Tackling financial exclusion

Lloyds Bank has become the first financial services company to trial Signly, innovative British Sign Language (BSL) translation technology devised by Catalyst programme entrepreneur Mark Applin. The bank incorporated Signly’s functionality into both written and online material, enabling hard of hearing and deaf customers to use BSL to understand the financial material they were being shown.

Signly enables customers to scan Signly-enabled literature on their smartphone which provides translations into BSL through augmented reality. This is important because masses of essential content is not independently accessible for the 250,000 people in the UK that use some sign language in their daily life. Simply writing things down isn't enough because of low literacy rates among the deaf community and because BSL is its own language, constructed in a unique way.

Nick Williams, Lloyds Bank’s Consumer Digital director said: “We are always looking for new ways to support our customers and trialling this new technology is a great example. Signly provides a new tool to make it easier to engage with us. Improving our services to make them simple and intuitive for all our customers is key to removing barriers of financial exclusion.”

signly.co