How to improve Consumer Understanding

21 May 2025 02:00 PM

Outline of a brain with a triangle inside of it, next to a rectangle with a triangle inside of it.

21 May 2025 Online event

This two-part webinar series will help you meet your ongoing Consumer Duty obligations, by making customer communications clearer.

Free

About

Good Consumer Understanding is vital to good outcomes. And it underpins many of the FCA’s specific concerns today, including:

  • Investing & wealth: meeting the Price and Value outcome, and the effective delivery of Targeted Support
  • Protection: in its market study into pure protection insurance, the FCA wants to feel more confident that consumers understand the products they are buying
  • Consumer finance: do your digital tools sufficiently help consumers to understand credit agreements?
  • Vulnerable customers: especially supporting people with poor numeracy and literacy, and low confidence in managing their finances

Led by our Head of Design, Stuart Tayler, this series explores what it really means for consumers to understand the information you provide – and how you can achieve that in practice.

Register once for access to both events.

Part one: How to test for Consumer Understanding

Wednesday 21st May, 2pm-2:45pm.

When we test financial services journeys, we see that a lot of customers are confused.

The firms we work with are usually surprised by this. FS can be complicated, sure, but they don’t intentionally send customers things that they won’t understand.

They’re surprised because they hadn’t seen signs of poor understanding in their quantitative data.

In the first of two webinars, Stuart Tayler will share how we test for Consumer Understanding in an effective, impartial way, and shine a light on those blind spots. He’ll talk through an approach to qualitative research that helps you align with the Consumer Duty principle, rules and outcomes.

Find out about:

  • Why it’s important to test for understanding
  • Why you may not be the best person to assess understanding
  • The details of our approach
  • How the approach can strengthen conversations with the FCA
  • How the approach can be applied at scale

Part two: How to improve comprehension, using design

Wednesday 4th June, 2pm-2:45pm.

In our previous webinar, we’ll have explained how to assess whether customers understand your communications. Next, let’s focus on making things better.

In this second session, we’ll share tips on how to design for comprehension. We’ll bring those tips and principles to life with examples, and we’ll explain why they work. You’ll then be able to apply those ideas and make things clearer for your customers.

Find out about:

  • The problem with transparency
  • Why words alone aren’t always enough
  • What German psychology has to do with comprehension
  • Why numbers can baffle people
  • What we can learn from people with dyslexia

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