On October 21, 2026, UK advocacy group CensHERship launched FemTick, an accreditation for banks, insurers, payment providers and other service firms that serve women's-health companies without bias. It has nine founding partners: HSBC Innovation Banking, specialist insurer Tokio Marine Kiln, e-commerce platform Commerce, accountancy and advisory firm Withum, executive-search firm Practicus, Novabook, law firm Mills & Reeve, LT PR and Communia. Providers go through a structured assessment of how they classify, review and support women's-health businesses. It covers leadership and accountability, risk classification and policy, and culture and customer experience. Those that pass may display the FemTick badge.

Why It Matters

Afterglow has tracked financial exclusion in this industry mostly from the adult-content side: [Visa's VAMP thresholds](/stories/visa-vamp-threshold-tightens-april), [processor-driven content purges](/stories/pixiv-fanbox-payment-processor-suspensions), and an [OCC debanking report](/stories/fsc-debanking-opportunity-credit-union) that dropped adult entertainment from its final version. FemTick shows the same automated risk filters catching period-care, menopause and pelvic-health companies, which never set out to be "adult" businesses. The working mechanism is a keyword-and-MCC classification that flags genitals before it looks at the actual business. That is a solvable problem, and HSBC and an insurer joining is a signal to lenders that the category can be underwritten. There are limits. FemTick is voluntary, UK-centred and self-defined. The assessment criteria and thresholds aren't public yet, and it covers women's health, not pleasure products. Sex-toy and sexual-wellness brands sit in the grey zone between the two. Watch whether FemTick explicitly admits sexual-wellness companies, and whether a badge changes outcomes at the underwriting stage rather than just in marketing. If it does, it could become the template for a broader sexual-health equivalent. That matters given that federal U.S. anti-debanking efforts have so far [left the adult and sexual-wellness sector out](/stories/fed-bans-reputation-risk-debanking).

The case rests on CensHERship's 2026 Bias Burden report. It found that 100% of the women's-health companies surveyed had faced barriers getting financial or commercial services, including banking, payment processing, insurance and e-commerce platforms, and that more than 60% lost revenue as a result. Co-founders Clio Wood and Anna O'Sullivan blame much of this on automated risk models and outdated classification systems. Words like "menstrual," "vagina" and "sexual health" can trip restrictions designed for adult content or high-risk industries. Newer technologies, such as using menstrual blood for diagnostics, don't fit existing risk categories. "Companies were telling us they couldn't access payment services, were being refused insurance or were struggling to open bank accounts," Wood said.

HSBC Innovation Banking UK's head of growth and financing, Emma Stephens, said women's-health companies "still face barriers to accessing capital, commercialising their products and scaling successfully." Tokio Marine Kiln's head of life sciences, Kirsten Shastri-Moscher, said underwriters "have a responsibility to understand emerging sectors on their own terms." The launch cites PwC's estimate of a $600 billion women's-health market opportunity by 2030. FemTick is now inviting more providers to apply.

Sources

Update — 2026-10-22

Initial entry — story first created.