MorganAsh, a specialist in Consumer Duty compliance and customer vulnerability, has integrated British Sign Language translation technology from Signly across its main website and its consumer portal, itswhoiam.me. The move makes MorganAsh one of a growing number of financial services firms deploying on-demand BSL translation to satisfy accessibility requirements under the FCA‘s Consumer Duty rules.

Signly’s service works by connecting organisations with registered BSL translators, all of whom are members of the deaf community. Visitors to either site can request a translation of any webpage at no cost. Once a translation is produced, it is stored and updated automatically whenever the underlying content changes. The company is explicit that its translations are produced by human professionals rather than AI-generated sign language, a distinction that matters for quality and community trust.

Consumer Duty context

Consumer Duty, which came into full effect for open products in July 2023 and for closed books in July 2024, places a positive obligation on firms to ensure customers can access, understand and act on information in a way that leads to good outcomes. The FCA has been clear that accessibility for vulnerable customers is central to that obligation, not a secondary consideration.

Andrew Gething, managing director of MorganAsh, said: “If a person cannot access important financial information in a format that works for them, they risk being excluded from making informed decisions. It’s therefore not just about good practice, but about delivering good outcomes and creating a financial services sector that is fairer, more trusted and more inclusive for everyone.”

The release notes that roughly 87,000 people in the UK use BSL as their primary language, with a broader estimate of around 151,000 people using BSL in some form. A point MorganAsh and Signly both emphasise is that profound deafness does not automatically confer English literacy: for a significant portion of the deaf community, BSL is a first language, and written English is, in effect, a second. Financial services websites that assume text accessibility is sufficient may still be falling short of their Consumer Duty obligations.

Signly already counts Lloyds Bank, Santander and Nationwide among its financial services clients, which gives MorganAsh a degree of third-party validation for the technology before it integrates it into its own vulnerability-management tooling.

Market positioning

The partnership is also commercially rational for MorganAsh. The firm’s flagship product, the MorganAsh Resilience System (MARS), is positioned as a tool that helps financial services providers identify and monitor vulnerable customers and generate a standardised Resilience Rating. Embedding BSL accessibility directly into itswhoiam.me, the consumer-facing portal designed to help customers disclose vulnerabilities to firms, strengthens the coherence of that product proposition. A portal asking customers to self-report vulnerability must itself be fully accessible to those it seeks to serve.

More broadly, the FCA has indicated that it will scrutinise how firms evidence their Consumer Duty compliance, with vulnerability management and accessibility among the areas it is most likely to probe in supervisory review cycles. Firms that have not audited their digital estate for sign-language accessibility may find this partnership a useful prompt to do so. Signly’s automated workflow also means that ongoing maintenance burden for participating firms is relatively low once initial translation work is done.

The next milestones to watch are whether adoption among smaller financial services firms accelerates following high-street bank deployments, and whether the FCA issues more prescriptive guidance on digital accessibility standards under Consumer Duty in the coming review period.

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