Lloyds Bank has become the first financial services company to undertake a trial with Signly – a British Sign Language (BSL) translation tool. Lloyds Banking Group’s Innovation Labs trialled the technology to understand how Signly could offer an alternative option for up to 250,000 people in the UK who use BSL each day. Since undertaking the trial, the Bank is now looking to test the technology with a wider group of customers.

BSL is a unique language with its own sentence structure and contains a number of key differences to both spoken English, and Signed Supported English (SSE). This means that for customers who use BSL as their first language, many communications are often hard to understand.

Signly enables customers to scan Signly-enabled literature on their smartphone which provides translations into BSL through augmented reality. The trial 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. 

In addition to trialling Signly functionality, Lloyds Bank currently provides a wealth of ways for customers to interact with their bank. These include Text Relay and SignVideo, a signed video service which provides deaf customers with access to an online interpreter. For those with visual impairments, customers can access large print, braille and recorded literature.

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. Alongside SignVideo, Text Relay and our interpreting service, Signly provides a new tool to make it easier to engage with the Bank. Improving our services to make them simple and intuitive for all our customers is key to removing barriers of financial exclusion.”