PODCAST | Banking on everyone: Why inclusion is the next competitive advantage - Trade Treasury Payments

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PODCAST | Banking on everyone: Why inclusion is the next competitive advantage

A quiet transformation is unfolding in finance. Despite all the digital upgrades and capital flows, one gap remains glaring: people with disabilities continue to be left out.

Around 15% of the global population lives with disabilities, and 80% of those are in developing markets. For the trade and supply chain finance world, this presents a significant opportunity for more inclusivity.  

They represent the largest group of financially excluded individuals worldwide.

The Asian Development Bank’s (ADB) Trade and Supply Chain Finance Programme (TSCFP) recently launched a two-year Disability Inclusion Project to improve accessibility for people with disabilities and partner banks across Asia. 

By working with 88 banks in over 14 countries, the project helped institutions identify and address barriers to inclusion, ranging from physical impediments to communication challenges, with notable success stories, including with the National Bank of Pakistan and TBC Bank in Georgia.  

To learn more about how financial institutions globally assess and improve their accessibility across employment, culture, product access and partnerships, Trade Treasury Payments (TTP) Editor Deepesh Patel spoke with Maka Bochorishvili, Environmental, Social and Governance Coordinator at TBC Bank; Mirza Muhammad Asim Baig, Senior Executive Vice President & Group Chief – Human Resource Management Group at National Bank of Pakistan; and Catherine Holloway, Co-founder & Academic Director of the Global Disability Innovation Hub (GDI Hub) and a Professor at University College London.

It all starts with a mindset shift

Attitude drives inclusion, and more often than not, it’s the people and mindset behind inclusion policies (rather than the policies themselves) that change outcomes for those with disabilities. 

An organisation can mandate its staff to take required training, and it can install ramps, but unless the team genuinely values inclusion, those measures will always feel like surface-level fixes. 

Holloway said, “Most of what needs to happen is a systematic change of attitude. That needs leadership from the top, and it also needs people on the ground to be able to implement that and understand why they’re being asked to do these additional things.”

Inclusion requires a shift in how an organisation understands value, contribution, and relevance. When the culture sees accessibility as part of its core identity, everything begins to align. 

Staff need to know how their actions connect to a broader vision. When they do, their work carries more meaning, and inclusive efforts gain momentum.

This attitude shift creates space for collaboration. When banks involve employees with disabilities in decision-making and people feel safe to share their lived experiences, such as hidden disabilities or mental health challenges, it normalises a wider definition of accessibility. 

That’s where real cultural change begins.

The world’s largest unbanked market

Disability inclusion is often framed through an ethical lens, but it’s also a missed business opportunity hiding in plain sight. One in six people globally live with a disability. That’s more than a billion individuals, many of whom remain outside the formal financial system.

They’re not out of sight because they lack interest or capability. They’re out of reach because systems weren’t designed with them in mind. For decades, people with disabilities have been excluded – often unintentionally – from institutions like schools, workplaces, and public spaces, an absence that fed the myth that they were passive recipients of care and not active contributors to society.

This manufactured invisibility, however, creates a sizable market opportunity, given the untapped consumer power that the disabled community represents.

Holloway said, “People with disabilities are the largest unbanked minority in the world.”

The shift in thinking, then, is to move from seeing inclusion as a cost to recognising it as both a human right and a business opportunity.

Real stories, real change

Stories are a uniquely human phenomenon, and they can be some of the biggest sources of inspiration. When we hear what some of our friends or coworkers have had to overcome in their lives, it can give us the motivation we need to try and change things, in whatever small way we can, for those coming behind.   

Holloway said, “There will be staff in your bank who are living with disabilities and probably haven’t declared them or have family members who have disabilities and are desperate to change things. You can leverage that passion to help people.”

And change doesn’t need to be a perfectly planned headline-worthy initiative, it can, and should, start small. What matters most is that it starts.

Take the National Bank of Pakistan. The bank began by installing Braille-enabled ATMs so that visually impaired customers could access their finances independently. From there, they focused on inclusivity in their hiring. 

Baig said, “Our inclusive hiring program actively recruits individuals with disabilities… that is one of the reasons that National Bank employs the highest number of persons with disabilities in the financial sector…. Our President has also given instructions that we will try to ensure that any new branch that we open has all facilities available for persons with disabilities.”

Having this level of buy-in from top executives is vital for driving inclusivity throughout the entire organisation. Once people see that it’s okay to share their stories and that real change can come as a result of that, they will be more willing to step up.

Technology is the great equaliser, if we let it be

Tech can either scale inclusion or it can cement exclusion, depending entirely on how it’s built. If developers assume a narrow user profile, the end result of a new digital banking tool may actually reinforce exclusion. Preventing this from happening requires foresight and the product team to ask better questions at the start of the design process so that inclusivity can be built into a core functionality.

Take the example of TBC Bank’s decision to shift its IT Academy to an online-first model. 

Physical infrastructure in Georgia is still not adequately equipped to support people with disabilities. Many buildings, including schools and training centres, remain inaccessible, making in-person attendance difficult, if not impossible, for some participants.

With a digital-first offering, participants were no longer tied to fixed schedules or dependent on transport. They could attend from wherever was most comfortable and accessible for them.

Bochorishvili said, “One of our participants with hearing impairments used sound amplification technology to engage fully with the course, which is something that would not have been feasible in a traditional classroom setting.”

Digital-first training courses are far from the only application of technology to increase inclusion. Voice-enabled banking, AI-driven localisation, and inclusive signature verification technologies are just a few more examples of how technology can help.

Bochorishvili said, “The development of the technologies will play, and they already play, a great role in increasing the level of inclusion.”

The best part is that advancements in these areas are not limited to helping people with disabilities. It can improve usability for everyone. Voice-activated banking interfaces, for instance, are helpful for customers who are multitasking or accessing services on the go.

When accessibility is woven into the product from the start, everyone benefits. So the question for any financial institution isn’t whether to start this work. It’s how soon, how seriously, and with whom.