Design of financial services

What is it?

A financial service is something that helps a customer deal with their finances. How well a financial service meets a customer’s needs can depend on how the service is designed and implemented. For many people experiencing disabilities or are Deaf, accessing financial services can be a great challenge. This page documents some of these impacts and some possible approaches to overcome these issues.

Articles

This Articles section includes research papers, news articles, and other information published on the Internet.

• “Financial Literacy and People Living with Disabilities” by Prosper Canada. This overview of financial literacy and people living with disabilities, including challenges facing consumers and approaches institutions can take to improve their reach by service and product design.

• “Banks facing calls to address Racial Barriers” by Melissa Shin / Advisor’s Edge. Article outlines how banks are dealing with systemic racism, and how it affects their customer service and lending practices. In particular the article cites challenges faced by black female entrepreneurs when accessing financial services such as securing loans. Banks offer unconscious bias training for employees, but advocates argue that more can be done.

• “Part 2: Increasing Financial Inclusion for People with Disabilities” by Jody Blaylock / Heartland Alliance. Approaches to make financial products more accessible for people with disabilities, including reduction of physical and digital barriers, education, inclusive products, collaboration etc.

• “Breaking Barriers for the Financially Excluded” by Moin Qazi / Daily Pioneer. Article defines the different kinds of exclusion that may emerge as a result of design of products, attitudinal stereotypes, high costs, mis-alignment of intent and so on.

• “Identifying and Removing Psychological Barriers to Seeking Financial Advice” by Dr Laurence Ashworth and Dr Lynette Purda, Smith School of Business, Queen’s University. This study explores the psychological traits related to willingness to seek out financial advice.

Experiences

This Experiences section includes stories, perspectives, and experiences submitted by people experiencing disabilities or is Deaf. Where necessary, personal information have been changed to protect the privacy of the people involved.

• Jose was not able to monitor his VISA card records because they didn’t work with his alternative access system, as a result there were numerous invalid charges. He can’t contest them because it requires a phone call, and he is non-speaking.

• Vanessa’s parents have left her investments to take care of her many essential needs since her car accident. The investment information is not in a format she can access, making it very difficult to monitor the status of the investment. She asked a neighbor to help. The neighbor made several bad choices that resulted in significant losses.

• Rebecca is threatened with losing her disability pension because she can’t complete the financial reporting forms which are incompatible with her speech recognition system.

• Ursula lives in a seniors housing complex. The only bank nearby is in a legacy bank building that is inaccessible to most of the residents of the complex because of the stairs. The bank has put a call bell outside to meet customers who can’t use the stairs. This doesn’t work very well for Ursula since she is losing her hearing and the traffic noise and wind makes it hard to hear outside. She has now heard that the bank is going to close the branch all together. This will leave most of her fellow residents without access to banking services. Most don’t have computers or smart phones.

• Monica was hired by one of the five major banks to boost their diversity hiring. Because almost all of the financial applications she needed to use were inaccessible, she feels she was set up for failure. She could not perform her job, but rather than attribute it to the inaccessible tools she was given, it was attributed to her and she was let go.

• Minesha is the owner of a small business. The budgeting, payroll and other financial tools she needs to run her business are all incompatible with the screen magnification and screen reading systems she relies on since her recent vision loss. She fears that she must close her business of more than 40 years, not because it isn’t successful but because the tools she needs exclude people with disabilities.

Other issues being raised or addressed

• Financial decision-makers often project a paternalistic relationship with people with disabilities and have difficulty abandoning persistent stereotypes about disability. 

• People with disabilities as public relations “pawns” or as a means to “wash” reputations.

• Everyone speaks their own language and comes with a particular perspective and framing. It takes time to establish a common language and understanding of the domain, and the priorities of the partnership.

• People with disabilities were often relegated solely to a passive consumer role, rather than as decision-makers, planners, designers and producers.

External groups

The External Groups section contains links to organizations or individuals who are working, advocating, or innovating in this space. The parties mentioned in this list are not endorsed by the IDRC.

• There is nothing in this list currently.

Contribute to this topic

Do you have an article or resource to add to this page? Do you have an experience you would like to share? Add your insight and perspective to this topic by using one of the following options:

• Use the comment feature on this page by either: 1) highlighting text on the page and select “Comment”; or 2) using the “Comment” section at the bottom of the page.

• Completing the article submission web form or by completing the article submission Word document and emailing it to jhung@ocadu.ca.

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