The Equality Tribunal has awarded a transgender woman €5,000 compensation after it ruled she had been discriminated against by AIB.
In October 2010 Deirdre O'Byrne contacted her bank to inform them that she had changed her name by deed poll. AIB changed her name and gender on her credit card but told her to close down her 'cashsave' account.
The Equality Tribunal found she has been discriminated against on gender grounds and have ordered the bank to review their policies in relation to people who change their name.
Speaking about the decision, Ms. O'Byrne said" What should have been a simple matter of going into the bank and presenting a few documents instead turned into a 3 year battle".
"I hope the bank, and all other institutions, will now ensure they have simple, straightforward procedures for transgender people to easily correct the consequences of a condition we were born with".
Bank refused to accept a cheque
In October 2010, Ms. O'Byrne said that she would henceforth use the name Deirdre Katherine O'Byrne to identify herself. However, the name listed as the account holder on
her AIB cashsave account is her birth name, which has occasionally led to difficulties for her establishing herself as the account holder.
In January 2012, the bank would not accept a cheque made out to Deirdre O'Byrne marked "a/c payee only".
On 4th December 2013 - two days after the decision was made in the equality case - she experienced difficulties in establishing her identity as the account holder so that she could update the address on her account.
"I've always wondered if the day would come where the bank would turn around and say - 'sorry - we do not believe this money is yours" she continued.
"But worst of all is the way the bank still uses my birth name when addressing me in their correspondence, in spite of being asked on a number of occasions to at least address me in my true name. In November 2013, they sent a letter addressed to my birth name to an address that I had just moved out of, thereby possibly outing me to my
ex-landlady" she added.
Ms. O'Byrne's witness in the case was a female-to-male transgender customer of AIB who successfully changed the name on his AIB account.
