976. Insights: Designing accessible fintech products for those with learning disabilities with Project Nemo

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1:14How accessible do you think financial services are? For many people with a disability, the answer is not that accessible. I'm Benjamin Ensor from 11FS, and on today's Fintech Insider Insights, we're taking a closer look at accessibility and how we can make financial services more inclusive. Over 1.5 million people in the UK alone experience some form of learning disability. But accessible banking is a global imperative. Not all disabilities are visible. And disabilities encompass a broad spectrum of challenges faced by people. Some include difficulties accessing technologies, cognitive impairments, or increased susceptibility to fraudsters and scammers.

1:57In this special episode, we're joined by Project Nemo, an organization working to highlight accessibility challenges from across financial services and bring together the tools of fintech to help solve some of these problems. So what exactly is Project Nemo? And what does it mean when we say we should be more Nemo? Let's find out. I'd like to introduce three guests. First of all, we have a very welcome return to Fintech Insider for Joanne Duar, co-founder of Project Nemo. Welcome back, Joanne. You're obviously well known to many people in fintech from your previous roles, but perhaps you can tell us a little bit about your role in founding Project Nemo and how it came to be.

2:35Absolutely. Well, thank you very much for the welcome and opportunity. Yeah, I've been in the fintech space for over a decade. I've been on this show a few times now and established Project Nemo a year ago, having come to realize that whilst we've been busy making payments faster, more streamlined, more secure, lots of different things. Have we really been thinking about making payments more accessible? And in fact, in addressing some of those other improvements, have we inadvertently forgotten accessibility? So Project Nemo generally was about the accessibility, both from a customer perspective and disability inclusion, which I also felt had been left behind within the diversity inclusion discussion.

3:25And Project Nemo has been looking to address the accessibility of all of our products and services. This particular project is a focus on learning disabilities, which is a subset of the wider disability inclusion conversation, and we'll come on to that in a moment. Fabulous. Thank you. We also have a FinTech Insider debut for Hannah Darley, Senior Director of Strategy at CINT. Hannah, it would be great if you could tell us a little bit about CINT and about your role there. Absolutely. Thank you for having me. So CINT is a technology transformation and acceleration partner. And as Senior Director of Strategy, I lead transformation and growth for global clients across sectors, including financial services, healthcare and energy.

4:14And my work centers on driving innovation and ensuring that technology-led change is balanced with human-centered design. So organizations have great business impact, but also deliver great customer experiences. And with Project Nemo, we've been privileged to co-create a prototype of a money management app with people with learning disabilities and their carers. And our goal really in this project was to show what's possible when you put Lyft experience at the heart of design. It's a shame the podcast is audio because it's harder to show people a demo, but it sounds fantastic. And I hope everyone listening to this gets a chance to see it as well as hear about it at some point.

4:54And we also have a FinTech Insider debut for Catherine Townsend, who is the UK Government Disability and Access Ambassador for the banking sector and also is Head of Customer Vulnerability, Access and Inclusion at Nationwide Building Society here in the UK. Fantastic to have you with us too, Catherine. Can you tell us a little bit about your ambassador role, your day job, and how you came to be involved with Project Nemo? I have been a disability inclusion advocate for as long as I can remember. But it became a profession after working in the branch design team actually back in Barclays around 15 years ago.

5:32And over the years, that turned into head of customer vulnerability and accessibility. And now I'm delighted to do that at Nationwide, where I've been for the last three years. My role as government disability and access ambassador for the banking sector has been a fantastic experience. A lot of people don't know what these roles are, so I'll just explain briefly. The UK government has 20 different government disability ambassadors for different sectors, from rail and retail to tourism and banking and insurance. These are leaders in their industry who can help drive disability inclusion through their networks and their experience and their change programs really.

6:16And so I've been doing that for nearly four years now. I'm just coming to the end of my time in that role. And actually that's how I became sort of connected with Jo really. I've been determined through that role to turn the dial on deaf inclusion and inclusion of people with a learning disability. And that's how Jo and I joined forces. Last October, so October 24, Nationwide won the inaugural Disability Inclusion Award at the Pay360 Awards, which Jo had been pivotal in launching. We met up shortly afterwards and realised that we both had a passion on learning disability. and within two months we were hosting the December Roundtable which kick-started this whole wonderful affair.

7:04Wow, if only every meeting was that productive. All right, well let's dive in to the new Safe Spending for Adults with a Learning Disability report that Project Nemo has just been published and I recommend to our listeners that you read it. In saying that, I'm conscious that some of our listeners are people with dyslexia who deliberately prefer listening to things to readings. I don't know if there's actually an audio version. But there's plenty of graphics and visuals in there. Jo, could you perhaps tell us a little bit more about how the report came about? But could you also just clarify the difference between a learning difficulty like dyslexia and a learning disability, just for those of our listeners who are maybe not familiar with the distinction?

7:45Yeah, so certainly. So we decided to work specifically with Mencap and their definitions of learning disability. of which there are 1.5 million people in the UK. And, you know, including their family members, that becomes 6 million people in itself who are, you know, closely associated with this particular community. You're right, it is distinct from learning difficulties or wider neurodiverse experiences. So it's specifically about learning disabilities as defined by Mencap. Thank you. Kat, perhaps you can tell us a little bit about the research process. Obviously, as Director of Research, I'm a bit of a research nerd.

8:37You have to be quite thoughtful when you approach sort of more vulnerable communities. Can you tell us a little bit about the research that was done for this, please? Yeah, sure. So whilst Jo and I co-chaired the December Roundtable at Nationwide last year, that identified that we needed certain action in certain spaces. And that's how we spun up particular work streams. And one of those work streams was new research and insights. And then we have another tech work stream, which we'll come on to later, which sort of shows the other side of it. But it was clear that the industry wanted a clear steer on what to think about, what to do.

9:16And Joe and I are quite impatient. We didn't want to have to wait for every banking provider in the UK to go off and do their own research. So Nationwide put their hand up and said, we'll do it. We'd love to do it. In fact, disability inclusion is key to our strategy at Nationwide as a modern mutual to be fairer, more inclusive, a banking provider. So it's a really great fit for us to create this open source content, not just that we can learn from that, but the whole industry can learn from that. And so we worked with Firefish, an independent research agency to do the work for us, obviously maintaining that professionalism and that independent nature that's really important to thorough research.

9:57And they conducted qualitative phase. So they held 15 in-depth paired interviews with people with learning disability and their trusted supporters for 90 minutes, really getting under the skin of what was important to them. And then they backed up those findings with a quant phase. So they went out to 300 more individuals with a learning disability online to engage them and validate the qualitative stage. And they also did a wider piece looking at other vulnerable groups to sort of peer assess some of the findings for the learning disability category. Thank you. Hannah, let's bring you in a little bit on this.

10:38What are some of the sort of most common challenges that people with learning disabilities have when they're trying to access financial services? Perhaps you can sort of summarise some of the highlights of the report for listeners who haven't had a chance to read it yet. What are some of the big difficulties that people with learning disabilities have trying to access financial services and why does that matter? I think what really stood out for me in the research was just how many people with learning disabilities and their carers are forced to rely on unsafe workarounds. So they're sharing passwords, they're sharing cards, or using children's accounts just to access basic banking.

11:16And, you know, this is everyday payments that they're wanting to make. It's making their life very, very hard on a daily basis. And ultimately, those workarounds just aren't safe and they leave them unprotected. What's forcing people into these workarounds? I mean, something like a children's account. I presume that's because it offers their carer or some other relative or someone else in their life an opportunity to sort of see what's in the account and sort of maybe help them in some way. But it sounds like it's kind of the wrong product for it. Joe or Hannah, one of you, what's pushing people into these sort of unsafe practices?

11:57Why are they having to find workarounds. If I describe a scenario and an example that helps bring the situation to life, if a young adult with learning disabilities has five pounds in their pockets and they're going to the shops to buy a can of Coke, the worst that's going to happen is that they will lose that five pound note, whether it's through spending five pounds when it was meant to be one pound twenty, whether it's, you know, something that else that happens along the route, whether it was initiated by them or initiated by somebody else. Once you translate to being digital payments in a digital world, and, you know, we know that the move away from cash is unrelenting, whatever we think.

12:53You know, it was 61 % of transactions in 2008 were cash and now it's 12%. So there's an absolute drop in use of cash. And so if somebody is having to use a card for a payment, the same can of Coke from the same shop, then whose card is it and what might happen? what else could happen with that card? What's the balance on the card? What transactions could happen? You know, who is looking after that balance? How can we help that individual make that transaction safely? And very often, I mean, the banks absolutely want to help individuals, but there is a very broad spectrum of capability. There's a very broad spectrum of need.

13:43And what we know full well is that there are in most scenarios there are parents and carers who know what precisely would be the best way of supporting that individual live their life complete transactions as independently as that individual can and should. And so what we've been trying to explore is Right. But what is the provision that's needed in order to enable that to happen? Kat, I mean, you've got experience supporting customers all the time. It's a real sort of varied picture because it goes back to the fact that not everybody is the same, even if they have the same impairment or the same access needs.

14:33There's a huge variety of needs. But banks haven't traditionally always thought about this community. We know, Joe and I have, you know, experienced the fact, both experienced the fact that within disability conversations, the learning disability part of that was absent. And so actually, you know, that's in accessibility conversations around the banking table. You know, I think this is why we wanted to do the report. We needed to really advocate and amplify the needs of these users for the first time because it's really been absent so far. It's a big proportion of the population, isn't it? Because, you know, 1.4 million people in the UK's population of 70-odd million.

15:13I mean, that's one in 100 people. And then to your point, Joe, you know, of course, all their families and so on. So it's a chunk. And presumably it's very much the same in other countries around the world. I presume that disabilities are sort of evenly distributed or fairly evenly distributed around the world. One of the other challenges, so you talked, Joe, very eloquently about the problem with cash and the replacement with sort of digital cash, electronic money, or whatever we want to call it, cards. In a sense, there's an element here of digital technologies have actually potentially made things worse for this group of users in the short term, even as they've sort of made them better for many other people.

15:55Hannah, is that a fair summary? In the short term, actually digital technologies have sort of made some things worse. Yeah, I think we love innovation and we love shiny new features in fintech. And actually, these kind of rapid innovation, it has a really, the impact on people with learned disabilities can be really disarming. And if an app changes overnight, suddenly they've got to relearn everything and their day is literally turned upside down. So whilst innovation is great, these rapid changes can have a really negative impact on people with learned disabilities who like stability. They like routine.

16:38I think to add to that, it's not just the cash. We've got a huge move to unattended terminals. And with an unattended terminal, you haven't got a cashier or a shopkeeper there right on hand to help somebody manage the process should they become stuck. So at multiple stages, we're taking out the human in the loop. And so often the human in the loop is the bridge between that enables a wider cross section of the population to be able to make payments and to interact with the world because they're able to just without any form of sort of process or training, you can just naturally see when somebody is struggling and lean in to help because that's what being human is.

17:26And part of the problem with the move to digital everything is that, you know, that's fine if it's been designed with your, you know, abilities, capabilities and needs in mind. But what's been fundamental that we found with this learning disabilities community, they have never been at the design table to be able to share what they would like as a community until this moment. And one of the beautiful things as to what we've learned in this process is there's been incredible ideation and innovation and creativity that's brought ideas that I think we'd all benefit from. And, you know, and I'm saying that as somebody who has been at the point of helping bring no end of different fintech products and services to life.

18:25Jo, I'm so pleased that you've raised that part about the human because it's so important. You know, at Nationwide, it's called to our strategy to have a branch present alongside technology. But in the research, we found that individuals, they want a fully accessible digital solution, but one that can connect to a human if you need that support. That's so telling. Who doesn't want to be able to reach out and say, I've got stuck or I need help or this is complicated or I don't know what I'm doing and have that, be able to raise that red flag if they need to. So it's really important. You've got to have that human at the heart of it, not just the human that you're designing for, but the humans who can support those individuals as well.

19:07There's a couple of really poignant sort of passages in the report where you've quoted directly from some of these users, where they're just saying things like, oh, you know, the man just wouldn't help me, or they just tried to fob me off onto a machine. And the sort of almost dread of a machine, which raises up, I suppose, two questions. So one question is, you know, with the sort of rapid advancement of artificial intelligence and so on, does that help or does that make the problem worse? Because you potentially get, you know, AI machines that simply don't recognize those human signs that maybe all of us as individuals recognize this is a person who's struggling here, but a machine would just carry on just doing its machine kind of thing.

19:50Do we think this problem actually could actually get worse for, you know, sorry, not this problem, these challenges could actually get worse for people because AI is just going to make the world more confusing and harder to deal with? I'm sure Joe will have a view on this. But just to say, first of all, I think you've got two things. You've got one, which is the topic of conversation. You know, our AI across the industry needs to be smart enough to understand when somebody needs to be connected to a human. But what if you can't actually access your app directly because Face ID doesn't work for you or Voice Authenticator doesn't work for you?

20:23Jo's got direct examples of people she's been working through for whom this is a real challenge. Jo, do you want to add anything there? Totally agree. It's built on that. You know, actually, we're not a sort of just the middle third of the population. You know, everybody's like that and needs those features and functionality. We have a full society that needs to be able to interact with the world. And we cannot think that we progress as society by thinking, right, it's okay, we'll build solutions that work for the 80 % and the 20 % on the edges. They'll just have to manage with cash or they'll just have to do something else.

21:06We need to build solutions and have a, and this is why it's so exciting building, having had these events just as we're coming into the new national payments vision, the new financial inclusion strategy, actually putting the needs of some of these often forgotten marginalized user groups who are, you know, often considered, you know, we'll come back to that later. It's a little bit hard. It's a little bit complicated. Actually bring those users' voices and needs front and center. And if we can solve for their needs, actually, we all benefit from a number of these ideas and features and functionality.

21:48Thank you. Yeah, Joe, I was just going to add that AI can absolutely help us personalize experience and make things more accessible. But it's not a silver bullet on its own. and the magic happens when you have AI, human insight and lived experience all together. I just want to wrap up this section with one last quick subject. Joe, you touched on it briefly, or I think actually it was Kat, I think you touched on it, about the difficulties sometimes people have using biometrics or other forms of security. And we've talked about how people often just want help from other people. And of course, the vast majority of people are wonderful and helpful and kind.

22:24But there are people out there who are not wonderful or kind or helpful. And, you know, there are fraudsters and others. My understanding is that people with learning difficulties are a little bit more susceptible to fraudsters and scammers than the rest of us. Though the rest of us are plenty susceptible as it is. How big an issue is that? Is that something that sort of came through in the research as well? I'm not really sure how I'm throwing that to maybe Kat. There's probably a few factors to consider here. I think, sadly, strangers or friends, and I use the word friends in inverted commas, do sometimes take advantage of trusting individuals.

23:02And indeed, Project Nemo's own co-founder, Chris Foster, talks openly about the time that he experienced this horrific form of abuse. Then there are the ways that individuals are forced to compromise their own security due to inaccessible systems. This is where banks and fintechs really need to lean into the research and understand what they can be doing. So, for example, high likelihood for these individuals of writing down pins, passcodes and sharing them because they're trying to bypass inaccessible systems, whereby pin entry just might not have been built for these users and isn't very accessible.

23:38So things like biometrics are key. And I think it's no surprise that the research found that 80 % of users praised Apple and Google Pay for making payments easy for probably just this reason. but you have to make sure that that biometrics journey is built accessibly and Project Nemo itself has found case studies of people with facial difference for example who are able to use face ID or for people who can't speak or use sign language and are asked to speak to authenticate and CINT's own demo found a lovely piece of functionality about pins and that use case so I don't know Hannah if you want to build on that.

24:14Yeah, we made it really accessible to be able to access your PIN in the app, but also in those moments where the user does freeze, the trusted third person can actually trigger PIN reveals. So the trusted third person does not see the PIN, but they can trigger it to display on the user's phone when they're in a moment of anxiety or crisis and just need to get the answer. If I can just build on that as well. We know from the activity that's happening in the counter fraud space, we all know as consumers, fraudsters are getting increasingly sophisticated and it's a whole enterprise in its own right.

24:59No longer are you just receiving emails about this Nigerian prince that's inherited$10 billion or whatever. They're increasingly hard to spot. And the danger is that those individuals that have digital signatures, any signs of vulnerability, will be picked up by fraudsters. And they'll double down on targeting those individuals. So we absolutely need to be mindful on ourselves doubling down to get ahead of that and ensure that we're putting those protections in place. It's our duty. Indeed. Thank you. So we've explored the challenges that people with learning disabilities can run into in financial services.

25:48But how can we make financial services more accessible for all groups? And more importantly, how can fintech help some of these problems?

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26:34Everything you need to lock in and unlock your potential at Equinox. Start today at equinox.com.

26:46Welcome back to Fintech Insider Insights, where we're talking about accessibility and making financial services more inclusive for those with learning difficulties. So it'd be great if we can dive into how sort of fintechs and financial technology can tackle financial inclusion or improve financial inclusion for people with disabilities. Now, you were talking earlier about how Project Nemo has been exploring and testing an app that could solve some of these problems. So Joanne and Hannah, perhaps you can tell us a little bit more. Maybe Joanne, you can tell us sort of what you were trying to achieve.