First Investment Bank strengthens digital accessibility

First Investment Bank (Fibank) is one of Bulgaria’s largest and most trusted private banks. Fibank’s total branch and office network in Bulgaria comprises 114 locations, including 34 in Sofia and 80 across other cities in the country. The Bank also operates a branch in Cyprus and a subsidiary bank in Albania – Fibank Albania. Since mid-2025, Fibank has further expanded its presence by directly offering products in the Republic of Greece through its My Fibank mobile application. This marks another step in Fibank’s European expansion strategy. The Bank serves more than 1 million retail and corporate customers. Digital services – online banking, mobile apps, and downloadable document workflows – now account for the majority of Fibank’s customer interactions, making the accessibility and usability of those channels a direct driver of customer satisfaction, retention, and revenue.

The European Accessibility Act requires financial institutions operating in EU member states to ensure that digital products and services conform to WCAG 2.2 AA. Non-compliance carries the risk of regulatory enforcement, reputational damage, and exclusion from public procurement opportunities. For Fibank, proactively addressing accessibility was both the right customer commitment and a pragmatic risk management decision.

Fibank engaged AIOPSGROUP, a valantic company to conduct a comprehensive accessibility audit of its website and mobile application. The scope spanned the full customer journey – from the public homepage and product pages to business client portals, and downloadable PDF documents – ensuring that both first impressions and core transactional flows were evaluated.

The engagement was structured around four measurable objectives:

• Identifying and documenting every accessibility barrier across all major user-facing screens and critical transactional workflows, mapped to the relevant WCAG 2.2 success criteria
• Validating findings with real assistive technologies – including NVDA, TalkBack, and keyboard-only navigation – to surface issues that automated scanning alone cannot detect
• Classifying every issue by severity – critical, major, or minor – and by functional area, giving Fibank’s development teams a prioritized remediation backlog they could act on immediately
• Establishing a quantified compliance baseline – giving Fibank a documented starting point against which remediation progress and eventual EAA conformance can be objectively measured

AIOPSGROUP deployed a dual-layer audit methodology combining automated scanning with expert-led manual testing across Fibank’s web and mobile platforms.

Accessibility specialists evaluated key user journeys using real assistive technologies – including NVDA, TalkBack, VoiceOver (Mac and iPhone) – to uncover barriers that automated tools alone cannot detect.

All findings were captured in a structured, developer-ready backlog, mapped to WCAG 2.2 success criteria, prioritized by severity, and linked directly to affected components and screens.

This approach ensured Fibank’s teams received actionable remediation guidance, enabling immediate integration into development workflows – without the need for additional interpretation or rework.