Iām Elizabeth Blakelock - a disabled single mum living in Suffolk. This year I joined Monzo to be our Accessibility and Inclusion manager. I get to focus on delivering our vision of making money work for everyone.
My work is steered by the experiences of customers like you, particularly people facing accessibility barriers. Today Iām here to share my first big project - making sure we can communicate with our customers in British Sign Language (BSL)
Weāve partnered with SignLive, an online interpreting service for British Sign Language (BSL). This means BSL users can now chat with our customer support team through a fully-accredited interpreter, in real time, using video relay services.
How it works
To access SignLiveās free services, you can download the app on any iOS or Android device. Or head to the SignLive website and use the web application.
Once youāve created a profile, log in to access a directory of UK businesses that offer interpretation services on the SignLive platform.Chatting with Monzo using BSL.
To chat to someone at Monzo using BSL, log in to your SignLive app and find and tap on āMonzoā in the directory. Thisāll connect you with an interpreter, whoāll relay the conversation to one of our customer support team members there and then.This wonāt add any time or additional steps to your call, so we can help you as quickly as possible. You can reach us using SignLive 7am to 8pm, Monday to Sunday.
Why this matters
We recognise that everyone should be able to manage their money easily, which includes speaking in your preferred language. This partnership is just one of our commitments to accessibility and inclusion for all of our customers.
Brilliant work. Iām sure this is very helpful for those who need it.
Will the support be enhanced? I only ask as almost every time Iāve asked for support in the last few years Iāve been passed pillar to post between people with literally one sentence said between. How is this going to change given this is a much more āliveā chat than regular support.
I just hope the interpreter is ready to sign āIām just passing you on toā¦ā a hundred timesā¦
I have mixed feelings about this. Overall itās a right step in the right direction - but can we just at least be honest and say you did this because itās a legal requirement - if Monzo really wanted to do this for itās customers, it wouldāve done it a long time ago.
Did Monzo directly engage with deaf individuals to understand how this might benefit them, and were they involved in testing the product before launch?
Iām sorry this has been your experience - Iām hoping this will be a big change I can contribute to, making things more accessible by supporting our front line teams being able to support many more queries. Important for all of our customers not only for people facing accessibility barriers! Thank you for sharing here - it gives us the insight we need to keep improving.
Thank you for taking the time to share this so I can check in. For BSL users the process is to support a call rather than in-app chat and this has been confirmed. Please keep sharing where you see issues - it helps us to keep getting better.
Thank you for taking the time to share this perspective - its a really important one.
Disability campaigners have fought for equal rights across the globe. To support inclusion of Disabled people, we can see their rights to access banking services in law, regulation and industry standards. Some of these are āprinciples basedā where we get to decide how we support Disabled people as long as they get what the rules set out. Others are more specific - outlining what we should make sure we provide as a minimum standard.
For this change weāve chosen to go for best practice rather than continuing with a legal - but less supportive - way of communicating with our customers in British Sign Language. We are really lucky to be part of a Financial Services working group which connects us to the experiences of Deaf customers to set our plans. We also focused on choosing a partner that is owned and run by Deaf people to increase our confidence our customers would get the best experience.
Wow that turned into a really long response! Hope that helps lift the curtain on our decision making and thank you again for sharing your thoughts in our community.
Thanks for the response. Iām a little confused by this line. Are you saying youāre following the law or not on this. The Equality Act 2010 clearly says:
The Equality Act imposes on service providers a legal obligation to make reasonable adjustments in communicating with them
For what itās worth, I am very supportive of this move, I think itās great an also great that you worked with Deaf Individuals to understand how this would work with them. But please donāt say you chose to do this when the law literally says you have to - Before this what was Monzo doing to provide āreasonable adjustmentsā to Deaf Individuals.
Theyāre saying that theyāre trying to exceed their legal accessibility obligations for servicing deaf folks. Thatās their choice that they didnāt have to make (but chose to anyway) in order to comply with the law.
This is great to see land - for many D/deaf people English isnāt their first language, and BSL is a unique language with different sentece structure than English - so for many who sign BSL as their primary language, there is a barrier to using just Chat (in case that info is new to some!*)
Itās great to see Inclusion being built - and often designing things with inclusive principles makes things easier and more accessible for all - so great to see.
Absolutely. Iām really glad that theyāve done this, even if it might not seem it from the earlier posts. Iāve recently started to learn BSL and itās really highlighted just how much of a language in its own right it is.
I think there are a lot of advantages to what theyāve done, for example helping to contextualise whatās being asked on a screen.
