The Director General of the Spanish Banking Association (AEB), María Abascal, said today that technological developments in services should help improve people’s lives, regardless of their age, and advocated strengthening public-private collaboration to promote digital skills training for older people.
The AEB’s Director General explained that, through the Association, we work to bring the benefits of digitalisation to all groups, and we particularly promote digital skills training for older people through multiple initiatives and partnerships with different stakeholders so that no one is left behind.
“The way forward is to keep making progress in digital skills training for older people. It is a highly cross-cutting process that requires public-private collaboration,” she said during her participation in the dialogue panel at the meeting ‘Digitalisation and older people: present and future’, organised by the Spanish Institute of Banking and Finance (IEBF).
At the same time, she explained, in the banking sector we work to offer alternatives to those who, for different reasons, do not wish to or are not in a position to access the digital society and need a longer period of adaptation or prefer more personalised service.
In this regard, the banking sector has made a very significant effort to improve personalised service for older people by implementing many measures, such as adapting websites and apps and making versions available to them with simplified language and display.
Awareness of cybersecurity and fraud prevention is essential for older people, but also for the rest of society, as we can all be victims of a cyber scam, she added.
For this reason, AEB deploys multiple initiatives to contribute to public education and collaborates with both private and public entities, including the State Security Forces and Corps, in awareness-raising campaigns.
For his part, the President of the Platform for Older People and Pensioners (PMP), Lázaro González, highlighted that “the banking sector has done a good job in the accessibility of ATMs and websites” and considered it “desirable” for the public sector to make further progress in the same direction.
Along the same lines, the President of the senior volunteering association SECOT, Inocente Gómez, noted that “banking apps are quite straightforward, but those of public administrations are complex for any age group with an average level of education”.
The Global Director of Social Action and Volunteering at Fundación Telefónica, Carlos Palacios, pointed out that the digital exclusion of older people “leads to ever greater social exclusion, since part of the population is not connected to the opportunities the world offers”.
“It is the responsibility of society as a whole to educate groups responsibly in the use of technology, and to that end it is key to promote skills training for trainers and for the groups themselves,” he added.
