Easy Read for Financial Services: Consumer Duty Guide
askVERA · Financial Services
Easy Read for Financial Services: 5 Key Consumer Duty Fixes
Consumer Duty made plain, accessible communication a legal entitlement. Most policy and claims letters still are not built to meet it.
Policy wording, claims decisions, renewal notices, terms changes: financial services runs on letters that customers are legally entitled to understand. Consumer Duty made that entitlement enforceable, and Easy Read for financial services is how firms meet it without adding a specialist team.
Why Consumer Duty makes this unavoidable
The FCA’s Consumer Duty came into force for open products and services on 31 July 2023, and for closed products and services a year later. Under the consumer understanding outcome set out in the FCA Handbook (PRIN 2A.5), firms must communicate in a way that is clear, fair and not misleading, using plain and intelligible language. Where jargon or technical terms cannot be avoided, firms must explain what they mean.
The bar rises further for customers with characteristics of vulnerability. FCA guidance on the fair treatment of vulnerable customers is explicit that firms must tailor communications to meet the information needs of these customers, test communications for clarity, and offer alternative formats where appropriate, including larger font, Braille, other languages, or simply more time to digest information. A standard policy letter, however well drafted, was not built with any of that in mind.
The practical problem is volume. A mid-sized insurer or lender issues thousands of claims letters, policy summaries and renewal notices a year. Rewriting even a fraction of those by hand, checking each one against an accessibility standard, and keeping evidence of who reviewed what, is not something a compliance or communications team can sustain manually. That is the gap askVERA closes, and it is exactly the environment Easy Read for financial services was built for.
askVERA is the easy read software firms use to meet exactly this kind of Consumer Duty requirement.
How Easy Read for Financial Services Meets the Standard
- Convert policy and claims documents automatically. Upload a policy summary, claims decision letter or terms update as a PDF, Word document or pasted text, and askVERA rewrites it into Easy Read or plain English, in minutes rather than as a specialist commission.
- Score every document before it goes out. Automated easy read production scores each conversion against the EU Easy Read Guidelines, so a firm can set a minimum standard, such as 80% or above, and apply it consistently across every letter a team produces.
- Adapt to different vulnerability characteristics. Low literacy, dyslexia, cognitive difficulties and English as an additional language are not the same need, and askVERA produces different formats for each rather than treating accessibility as one size fits all.
- Keep a named reviewer and an audit trail on every document. A human confirms tone and accuracy before publication, and that check is logged. The same governance discipline behind safe AI implementation for banks applies just as much to a customer letter as to a credit decision.
- Cover claims and underwriting, not just customer letters. The same conversion step can sit inside AI driven workflow automation for insurance, so accessible versions of decision letters and policy documents are generated as part of the existing document workflow rather than as a separate manual task bolted on afterwards.
A claims letter, before and after
The table below shows what changes when Easy Read for financial services sits inside an existing claims or underwriting workflow, rather than being run as a separate, occasional task.
| Step | Manual process | With askVERA |
|---|---|---|
| Drafting the letter | Standard template wording, regardless of who receives it | Same letter converted into Easy Read or plain English automatically |
| Spotting a vulnerability need | Depends on whether a handler notices and flags it | Accessible version available as standard for every letter, not an exception |
| Checking the standard is met | Rarely measured against a defined benchmark | Compliance score against the EU Easy Read Guidelines on every document |
| Evidence for the regulator | Reconstructed after the fact, if at all | Reviewer sign-off and score recorded at the point of publication |
Where to start
The strongest pilot is a single high-frequency, high-stakes document: a claims decision letter, a policy renewal notice, or a vulnerability-flagged customer’s correspondence. Measure two things from the first batch: the compliance score against the EU Easy Read Guidelines, and the time from draft to reviewed, published output.
Consumer Duty was not written as a box-ticking exercise, and the FCA has said plainly that it expects communication design, testing and monitoring to be a coherent process, not a one-off review. Easy Read for financial services turns that expectation into something a compliance team can run every week, on every letter, without a backlog building up behind it.
See Easy Read for financial services working on one of your own policy or claims documents.
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