you somehow don't get lost in the experience because you might end up with two different experiences accessible, but across different banks. Yeah, it's a good question. We're going into it to be deliberately open-minded. Rather than try and restrict and guide from the start, we're going in open-minded. What Emily has done in the background, and I've helped Emily a little bit with, create a functionality roadmap which lists what we believe is currently out there. And we will use that as a guide to navigate participants through because part of the governance of the whole challenge is that there are real-time Q &As. So we moderate on the platform. So we have the opportunity to ask questions like that and guide any of the participants through so everybody's getting the same information and the same message. There is no easy way to do it apart from to moderate as fairly and clearly and expertly as we can. And it'll filter down from a lot of questions to start with, hopefully into a much narrower channel. And there's not going to be one product that catches all. It's just not possible. But what we are aiming to do is to highlight those people that are bringing innovative solutions to this particular demographic or have solutions that are suitable for this demographic. And what we're trying to incentivize and encourage is for people to look at what they can do on their products today and almost turn that configurability on so that they are thinking about the needs of people with learning difficulties. how they can cater to that particular audience. So I mean, I think I speak on behalf of all of us in a very nerdy, fintech-y way, very excited about this and can't wait to see all the applications come in. And we've got some key judges as well because we've got actual users that will be our judges as well. So we'll have people with learning difficulties testing the products. I know that we're pretty much out of time and Neil's going to close, but we would love for you, Neil, you could do yours, but maybe somebody can recap everything and make sure the audience knows. And we'll give all the information out too, let's at least say the website one time. But, Neil, let me turn it over to you. Thank you, Debra. I was actually going to say, just linking back before we close, was about the stuff that you were talking about where you identified user needs. This was a process that we went through with the W3C for cognitive accessibility. So, what you've gathered could be shared, and you said it's open source already, but let's make the explicit connection to the standards bodies. I think that really helps. And then there's the other thing that drives a lot of this, which is the financial regulations and things like PSD2 and so on enable people to bank with one bank and use an app of another one that works for them. So where you're identifying features that work for particular groups that meet particular needs, you can highlight that to people and they can they can highlight apps for one particular need because as Emily said, no one is going to be able to produce a single product work for every need. So, I think this is great work. I'm also really excited about this. I have two cognitive accessibility needs, I'm dyslexic and ADHD and I screw up online banking all the time. So, I'm excited about it too. So thank you so much for coming on and talking about this. So you can find the website. It is a co.uk website. It's not anything to do with deep sleep. it's it's HTTPS colon forward slash forward slash project Nemo. And that's an NEMO.co.uk. Thank you to Kathryn Katz. Emily and Mark, thank you also to our friends at Amazon and MyClearText for keeping us online and keeping us captioned. And I look forward to continuing this conversation on social media. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.