LTW26 Fringe: Locked Out by Design: Financial Systems and the People They Were Never Built For

​Hosted by Policy Connect and RIX Research & Media at the University of East London, in partnership with Tech For Disability

​The UK is moving rapidly toward a cashless, digital-first financial system. But that system was built on a set of assumptions — that everyone can prove their identity through standard documentation, navigate abstract numerical interfaces, and manage money independently — that exclude a significant portion of the population by default.

​For learning disabled people, the result is not inconvenience. It is exclusion from one of society's most basic functions: the ability to hold, manage, and spend your own money. The barriers are not primarily technological — they are structural, embedded in security frameworks, identity verification processes, and product design decisions that treat a narrow set of cognitive capabilities as universal.

​Making an app "accessible" does not fix this. The challenge is systemic, and it requires the financial services industry, technology providers, policymakers, and people with lived experience to be in the same room — asking harder questions about who the system was designed for, and what it would take to genuinely redesign it.

​This panel brings together voices from policy, banking, technology, research, and lived experience to examine what financial inclusion truly requires when you start from the people the current system reaches least. Because the evidence is clear: when you design to reach the furthest, you build something that works better for everyone.