Digital Ageism: How it operates and approaches to tackling it

With the social distancing imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, basic processes and services of everyday life became digitalised in many countries. These include restaurant menus, making medical appointments and managing prescriptions and the mandatory use of credit and debit cards instead of cash. Retail stores also increasingly rely on online shopping (Nanda et al., 2021).

In Spain, a large social movement emerged against the deterioration of in- person bank services in late 2021. This movement collected almost 650,000 signatures on an online platform to ask banks and the government to stop the dehumanisation of banking services that, according to them, excluded older users (De Laorden, n.d.). The movement captured political attention and influenced the discussion of public policies. A new regulation came into force in February 2022, compelling the banking sector to extend opening hours and implement dedicated telephone lines to serve older adults. This situation results from existing trends that create and sustain the exclusion of older adults (Fernández-Ardèvol, 2022). First, the COVID-19 pandemic drove the spread of digital banking due to imposed physical isolation during lockdowns and after them. Second, the banking sector is in the midst of a significant digitalisation of services that involves the closure of numerous branches and the dismissal of many staff (Blomquist & Hägglund, 2021). The most important banks offer limited face-to-face service and make it almost compulsory to use other channels for every transaction, leaving people with low digital skills unattended (including many older adults). However, and this is the third element, digital banking was never designed for older clients, and neither were ATMs. Instead, digitalisation targeted young and mid-age adults as they were deemed more likely to accept and appreciate a digitally based relationship with banks. Such a decision might have been shaped by myths that assume that older adults are not interested in digital technologies and have no capacity to learn how to use them (Sawchuk et al., 2020).