2024 APSIPA Winner Emily Yang On Designing Inclusive Bank Services For Visually Impaired Users

With the gradual increase of global risks, how can we develop innovative practices to ensure a future where sustainability will become mainstream? The Asia Pacific Social Innovation Partnership Award (APSIPA) is established to explore dynamic social innovation models in the Asia Pacific and to motivate more change-makers to contribute to social innovation, discovering and celebrating social innovation partnerships that connect diverse stakeholders and make significant social impacts. Partnership cases are required to set the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (the SDGs) as their core value.

The award sets motivating social innovation partnerships as its purpose, integrating 17 SDGs sorted into three categories, Biosphere Sustainability, Inclusive Business and Social Prosperity. Three winners were chosen from each category and there was one Special Jury Prize chosen by the judging panel.

The Inclusive Business Award values socially innovative approaches to economic activities and commerce. Innovation, in terms of economics, does not only imply increase in income or employment, but also decrease in inequality and negative impacts, as well responsible measures to forward economic growth and cycle. The highly related corresponding SDGs are SDG8: Decent Work and Economic Growth, SDG9: Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure, SDG10: Reduced Inequality and SDG12: Responsible Consumption and Production.

Emily discusses identifying pain points preventing customers from using products or services and why this process is crucial for social entrepreneurs to help society be more inclusive of impaired or disabled communities.

Highlights from the Episode

(listen to the podcast for full details)

[Indio Myles] - To start off, can you please share a bit about your background and what led to your work in inclusive business and social innovation?

[Emily Yang] - The first stage of my career started in the banking industry when I served as a HR professional. The employees were my clients, so my job mostly involved creating a happy and satisfying working environment through designing reward systems, career development, roadmaps, performance appraisal schemes, et cetera. After 12 years of service, I started to run my own business in healthcare, franchising from Taiwan to mainland China. That was the era my service concept was solidified, and then I was fortunate enough to join Taipei Fubon Bank as the head of the Branding and Sustainability department. This team is responsible for developing the bank's brand promotion and sustainability initiatives. Speaking about my passion for social innovation, although this award nomination is for designing our financial services to be accessible for visually impaired users, this is not the first user friendly project undertaken by Taipei Fubon Bank. Instead, our service created for hearing impaired customers is what motivated us to develop this series of inclusive financial service designs. I remember it clearly; it was 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Taiwan government held a press conference every afternoon to report the latest news of the pandemic with sign language interpretation included. That was when I noticed that communication for customers who are hearing impaired, especially when conducting banking business, would be very challenging; none of the banks in Taiwan had thought of ways to help. With this awareness, our financially friendly service design projects began to take shape, and we became the first bank in Taiwan to offer sign language interpretation, both online and offline. Speaking of this, I have a story to share. After falling victim to an online shopping scam, there was a hearing-impaired customer who rushed to our branch with his friend, fearing that both their bank accounts may be hacked.

With the support of a sign language interpreter, our staff helped both to report the issue to the police and make refund applications through our customer service representatives from the shopping website to safeguard their assets.

But the friend's account was from another bank, not Taipei Fubon Bank. Still, our staff helped him without discrimination. This story was widely shared through their circles of friends, and the staff who had assisted them in preventing the scam became a hero amongst them. This positive social impact is the driving force for us to keep optimising our banking service for different customers.

As the head of Branding and Sustainability at Taipei Fubon Bank, how can social entrepreneurs effectively collaborate with diverse communities to identify pain points and develop solutions that create equitable outcomes?

If you think about the most considerate service you have experienced, the first thing which comes to your mind may be the time when a Starbucks staff member drew a little smiley face on your cup, or maybe a fine dining experience in a Michelin Star restaurant. Few people will think of banks, not even myself! I think this is because traditionally banks are best at serving people in need with good products, but not services, and that is the industry dynamic we would like to change. Since it is user related, the opportunity for social entrepreneurs, communities, and commercial brands to cooperate emerges from here. With Taipei Fubon Bank for example, in 2022, the connection between us and a social enterprise was built to conduct a focus group for visually impaired customers.

We started digital partnerships with advocacy groups to understand customer pain points and expectations aiming to optimise our online and offline services. Additionally, we collaborated with visually impaired customers firsthand to create training videos for our frontline staff on providing suitable services so we could rapidly establish a corporate culture of equitable treatment.

With this project, we evaluated the processes of various banking services, such as account opening, withdrawal, remittance, deposits, financial card loss, reporting, and even more for visually impaired customers. This turned into a triple win situation, because Taipei Fubon Bank, social entrepreneurs and communities all benefitted from it.

You have recently won an APSIPA Award, and it highlights your dedication and ability to innovate and create a social impact. What have been your observations of the social innovation movement in your country, and where do you see key opportunities arising for others?

From my viewpoint, giving up the sense of competition between banks on issues that promote social prosperity will be key to increasing outcomes for beneficiaries and implementing industry wide inclusive finance measures.

The goal of Taipei Fubon Bank's diverse inclusive financial service designs are to remove user pain points, bridge gaps, and erase prejudice for individuals with disabilities. However, there are over 30 bank brands in Taiwan, and we're not able to serve everyone from the market! We have too many competitors, which makes industry wide cooperation important to support a larger number of disabled people. To expand our positive influence, Taipei Fubon Bank proactively shares its results of our service design experiences and provides free manufacturing models of the service supplies with all the banks in Taiwan. Through widespread use of the tools we develop, other banks can spare their cost of mould design and production when producing their own branded supplies. It's an open-source concept, we hope to break the barrier among banks and collaborate to establish a more accessible financial sector, thereby widening its effect to reach individuals in need.

What is required from key stakeholders such as the government, not for profits or individuals to support businesses who are prioritising inclusivity?

For social entrepreneurs, I would say always design your product or service based on the user’s needs. It sounds cliche but let me give you an example. Last year we spoke with a group who is representing people with intellectual disabilities, and we found that easy to read manuals for common financial transactions are required for people with intellectual disabilities. They have difficulty understanding the steps involved in financial transactions before dealing with the bank or during the transaction, and this has resulted in a fear and unwillingness for them to interact with banks, or they make casual decisions to avoid further interaction with bank clerks. As a result, we conducted in depth interviews with a group of individuals with intellectual disabilities to learn about their most frequent use of banking services, which includes depositing or withdrawing money, and transferring both over the counter and through ATMs. Then we worked with several intellectual disability rights groups to create easy to read manuals about the above-mentioned transactions, and these manuals were reviewed four times by intellectual disability consultants to guarantee that all people with intellectual disabilities could comprehend the content of the guidebooks. Since the manual creation process, it has met the European criteria for easy-to-read manuals. It received the European Easy-to-Read Manual Badge, which is a certification guaranteeing the quality of guidebooks. Then there's the series of handbooks created by Taipei Fubon Bank which was launched early this year, and they were Taiwan's first easy to read financial handbooks provided from the private sector. Now, they have been distributed to 32 intellectual disability rights groups in Taiwan, and almost 10,000 people have benefited from using them (and the number continues to grow). Take our sign language services for example, as I mentioned, Taipei Fubon Bank was the first bank to offer this service, and then we shared our experience with other banks as well. After that, Taiwan's financial supervisory commissions found these services were not provided, and they hadn’t found out that this was a need for certain customers. Our governing institution requested every bank in Taiwan provides this service, so sometimes it's the corporations who can lead the government to decide on a new policy. It is the corporation’s responsibility to remind our government, because we are on the front line, and we can observe the actual needs of different customer.

That is our concept, not only to implement the service within the bank, but also to influence the whole industry. To broaden that, we even influence different industries, so now in Taiwan hospitals have started to introduce sign language services to their patients.

What key piece of advice to a social entrepreneur who are just beginning their journey in social enterprise and impact, what advice would you give them?

A very simple sentence, always design your product or service based on the user's needs. That sounds cliche, but it's what we're thinking when we make all our service designs here.

To finish off, what books of resources would you recommend for our audience?

I would like to share a book I read recently, the title translates to Moment Of Truth, and it’s Fun Ju Ti Yen written by Mr. Wun Ju Chen. The concept of the book is based on two assumptions, first that the company's resources are limited, so they will focus on the most valuable activities for the brand. The second assumption is that the customer’s time is also limited, so they will only pay attention to what interests them. Therefore, when companies interact with their customers, only when the customer's needs are fulfilled at critical moments will they be driven to buy, become frequent buyers, and spread the good reputation of the brand. These critical moments are called the Moment’s Of Truth (MOT). MOT’s usually happen at three times, the first being touch points between the company and customer. Then, they happen during the most satisfactory experiences with products and services, and finally during the process of how the service ends. Making wonderful service designs for these three timings might make customers remember your brand and come back to buy just by having such a good experience.

Mapping that concept to our projects, after understanding the pain point of the banking service experience for visually impaired people, we first collaborated with customers with the same disability to create training videos so we could provide the most suitable offline services at our first touch point, in bank branches.

Secondly, we evaluated and enhanced our detailed processes behind various banking services to create the most exquisite service experiences possible. For example, banking contracts are usually done through paperwork, so we made the account opening contracts able to voice out by smartphones for visually impaired customers, so they can listen and comprehend the terms in advance. Also, we developed a signature board to help them locate the size of the signature field while signing the contracts. For the last part of our service, since the size and materials used credit cards and deposit books from every bank are the same, we developed a brand recognition sticker to help visually impaired customers identify which credit card or deposit book in their hands belongs to Taipei Fubon Bank. We thought of making different logo stickers for other banks as well, but they have copyrights so we can't do that. For now, we can only print our own stickers with our own logo to help visually impaired customers by sticking it on their credit cards or bank books. The idea of creating great services at critical moments can be implemented in different industries also. Although this book is only written in Mandarin currently, I believe there must be other books with similar ideas in other languages. I recommend everyone to go and look for it, I'm sure you will be inspired as well.

This content is sponsored by Small and Medium Enterprise Administration, Ministry of Economic Affairs, Taiwan.