Digital Accessibility Board Adviser

The mandate

The bank consolidated mobile and web journeys, but customers with visual, hearing, motor and cognitive access needs still depend on branch or family assistance for authentication, card controls and fraud recovery. Accessibility audits identify technical defects yet do not show whether a customer can complete a consequential financial task safely. The board’s standing question is how inclusive product evidence should change investment, release and assisted-service choices rather than remain a compliance appendix.

The adviser will review monthly journey and complaint evidence, meet product and conduct owners before committees, attend three Auckland sessions and observe two assisted-banking journeys with approved safeguards. The cadence will challenge authentication, consent, delegation, communication, device compatibility, cognitive load, fraud controls, service hand-offs and change governance. Advice will prioritise barriers by financial consequence and autonomy, not by raw defect count or ease of remediation.

The appointment runs for eight months through the digital investment plan and two major channel releases. Renewal needs a fresh committee minute naming a new inclusion question after product teams have embedded accessible outcome evidence and demonstrated independent release challenge. The advisory role should conclude once directors receive comparable journey evidence routinely; it is not an outsourced accessibility office or permanent conformance review.

The adviser holds no line authority and takes no executive responsibility for product design, release, fraud policy, customer authentication, reasonable adjustments, complaints, legal compliance or investment approval. Accountable bank officers retain those duties. Advice can question whether an ostensibly secure control transfers risk to disabled customers, but cannot waive that control or prescribe an individual customer outcome.

Conflicts must disclose relationships with banks, accessibility consultancies, assistive-technology vendors, consumer advocates, identity providers and relevant regulators. The adviser will protect participant privacy, avoid representing one disability experience as universal and decline supplier referrals or downstream delivery. Recusal applies if an organisation under material review is a current client or investment.

Why the board wants this voice

Technical conformance reports reassure platform teams while complaint and branch evidence shows customers losing privacy, independence and timely access. Fraud and accessibility are also presented as competing interests after designs are already fixed. The board wants an inclusive-product leader who can bring lived journey evidence into earlier decisions, distinguish genuine risk trade-offs from design habit and challenge aggregate adoption measures that omit customers forced offline.

What you will own

• Challenge critical journeys for authentication, payment, card control, statement use, fraud recovery, support and delegated assistance.
• Examine barriers across visual, hearing, motor, speech, cognitive and situational needs without treating any cohort as uniform.
• Test whether assisted hand-offs preserve privacy, consent, context, timeliness and the customer’s own decision authority.
• Review fraud controls for inaccessible challenge, unsafe workarounds, false positives, caregiver dependence and routes to recovery.
• Assess release evidence through task completion, error recovery, autonomy, abandonment, complaints and displaced staff effort.
• Give directors investment choices that connect inclusion, conduct, security, operating burden and preventable customer harm.
• Leave a board scorecard and challenge questions that product teams can supply without a separate advocacy exercise.

Candidate qualifications

• Has led accessible product governance for banking, payments or another consequential regulated digital service.
• Can move beyond standards conformance into observed task completion, error recovery, autonomy and assisted-service continuity.
• Understands authentication, fraud, consent, delegation and privacy trade-offs for customers using varied assistive technologies.
• Has worked ethically with lived-experience research while avoiding tokenism, overgeneralisation and exposure of sensitive circumstances.
• Can challenge product, security, conduct and operations leaders without assuming their accountable legal or risk decisions.
• Has influenced investment and release choices through accessibility evidence at executive or board-committee level.

Non-negotiables

• Can attend all Auckland evidence sessions and both observed assisted-banking journeys with approved research safeguards.
• Will disclose bank, accessibility supplier, advocacy, identity-provider, investment and regulatory relationships before participation.
• Brings accessible outcome governance in consequential digital services; checklist auditing alone does not qualify.
• Will neither waive security controls nor treat forced staff or family assistance as successful digital completion.

1. 49 words maximum. Which banking task can pass accessibility conformance while still denying a customer practical autonomy?
2. 49 words maximum. How would you evaluate an authentication control that shifts risk to a caregiver?
3. 49 words maximum. What observed evidence should change the board’s priority among accessibility defects?