Much effort is spent in the trade finance community finding ways to increase access to financing – perhaps one of the industry’s main missions. However, accessibility comes in many forms: a recent ADB project focused on tackling disability inclusion, promoting accessibility in partner banks across Asia. In a webinar on 6 February 2025, ADB’s Trade and Supply Chain Finance Program (TSCFP) discussed the project and how it supports banks in targeting access for people with disabilities.

The Disability Inclusion Project, pioneered by the TSCFP in partnership with the Global Disability Innovation Hub (GDI Hub), was first launched two years ago to further ADB’s goal of financial inclusion and extend it to people with disabilities, an often-overlooked group in the finance world. The project aims to both increase access to finance products for those with disabilities and to raise awareness within companies of disability issues, modifying hiring practices and internal processes to be more accessible. 

For the past two years, partner banks have received bespoke advice to tackle accessibility issues and have implemented change in almost every aspect of their operations. Now, the knowledge tools used in the project are being released to all institutions and as a sector resource in a drive to improve accessibility everywhere in the banking world.

Visible and invisible barriers

Increasing access to people with disabilities is an increasingly urgent goal in a world with an ageing population and rising inequality: one in six people have a disability, many of them developed later in life, and disabilities disproportionately affect those with a low income, exacerbating their lack of access to basic services and employment. 

After a call by a number of international trade agencies to increase accessibility last year, many companies have reviewed their access policies, but still, only 4% of companies are focused on disability inclusion. Barriers stopping people with disabilities from accessing basic services can range from the evident (physical impediments like a webpage not designed for screen readers) to the “invisible” barriers (like inaccessible communication styles). 

Increasing inclusion isn’t just a tangential goal – it should be one of a company’s top priorities, and for good reason. “Integrating accessibility and inclusion helps serve 1 in 6 customers, attract diverse talent, reduce legal risks, and avoid future retrofitting costs; in essence driving sustainable business growth and innovation,” said Catherine Holloway, Professor of Interaction Design and Innovation at UCL’s Interaction Center and co-founder of the GDI Hub.

ADB’s inclusion drive

In the two-year project, ADB’s TSCFP performed wide-ranging research on 88 partner banks across 14 countries to identify the problem and set out ways to fix it. The survey, led by GDI Hub found that most banks were at the early stages of taking steps on disability inclusion: they had realised an accessibility problem existed and were only just starting to find ways to tackle it, but did not yet have concrete plans implemented in all departments.

The main issues found by the survey were employee and management awareness of disability issues, a lack of physical and digital accessibility, and non-inclusive employment practices. For example, some banks still required the physical presence of clients at non-accessible branches for some operations; some hiring managers felt applicants to their positions may not disclose a disability for fear of discrimination, making the drive for access even harder. Overall, while banks realised the importance of disability inclusion, they were struggling to turn this into concrete actions to increase accessibility. 

The project supported banks in the areas they themselves said they needed the most help: employee training, increasing branch accessibility, promoting inclusion in recruitment, and measuring the impact of projects. Banks received a detailed action plan with recommendations to improve accessibility, most of which were taken up. Now that the project is over, ADB is sharing the insights gained with all banks in the hopes of increasing accessibility everywhere. 

Case in point: Increasing accessibility in Pakistan and Georgia

One place of a sizeable impact is the National Bank of Pakistan. The bank responded to regulatory policy by converting 28 of its nearly 1700 branches to completely accessible “model branches” with ramps, accessible bathrooms, and height-adjusted counters.  

With support from the project, the bank made its hiring practices more inclusive, collaborating with local disability advocacy groups to make sure recruitment processes and job advertisements put accessibility at the forefront. In an effort to help employees with disabilities, the bank set up a program to give employees wheelchairs and move some of them to branches closer to their own homes, as well as providing visually impaired employees with interpreters and scribes. 

The ADB’s support made it possible for banks to turn vague inclusion goals into concrete action, said Saman Abbasi, Divisional Head of Learning and Development of the National Bank of Pakistan: “We have adopted a more strategic approach towards PWD inclusion;  [we held] discussions on career planning, role mapping, and capability enhancement of our PWD staff, we received more insight on global best practices, and we got better awareness of internal challenges.” 

In Georgia, TBC Bank has been undergoing a similar journey towards inclusivity. After realising disability inclusion was a priority, TBC Bank decided to integrate it in nearly every aspect of its services through the project: “It’s important for us to make out of this whole story something which creates economic value and goes beyond humanitarian or philanthropy work. […] In the process, we understood that in order to create, again, this economic value, we have to approach this topic with a more comprehensive view,” said Maka Bochorishvili,  Environmental Social and Governance Coordinator at TBC Bank.

After identifying 6 streams where accessibility could be improved, TBC Bank set out actionable ways to implement change—from setting up seminars to improve company culture toward people with disabilities to transforming mobile apps to be accessible to auditing branches from an accessibility perspective. 

TBC Bank also used its role as a major national bank to improve disability inclusion beyond its own employees: developing guidance to embed accessibility across festivals TBC Bank sponsors (Tbilisi Open Air, Saba Award) both strategically and operationally.

Beyond bespoke: Knowledge tools for accessibility everywhere

Parallel with targeting individual banks, the ADB’s Disability Inclusion Project has also been developing knowledge tools to share with banks everywhere to help assess and improve their accessibility. From self-evaluation questionnaires measuring accessibility across four key parameters – employment, culture, access to products, and partnerships – to concrete recommendations at every step of institutions’ inclusion journeys, the tools are designed to fit the needs of a range of banks across regions and service types.

What sets the ADB’s knowledge tools apart from the rest is their focus on banks and the unique challenges they face in implementing accessibility. “The [tools] have really been developed with [banks], for [banks], integrating knowledge of both the banking sector as relates to the practices that banks deliver, but also bringing in that global best practice in terms of disability inclusion under corporate constraints,” said Pollyanna Wardrop, Senior researcher at the GDI Hub. 

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As DEI policies are scrapped to align with political goals, it is all the more important for institutions to reinforce their commitment to inclusivity. ADB’s project has already had a wide-ranging impact on the banks involved, raising awareness of inclusion needs and implementing concrete change. The knowledge tools it has just unveiled promise to go even further, giving all institutions a way to understand disability issues and improve accessibility.