80 percent say financial statements are way too complex |
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Wed, 31 Aug 2005 12:10
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LONDON - New research conducted by financial systems firm Docucorp has found that more than 60 percent of people happily ignore their financial statements, but pay close attention to what is written at the back of cereal packets.
The survey found that people tend to ignore their mortgage, pension or bank statements, but were conscious of what was written on food or cosmetic packages. An astounding 75 percent of people were found to be more aware of information on consumer products rather than their present financial statements. The fairer sex also could not care less, with 90 percent admitting that they would read the fine print of their horoscopes rather than complex finance documents. Only about 12 percent of women said that they paid close attention to their finances. 68 percent of those polled admitted that their pensions statements were boring and that they did not bother reading them. But significantly 80 percent admitted that they found it difficult to follow the intricate statements and said they would focus more clearly if the statements were simpler.
74 percent believed that important matters could be lost in the voluminous correspondence since they usually binned it.
Tracey Robinson, vice president of Docucorp said that the intention was not to highlight the supposed indifference among consumers, "The lack of attention paid to pensions, for example, can be explained by the fact that consumers rank their pensions’ information as the most poorly presented and difficult to understand out of all their financial correspondence. These results seem particularly ironic, given the commitment from the Financial Services Authority (FSA) to build 'financial capability' among UK consumers through the provision of clear information," she pointed out.
The FSA said that it was spending more than £10 million a year towards improving financial literacy among consumers, but Gordon Walker, a spokesman for the FSA admitted that they could not force consumers to read their bank statements. "Things are not going to change overnight- it is an incremental process," he said. The Plain English Campaign has also renewed calls to make financial documents clearer and less complex, "The way information is presented can make a significant difference to how easy it is to understand. Sometimes a simple flow chart can help readers to sort out complicated information. The beginning of the document should catch the reader's interest by getting straight to the point," a spokesman for the organization was quoted as saying.
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