The Swedish neobank Northmill Bank that provides the tools for people to make better financial choices, launches a tailored customer service for people with hearing impairments. The purpose is to make it as easy as possible for customers with hearing impairments to receive direct help with their everyday banking needs. The service has been developed in-house and is now made available for the neobank’s over 200,000 customers.

Simon Nilsson, Chief Commercial Officer at Northmill Bank commented:

“It was one of our employees in the customer service team, who herself has grown up with two deaf parents, who made us aware of how big this problem really is. We assigned one of our product teams to take a closer look at what the needs of our customers looked like, and how we could help them. After a few weeks of development, testing and evaluation, it is now time to make the service available to all our customers with speech or hearing impairment. The response from the people who have tested it so far has been fantastic”.

According to Statistics Sweden (SCB), 1.4 million Swedes, about 15 percent of the population, experience some form of hearing problems. Hearing impairment is becoming even more widespread than many of the more well-known public health diseases, and it is especially young people who are at risk - mainly due to increased noise exposure in their everyday life. The same development can be seen globally. By 2050, the number of people with hearing impairments in the world is forecast to reach 900 million.

Simon Nilsson commented:

“Many of the solutions that exist today require a third-party and the customers have to do a lot of the work themselves when going through many different steps. We have the technical capacity, the will and resources internally, and can therefore control the whole experience for the customer. All the customer needs to do is to book an appointment through the chat and a link with an invitation to a video call is automatically sent out. Our employees skilled in sign language will help the customers”.

Watch Swedish National Television (SVT) #Nyhetstecken's segment about the solution here: