Banking is the key to inclusion
Included by the bank, included in society.
Everyone needs a bank. And we all need a proper bank if everyone is to come along. That is how Norway gets better.
Ridderrennet is reporting for duty as a guide for the banks. We are ready to help. Include more people. Build new products. All to the benefit of new and existing customers, the knights, and the banks themselves.
And psst, a word for the bank chiefs: there is more money in this than you might think. Do read on.
Banking for the A4 life
For most of us, life spins around work, home, car and pension. Joe Bloggs pours his salary into loans, ISAs and pension savings. Day-to-day banking glides along on cards and a tap of the phone. The bank has been built for exactly this sort of life.
It is, in short, a passive bank. It lays out services based on tidy margins from the average customer's predictable life. Leaning forward is not its thing. If you happen to fall outside the A4 template, the job of asking and challenging lands squarely on you.
The bank's sleeping superpower
Here is a curious paradox in 2026. A bank with its data in order can see every one of us, every corner of our lives, if only it chose to. It can spot that a customer is expecting a baby before they have told a soul. It can predict a house move before you have even opened a property app. It can guess the make of your next car and roughly where you are off to on holiday, long before you have booked the flights.
A bank, in other words, has everything it needs to meet each customer's particular needs on its own initiative. It could shift from being a passive caretaker of your money to a properly active partner for every one of us.
Challengers who spot opportunities
Our knights are not A4. Traditional banking folk might call them demanding. We prefer "challenging", because they challenge the banks rather more thoroughly than the average customer.
Today, a great many of our members fall outside the bank's standard menu of services. Fall outside the bank and you tend to fall outside society with it. Included by the bank, included in society.
Our members are well accustomed to using advanced technology to get on with daily life. The knights spot opportunities and expose weaknesses that ordinary customers breeze past without noticing. A guide sees the course for the knights. The knights, in turn, can see the course for the banks. They can help them become a more active and distinctly better bank for every customer.
Four keys to a smarter bank
A person with a disability is a complex system of benefits, allowances and extra expenses. To give a small glimpse of what an active bank could actually do, here are four concrete suggestions for how banks could turn data into genuine value for such a customer.
The intelligent budget
Using transaction data, the bank can automatically identify and categorise a customer's disability-related expenses. The customer ends up with a precise picture of their own finances, and a rather powerful tool for documenting things to DWP and the local council.
The benefits assistant
Plenty of people miss out on support schemes they are entitled to. Based on the expense analysis, the bank could actively flag possible rights at DWP, Homes England and elsewhere. In plain terms: help the customer get the income they are owed.
A safe zone for work income
The fear of having benefits cut stops many from working to the abilities they still have. A tool that instantly calculates what you actually take home after benefit rules and tax would make it safe to work. And tackling loneliness comes along as a pleasant bonus.
Alternative credit rating
Disability benefit is about as stable an income as exists, and yet today's credit models treat it as suspect. An alternative model could give more weight to stability, modest spending and solid payment history than to the size of the income itself. That opens the door to loans for assistive equipment, and even a foot on the housing ladder.
And there is plenty more where that came from
These are just four straightforward examples. We have not even mentioned the business of helping people with disabilities into employment. Loan products with municipal or state guarantees for firms that take them on. Investment models that let customers help build local businesses generating passive income. Or funds in a vast, global, high-tech assistive technology market. Technology is coming that will help the knights walk, speak and take part, and it will also have to meet the sizeable wave of an ageing population who need help of their own. Today's A4 citizens can buy a slice of their own future security in funds like these. The potential is, to put it mildly, enormous.
Helping the banks help themselves
In Norway, as an example, roughly 375,000 people receive disability benefits. On top of that, vast sums of money move between the public sector and private providers on their behalf. It is a market with real potential for any bank prepared to think outside the bank box. Services developed with people who have disabilities turn out to be surprisingly good services for students, entrepreneurs, the ageing population and anyone else who lives outside the A4 template. They would also make the bank's A4 products distinctly better in the bargain.
So, back to the bank chiefs. This kind of active inclusion is not charity. It is a profitable and genuinely meaningful business opportunity. Which is why we are inviting banking and finance to partner up and build the future's best active bank: one that actually sees every single person walking through its doors.
Consider banking and finance hereby challenged: contribute to inclusion, self-respect, visibility and a renewed faith in people's own possibilities, and do it through the bank's own core business. The knights are ready to lead the way down a profitable and inclusive road, where everyone ends up a winner. Customers, banks and society alike.
