MorganAsh Deploys BSL Translation Tech to Satisfy FCA Consumer Duty Rules

MorganAsh, a firm specialising in Consumer Duty compliance and customer vulnerability management, has integrated British Sign Language translation technology from Signly across both its main website and its consumer portal, itswhoiam.me. The deployment allows visitors to request on-demand BSL translations of any page at no charge.

Signly connects organisations with registered BSL translators who are members of the deaf community. Once a translation is created, the system stores it and updates it automatically whenever the underlying webpage content changes. The company emphasises that its translations are produced by human professionals rather than generated by artificial intelligence, a distinction that matters for quality and community trust.

Consumer Duty, which reached full effect for open products in July 2023 and for closed books in July 2024, imposes a positive obligation on financial services firms to ensure customers can access, understand and act on information in ways that lead to good outcomes. The FCA has stressed that accessibility for vulnerable customers is central to that obligation, not an afterthought.

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.

Andrew Gething, managing director of MorganAsh, made that remark in the context of the integration. The firm notes that roughly 87,000 people in the UK use BSL as their primary language, with broader estimates around 151,000 people using it in some form. A key 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 effectively a second. Financial services websites that assume text accessibility is sufficient may still fall short of their Consumer Duty obligations.

Signly already counts Lloyds Bank, Santander and Nationwide among its financial services clients, giving MorganAsh third-party validation for the technology before integrating it into its own vulnerability-management tooling.

The partnership also carries commercial logic 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 it will scrutinise how firms evidence their Consumer Duty compliance, with vulnerability management and accessibility among the areas most likely to be probed 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 the ongoing maintenance burden for participating firms is relatively low once initial translation work is completed.

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.