When I sat down this week with James Green, who leads digital accessibility at Chase, I mentioned accessibility and financial institutions aren’t necessarily congruent with one another. That is to say, when a person thinks of their bank, odds are good they don’t think of it as the most accessible experience. As a disabled person who—in full disclosure—admittedly doesn’t bank with Chase, I certainly have thought this way.
It turns out, Green and Chase truly do care about accessibility.
Green, who’s been working in accessibility since 1999 and has been with Chase 2 years, explained there’s a difference between accessibility and usability. Most times, he told me, usability is defined by reducing the efforts required by users to do stuff and generally make the experience nicer. For accessibility, while niceness is always appreciated, the stakes are raised because engineers are designing affordances to “make the experience possible” in the first place. When he joined, Green said Chase already had “a very mature practice” in place to support its accessibility efforts; his job, then, was to come in and “help take that to the next level.” Banks really do care about the accessibility of accessing money.
“I think accessibility and managing your finances are actually very much entwined,” Green said. “Being able to manage your money is an important dimension to personal independence. It’s about agency, privacy, and dignity. Being able to work at a company that values that and values the customer experience and puts it above everything and says ‘we want to be the bank for everyone.’ To me, that lines up with my goals. If you don’t have an accessible financial app, you’re often going to be in a situation where you have to rely on others to manage your finances, and everybody should be able to manage their own finances.”
At Chase, accessibility is divided amongst teams. For Green’s, his is responsible for the digital side. Green’s group cross-collaborates internally, saying the company employs a so-called “branch innovation team” whose job it is to figure out how to use technology to “improve the customer experience in branches” with accessibility as one ingredient in the full recipe. Notably, Green said Chase plans to open a branch near Gallaudet University in Washington DC; Gallaudet is the world’s only institution of higher learning for the Deaf and hard-of-hearing community; its president, Roberta Cordano, has been interviewed by yours truly. Gallaudet worked with Chase on the bank integrating the school’s Deaf Space guidelines in order to “set up [the branch] in a way that would be ideal for our Deaf and hard-of-hearing customers.”
Green is decidedly not running a skunkworks crew inside Chase.
What makes Chase’s ambition in accessibility, Green told me, is they don’t do it merely to meet legal compliance. Indeed, as Starbucks’ Emily MacKinnon said recently, the Americans with Disabilities Act should be the floor, not the ceiling. A lot of companies view the law as the ceiling, but not Chase. Green said Chase views accessibility “very different from that” perspective, saying he believes accessibility is a function of design rather than of compliance. It’s about the customer experience for literally everyone. Governance is obviously importance, but Green’s point is simply that accessibility shouldn’t be something that companies do to tick a checkbox. Accessibility deserves more credence than that.
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“As a team [and] as a company, we do our best to think about accessibility as something you build in from the beginning,” Green said.
Chase’s embrace of accessibility extends to the highest levels of the organization. Green said he feels “a ton” of support from Chase’s senior leadership, telling me it’s “built into the company culture.” He added those at the top of the pecking order definitely know what’s going on.
Part of working on accessibility entails engaging with customers. Green said Chase does a lot of it, noting there are teams that are constantly busy collecting data based on feedback from people. This information, he said, is vital to the work he and his team do because it alerts them to feature requests, potential problem areas, and more. Green reiterated Chase is always doing user research with customers in efforts to improve and do better, which he said is crucial for disabled people in particular. As such, Green and team are keen to hear about “any unmet needs” from a variety of sources. After all, accessibility is an evergreen endeavor.
As to feedback, Green said Chase often hears from customers with disabilities who report they chose to bank with them because of the fact the mobile app and branches are more accessible than others. It’s a profound source of personal pride for Green, with him saying such sentiments is a big part of what appealed to him in joining the company. Chase has 60 million active users, he added, and “the impact I could have in the accessibility space” was too immense for him to pass up a few years ago. Green acknowledged things will break, and there will always be bugs, but “the dedication of my team and the teams that focus on accessibility” is palpable and he’s excited to show up for work every day.
Green believes disabled people sense that care and devotion.
Looking towards the future, Green said Chase’s main priority is to go harder on accessibility and make it even better for the customers who need it for financial freedom. Elsewhere, he’s particularly interested in doing more partnerships, especially with universities, as well as making the web more accessible for banking purposes and anything else.
“For us as an accessibility team [and] as a company, the sky’s the limit,” Green said after gazing into Chase’s proverbial crystal ball towards the future. “We’re gonna keep innovating and partnering with other groups around the company and doing our best to enable everyone at Chase to make experiences for every single one of our customers.”
