If there's one thing that really must shine through in the new financial services marketing, it is that we must learn to express ourselves more simply – most of all in writing, although at the same time it's also true that we should use writing to express ourselves less often, and other techniques much more often.

To help make sure we practise what we preach, we're going to write all (or actually almost all) of the first section of this chapter in words of only one or two syllables.

We say ‘almost all’ because we're going to give ourselves a small handful of get-outs – longer words that we're going to use even though they have three syllables. Yes, you've spotted it, the first word in that small handful is indeed the word syllable (and also syllables) – it would be hard to explain what we're doing without using the word at least once. We'll allow ourselves a few other get-outs too: we can't manage without the words financial, services and marketing, already used in our first sentence; we'll be using the names of firms, people and other bodies, some of which are longer; and also we'll allow ourselves some words used in comments made by other people that we'll be quoting in what follows.¹

To be honest, writing in this way isn't a new idea for us. A year or two ago one of your authors put it forward to a client who wanted to focus his brand promise on the idea of keeping things simple (and it wasn't a new idea then, either). The client turned the idea down straightaway. Far too tricky, he said. My people will never go for it. We're not children, and the people we're writing for aren't children either. That kind of writing wouldn't impress any of them at all.²

We shall see. If the first part of this chapter seems naive, childish or banal, then the client was right. If it seems plain-speaking and easy to read and absorb, then it'll help us make our point.

Over the years, people in financial services marketing have very often chosen to write in a complex, jargon-ridden and opaque style. There are many reasons for this.

1. They've often been writing mainly for business readers. Business readers are much more able to absorb jargon, and are much less likely to be put off by forms of words that others find complex or opaque. (In fact, the whole point of jargon is to make it easier and quicker to get your point across – but only, of course, when your readers know what it means.)
2. We're often told what to say, and how to say it, by bodies like the Financial Conduct Authority (and before that, the Financial Services Authority) and Trading Standards. Take the Annual Percentage Rate (APR) rules, which govern how we have to express the rate of interest people pay on their loans. No-one gets this. Very few people can even make sense of the words ‘Annual Percentage Rate’ in themselves, and for this they can hardly be blamed. Here's the way the term is defined in Wikipedia:

   The nominal APR is calculated as: the rate, for a payment period, multiplied by the number of payment periods in a year. However, the exact legal definition of ‘effective APR’, or EAR, can vary greatly in each jurisdiction, depending on the type of fees included, such as participation fees, loan origination fees, monthly service charges, or late fees. The effective APR has been called the ‘mathematically true’ interest rate for each year.

   The computation for the effective APR, as the fee + compound interest rate, can also vary depending on whether the up-front fees, such as origination or participation fees, are added to the entire amount, or treated as a short-term loan due in the first payment. When start-up fees are paid as first payment(s), the balance due might accrue more interest, as being delayed by the extra payment period(s).

   Did you get that? Thought not.

3. Quite frankly, the truth is that we've often used language to make things hard for people to follow on purpose, rather than to make it easy. Small print, complex grammar and opaque wording combine to ensure that very few people have the patience or skills to figure out what firms are really saying. We doubt, for example, if a poor-value product like PPI (Payment Protection Insurance) could ever have sold as well as it did if people had fully grasped what they were buying.
4. It's very easy to hide behind complex language, so that people never quite know what you're saying. Vincent Franklin, of language advice firm Quiet Room, highlights the use of passive verbs – when you say ‘the ball was kicked’ rather than ‘I kicked the ball’, Vincent points out that the passive version ducks the issue of who did the kicking. In the same way, he says, when Gordon Brown had to report at the time of the 2008 financial crisis to the House of Commons, he used the form of words ‘Mistakes were made’. By whom, that's the question – but the answer is hidden behind that passive verb.
5. A lot of financial copy has been written by people who may know a great deal about financial services, but who really can't write very well. It wouldn't be true to say that the country's best writers are queuing up to write this kind of stuff. Much financial marketing copy has been written by people who aren't really writers at all, and it shows.

Of all these four reasons, we'd say the key one is the first. Far too many of those involved in briefing, writing and vetting financial services marketing content simply aren't focused enough on whether they're making any sense to the poor sods who have to read it. Changing this lack of focus is one of the big issues that the new financial services marketing has to tackle.

We say ‘has to tackle’ because we're sure that it really matters. The failure to keep things simple and clear creates five big problems for our target groups:

1. Big picture, it makes them feel they want as little to do with our world as they can get away with. Money is tricky, quite nerve-wracking stuff at the best of times: there's always an instinct telling you it may be best not to open that letter. But if, along with this very real angst, you also have a strong feeling that the content is sure to be wholly baffling, that instinct to keep well away will be all the stronger. We hate feeling stupid, and that's the way that reading bad writing makes us feel.
2. Beyond this broad sense that financial matters are too hard to bother about, there's also the very real danger that people will fail in their attempts to buy products, most of all online. Drop-out rates in digital DIY channels are often very high, and research shows that a few poorly expressed phrases often cause the problem. One online savings process lost over 50% of all users when they reached one single badly worded question: when the words were changed, the results were transformed.

   It's helpful to think of someone going through an online process as someone walking a narrow, wobbly tightrope in a strong crosswind. If all goes well, they'll make it to the other side. But any sudden jolt, or gust or kink in the rope, and they'll go crashing to the ground.

3. Then of course there's a big point about trust. Unclear, complex, jargon-ridden content adds to people's feelings of distrust – and if, as is the case in financial services, the level of distrust is high from the outset, that's an even bigger problem. (The reverse is also true. In any effort to rebuild trust, keeping things clear and simple and giving the strong signal that you have nothing to hide is a vital aspect.)

   In fact, it's a bit worse than a simple lack of trust. People faced with the over-complex don't simply react with distrust, they react with something worse: they react with fear that something bad is going to happen to them, and they're not going to know when it does. Being fearful of our world is an even bigger problem than just not trusting us.

4. Common sense says there must be a point here about brands, and the ways they're perceived and seen to differ (or not to differ) from each other – and common sense is of course right. The failure to express themselves clearly and simply is seen to be so widespread across financial services firms that it gives a message that all firms are much the same.³ Note the contrast with many other complex markets, where tone of voice is often key to the way we perceive brands. In IT, a big part of the way people perceive the Apple brand is to do with the way that Apple keeps things simple – compared, of course, to those clunky, lumpy, hard-to-use PCs.

   The Apple brand, of course, is about a lot more than a tone of voice on screen and in writing, and indeed far beyond comms as a whole. It has become an ethos for the whole firm that is expressed in every aspect of design. We think it's odd that no financial firm seems to have learned from this huge success – with the possible exception of First Direct, we can't think of a single one that has really tried to build a brand on the basis of great design.

5. And last but by no means least in this list, we come to a point that is going to require another breach of our two-syllable rule, because we need to use the three-syllable word dialogue (and it would help if we could use another three-syllable word, engagement, too. You can't have a dialogue – or at least not a good one – with someone who makes no sense to you. If people's eyes glaze over before they get to the end of your first sentence, or indeed any sentence, then the dialogue won't get far. These days, financial services marketers are almost all – and rightly – obsessed with the idea of building a dialogue. They believe that in today's online world, good dialogue is the basis of good engagement – and good engagement is the basis of good business. But they'll never succeed if they can't make a whole lot more sense to people than most manage at the moment.

But the fact is that while most of us in financial services marketing would accept most of this, when push comes to shove we just can't do it. To reverse the well-worn cliché, we may be able to walk the walk but we just can't talk that nice, simple, real, human talk.

(And, by the way, when we do sometimes manage it, we do something else almost as bad, which is to keep things simple but only by talking to people in a weirdly dull, boring, empty way. There's a new, online tone of voice starting to emerge in financial services, shared by a large number of young fintechs. It has its good points – it's more friendly, simpler, more human and relaxed. But on the downside, there are dozens if not hundreds of firms now using it – and they all sound just the same.)

So far, this chapter has focused mainly on writing – the way we engage with people with words, the way we explain things they need to know. But that's only part of the story. Behind the question of writing, there's something bigger – something about the role that we're trying to play in people's lives, about how much we demand of them in order that they can engage with what we do, about the concepts that we expect them to be able to grasp.

To discuss this underlying dimension, we're going to drop the two-syllable thing, which might start to get a bit wearying for both you and us as we move into this more conceptual subject (although we hope you'll agree that it hasn't worked too badly in the chapter up to now).

The key point is that the limitations in consumers' level of financial engagement, and along with that their level of financial capability, aren't just – or indeed aren't mainly – about language, and the problem can't be solved either by using simpler words ourselves, or indeed teaching them some of our more complicated ones. There's a whole backstory of conceptual ideas that sit behind the language, and without understanding at least something of that story and those ideas the language can't be meaningful.

Take, for example, a little-known and not-at-all-financial word like, to choose at random, crepuscular. And then choose an unfamiliar financial expression, like, equally randomly, absolute return. You could prove easily enough that both are understood by only a very small minority of people.

But the lack of understanding is of two very different kinds. People may not know the meaning of the word crepuscular. But as soon as you tell them that it's a way of describing twilight, there are immediately a whole lot of things that they understand perfectly well. They understand what twilight is, and why it happens. They understand that it happens at, or just before, dawn, and, particularly, at dusk. They understand at least something about why it happens – that the sun is low in the sky and so doesn't cast much light. And many will have a sense of some of the science that lies behind that – the earth rotating on its axis so that night and day alternate, and twilight occuring in the period between the two.

If you explain that an absolute return fund is one that aims to achieve a positive return in all market conditions, then for a great majority of customers, none of this background understanding exists. The first problem is that you've simply replaced one unfamiliar word with several others – what is a fund? What is a return? What are market conditions? But even if you get past that with some more explanations and definitions, you still aren't really anywhere. Don't all of these funds try to make a positive return in all market conditions? How is this remotely special or different? How do you mean, most funds aim for a relative return, one that will be positive when measured against a benchmark? What is a benchmark? If it's based on an index, where do you find this index? (Most people find them at the back of a book.) And what will this absolute return be, anyway? And is it guaranteed? And if not, what's the point of it?

We could go on, but you get the message. To understand what the words absolute return mean, you don't simply need a definition from a dictionary – you need a beginner's course in asset management.

Of course, to make a point that seems to come up in virtually every chapter of this book, all consumer markets segment. There is, as we acknowledge in several places, a small segment of knowledgeable consumers who know all about absolute return funds, and about modern portfolio theory, and could even explain the concept of the efficient frontier.⁴ These people, although private individuals, have attitudes, expertise and in many ways behaviours in common with the business target groups who are much more familiar to many financial marketers. Everyone recognises the existence of this segment, including the FCA, which is happy to see them served, and addressed, in a manner that reflects their sophistication.

The problem is what to do about everyone else. Is it just a question of producing simpler marketing collateral, with a glossary giving a brief definition of Absolute Return? Although that would probably satisfy the regulator, we don't really believe it solves the problem. If an unsophisticated investor can't understand a proposition quickly and easily, we don't really think it makes much sense to offer that proposition to that investor at all. Not all financial propositions that work for professionals or for sophisticated consumers can be presented in ways that make them work for all consumers. Recipes and ingredients that work well for professional chefs and keen domestic followers of Jamie and Nigella can be too difficult, no matter how simply presented, for most of the rest of us.

And of course by the time less-expert readers even think of turning to the glossary – if indeed they ever do – a misunderstanding may have already taken root, and may be extremely difficult to correct. At the time this was researched, for example, there's an investment poster in the London Underground, where it will be seen by a number of more experienced investors but also a great many more inexperienced ones. The headline says: ‘Your Route to Spreading Risk Across Many Investments’.

Experienced investors probably read this rather clunky form of words as it was intended, as a positive idea about diversification. Inexperienced ones may misunderstand it completely. ‘Risk’ is a bad thing, isn't it? We don't want risk. We're better off without it, or at least with as little of it as possible. Yet this fund, or thing, or whatever it is, says it's ‘spreading risk across many investments’. Not just a few, but many. Sounds terrible. I'm going to stay well away.

Again, this isn't just a point about language. It's a point about the concepts in the investment world of risk, and of diversification. If the baffled tube-travelling inexperienced investor decides to turn to that glossary, or more like to Google or Wikipedia, to try to decode this message, they'll have a fair bit of reading to do.

None of this means that financial propositions should be withheld from the consumer market. They all have their place. Absolute return funds should be there, on the market, available to anyone who wants to work their way through the Hargreaves Lansdown website, in just the same way that titanium flanged exhaust inlet valves should be advertised in Practical Mechanics. But the propositions we present to consumers should be designed from the ground up to meet the level of sophistication and understanding of those consumers, which means that they can't be – as they so often are at the moment – propositions designed for professionals but offered in dumbed-down versions in the direct-to-consumer marketplace.

This is a point that clearly presents a very significant challenge to the industry. In most financial services categories, standard operating procedure – refined over many years – is, precisely, to design products and processes for professionals, and then to go on to develop dumbed-down consumer versions (‘dumbed-down’ in this context means simplified either in terms of product design, or in communication or, very likely, both).

Sometimes, the implications of this line of thought can raise eyebrows – especially when they mean limiting the availability of appealing and effective products and services. We mention offset mortgages elsewhere as examples of excellent and beneficial products that are just too complicated to explain to most borrowers. Most of those choosing their mortgage on a DIY basis don't choose offset mortgages because, try as the copywriter might, they sound complex and intimidating; and even among those who do finish up with an offset mortgage, usually on the basis of an intermediary's advice, very few use the product to anything like its full potential.

Even in categories that are now very largely direct-to-consumer, and where the role of professionals has been dramatically reduced over time – like, for example, general insurance – the dumbing-down approach still largely prevails, and still causes plenty of discomfort. Consumers are generally content to buy general insurance direct, but it's disturbing to realise how little they understand about what they're buying. Motor, travel, home and pet policies are still built around hugely lengthy and detailed terms and conditions, stuffed full of traps for the unwary and little-understood ground rules: this basic approach was developed in an era when brokers dominated the market, and has never changed even though their market shares are now down to single-figure percentages.

The new financial services marketing is already starting to move on. In many categories – insurance, investment, banking, peer-to-peer lending – start-up pure-play digital propositions are beginning to reject old-style complexity and simplify propositions to the bare minimum, often using data to achieve ‘simplified relevance’ that makes it possible to offer no more, but also no less, than each individual customer needs.

But this evolution still has a long way to go. It's very, very difficult for people working in financial services to completely clear their minds of assumptions carried over from the old world. Traditional tools and processes – even if in much more modern, much more accessible presentations – have a habit of surviving. Insurance underwriting may now happen on the phone, but it's still underwriting.

Again, we have to make the point that the regulator often doesn't help. It's regulation, for example, acting on the mistaken belief that more information makes for more empowered consumers, that insists that the marketing of lending products has to focus around the communication of APRs (Annual Percentage Rates), which no direct borrower understands.

And in attempting to satisfy the regulator's requirements, many new-generation investment propositions still give themselves a mountain to climb by basing their processes around attitude-to-risk (ATR) questionnaires originally designed to work in a financial adviser's office, but horribly difficult and intimidating for younger people with little investment experience who are going through the process on their tablets or phones. (At the end of this chapter, we run through a real and frequently used ATR questionnaire, the 10-question version developed by Oxford Risk, adding in some of the kind of responses and anxieties we would expect it to trigger from a typical inexperienced customer.)

The same problem arises in countless other tools and processes originated for the adviser, professional or sophisticated investor market, and then subsequently simplified a bit and presented in D2C environments. From the name alone, for example, you might imagine that an unsophisticated DIY investor would be likely to struggle with something called Stochastic Modelling, and you'd be right. One of your authors has sat in research focus groups where people were exposed to the kind of ‘fan charts’ that show the potential range of investment outcomes over a range of periods of time: for all the sense they could make of them, the charts might as well have been written in Sanskrit.

And let's not forget completely about doubts and uncertainties that are triggered by language, even though – as we argued earlier – language problems often reveal underlying problems with financial principles and concepts. New-generation online life insurer Beagle Street, for example, claims to offer a quick, easy, online quote-generation process. But at the time of writing, as soon as it's asked you your name, gender and age, the next question in its online application process as at spring 2017 is whether you want Level Term or Decreasing Term insurance. Most people won't know. There is a little video to watch, but we found it rushed and quite confusing. And the three-screen written explanation is very strange, the third of the three screens saying only:

What's Not a Type of Life Insurance Policy?

The two main types of Life Insurance are covered above; it's a common misconception that Critical Illness and ‘life assurance’ are classified as types of life insurance policy.

Even with our combined 60 years of financial services marketing experience, we have no idea what that means.⁵

After that, the process asks a series of simple questions – how much cover you want, how long you want the cover to last, whether or not you also want Critical Illness. The explanatory notes are notably short, but not notably explanatory. The Critical Illness explanatory box, for example, states:

Why You Might Need Critical Illness Cover

You can set the level of Critical Illness Cover that's right for you, providing extra security just in case you need it. If you were to become critically ill you may find your costs increase, for medical appointments, equipment, lifestyle changes, even a carer. A lump-sum pay-out could help cover these additional expenses.

This is, to say the least, a pretty sketchy sales pitch for what is effectively a second level of cover that will usually more than double the cost. We think it's an unhelpful distraction from the main business of the site, which is selling life assurance – but at the same time an insufficient argument to make a persuasive case for CI.

By the way, while Beagle Street is undoubtedly an online business looking to make sales directly from its website, there are others with rather murkier aims. Particularly in life assurance, but in other sectors too, there are players which use a seemingly online process to generate leads for a telesales operation. At some point in the online process you'll be asked for a telephone number, and fairly shortly thereafter you'll start receiving calls from remarkably persistent callers. These firms operate on the basis that good telesales people can achieve much higher conversion rates than ‘pure’ online services, and also that they're likely to be able to walk customers up to more expensive and profitable options. For the firms concerned, it can be an effective model and one that can overcome the problem of unviably high acquisition costs. But from the customers' perspective, it's a manipulative and misleading tactic that has little to do with the new financial services marketing.

To sum up, it's obviously true to say that if the new financial services marketing has to engage more effectively with consumers, and help build their confidence and understanding to the point that they're able to find their way through our processes, choose good products and services and make effective use of them, we have to get better at communicating with them.

The most obvious requirements are to do with how we express ourselves in writing. On the whole, our writing is still far too complex and opaque – and, no less important, it's also far too boring and unrewarding to read. We seem to have reached a point where we've eliminated some of our very worst habits, at least from our marketing communications, and then slumped back exhausted, failing to build on these limited achievements.

At the next level, we've been making a bit more progress recently in finding other ways to communicate that get us beyond reams of text. Very large amounts of time, money and effort have been ploughed into so-called infographics, for example, although it has to be said that results have been mixed. And fairly large amounts of time, money and effort have gone into the use of video (including, obviously, a lot of animated infographics), but the results have been rather more mixed. Too many of these have a patronising air, which is insulting to customers.

But it's the third level that presents the real challenge, specifically to marketers but actually to the industry as a whole. The third level says we will never become good at engaging with consumers if our default assumption is that we will offer them dumbed-down versions of products, propositions and processes originally designed for professionals. We have to start again, with blank sheets of paper, and think about what our customers really want from us, and how they want to buy and use it.

There are of course a few parts of the industry with a lot more experience than others when it comes to this kind of thinking. Many retail banking services, for example, have only ever been intended for individual consumers, so rebuilding propositions originally intended for professionals doesn't arise. But that's no reason for complacency – as a new wave of challenger banks are demonstrating, there are still plenty of ways to make basic banking services a whole lot more meaningful and relevant to consumers.

And amid all this room for a great deal of improvement, there are now some examples of firms that have developed genuinely customer-centric propositions, which are now clearly setting the pace. It's not the most original or popular example, but it is hard to imagine how you could improve on the core of payday lender Wonga's wonderfully simple online application process, with its two questions – how much cash do you want, and how long do you want it for? – and its two simple slider controls to use for your answers. It's very difficult to imagine why anyone would drop out rather than answer these (although of course those incomprehensible APR details, if they register with people, might create some alarm).

‘ATTITUDE TO RISK’ QUESTIONNAIRES

Finally in this section, we turn our attention to an element which, thanks largely to the enthusiasm of the FCA, has become a ubiquitous part of online investment processes: the Attitude To Risk questionnaire. There are several currently in use, but there's little difference between them and the aim is always the same: to identify how much risk the respondent is comfortable to take in pursuit of investment returns.

We're well aware that a great deal of science has gone into all of them, and that they've been designed to provide good, reliable outcomes even when – or arguably especially when – people complete them quickly and without thinking too hard. We're by no means expert enough to cast any doubt over the outcomes they generate: it may well be that their questions, although seemingly ambiguous and repetitive, give genuinely robust results.

(Actually, behind the admirably mature and balanced perspective of that previous paragraph, we can't help secretly thinking that the whole idea of people having an ‘attitude to risk’ that is (a) one single thing and (b) pretty much unchanging over time is a lot of old tosh. Behavioural scientists quoted in Chapter 12 who are a great deal cleverer than us make it very clear that we all have different attitudes toward the risk that we're willing to take with different lumps of our money – for example, we're much happier to take risks with money we won on a horse than money for which we worked hours of overtime. And equally, although we can't produce any Nobel laureates to support our view, we know from personal experience that we're a whole lot more bullish about making risky investments when the TV news every evening is about the FTSE hitting record highs, and a whole lot more bearish when the headlines say it's plunging like a weighted sack. But what do we know?)

Anyway, these aren't the doubts we want to focus on here. Our concern, as demonstrated in what follows, is that when consumers complete these questionnaires for themselves,without the presence of an adviser to guide them, the process of answering the questions creates a growing level of uncertainty or anxiety – so much so that a significant number will drop out before they get to the end.

This isn't a minor problem. Like many digital direct-to-consumer financial propositions, the kinds of online investment service we're discussing here are, at best, very marginally profitable. Many are hopelessly unprofitable. Given the horrendous cost-per-response and cost-per-customer figures that most are experiencing, they certainly can't afford to frighten off perfectly good prospects: it may well be that for some, an unnecessarily high drop-out rate on this questionnaire, in itself, will make the difference between a viable and an unviable business.

In what follows, we've created a hybrid questionnaire which combines elements typical of the main offerings currently in use. And having created it, your authors decided to have a go at answering it…

Please indicate your response to the following statements on a five-point scale, where 5 means that you agree strongly, 4 means you agree slightly, 3 that you neither agree nor disagree, 2 that you disagree slightly and 1 that you disagree strongly. Got that? OK.

1. My family and friends think of me as a person who doesn't like to take risks.

   LC:	Well, what kind of risks? They'd say I'm quite careful with money, but the last time we went out for a meal I chose a white wine from Hungary. Which was delicious, actually. Do they mean financially, or in real life? Not too sure about that one. Perhaps I'll come back to it.
   AT:	I suppose it depends which ones you ask, and about what. I don't think the ones who've been around a motor-racing track with me probably would say that.

2. I'm happier when I know my money is safe from risk.

   LC:	Of course I'm happier. If I could choose between putting my money in a safe, or balanced on the edge of a glowing red-hot barbecue, I'd choose the safe. Who wouldn't? Is that what they mean?
   AT:	Who's going to say they're happier when their money is unsafe? Of course I prefer it to be safe.

3. I feel comfortable investing in the stock market.

   LC:	Honestly, that's such a generalisation. Comfortable investing what? Every penny I own? A modest flutter? Pity there isn't an answer saying ‘It depends…’
   AT:	Not sure if I ever feel completely comfortable investing. You're never 100% sure what you're getting yourself into.

4. I'm usually slow to make decisions on investment matters.

   LC:	Now, you see, that's another ‘It depends.’ I make decisions not to invest in things all the time, and usually in seconds. It's the few I go for that take some pondering. Is that a yes?
   AT:	Define ‘slow.’

5. I've made extremely risky financial investments in the past.

   LC:	This is getting really difficult. Yes and no. It depends.
   AT:	I don't think so, but to be honest I'm not really sure.

6. I want high investment growth for my money. I am willing to accept the possibility of greater losses to achieve this.

   LC:	That's another tricky one. What do you mean by ‘my money’. All of it, well, yes, definitely. A bit of it, well, I don't mind a flutter. I might be overthinking this.
   AT:	Some of my money? All of my money? Not sure what this means…

7. I would never make a high-risk investment

   LC:	Haven't we done this one? Never say never is what I'd say. Probably not, but you never know. A definite maybe.
   AT:	You've already asked me this.

8. Maximising long-term investments is my goal, and I would be willing to accept dramatic, short-term falls to achieve it.

   LC:	Is it guaranteed,this maximising angle? And when are these short-term drops going to occur? Depends. Again.
   AT:	But how would I know? And anyway, the first rule of research questionnaires is to ask only one question at a time.This is actually two questions. Which one am I meant to answer?

9. I would prefer small certain gains to large uncertain ones.

   LC:	Well, obviously I'd prefer large certain ones. How small? How large? How certain? How uncertain? As you may have guessed, I'm a Libran – it's all ‘on the one hand…on the other hand’ with me.
   AT:	Have we nearly finished yet? I'm losing my patience with this.

10. How much risk do you feel you've taken with your past financial decisions?

    LC:	This time I'm sure I've done this one. Or one very like it.
    AT:	Sorry, no, I'm out.

As we said, our main worry about all this is not whether the science is robust and a sensible and reasonably reliable score can be derived from respondents' answers. Our main worry is whether the experience of dealing with this kind of ambiguous, seemingly repetitive and frankly rather irritating questionnaire sits comfortably with the inexperienced, anxious, time-poor DIY investor – and, therefore, whether he or she is likely to have the confidence and motivation to persevere through to the end. (The same is true, though obviously rather more so, of the longer versions which sometimes include up to 20 questions.)

These questionnaires were originally envisaged, like so much in retail financial services, for use in the face-to-face intermediated channel. No doubt with guidance, reassurance and interpretation from a good adviser, they work perfectly well in that environment. Beyond that channel, like so much in retail financial services, they're nowhere near simple enough.