Paraplanners have been urged by an FCA specialist to ditch ‘flaky’ suitability reports and make them easier on the eye.

Rory Percival, regulatory technical specialist, said that improving the look of the reports through changes such as colour headings and larger fonts, could make all the difference in whether clients read them or not.

Speaking yesterday at the Paraplanners Powwow, he said there were some simple steps professionals could be making to improve their work in this area.

Many report writers are frequently falling into the same traps still and creating ‘flaky’ documents, he said, with many showing repetition, being overly long and containing ‘unnecessary’ sections.

For instance, he said, if a client is 20 years from retirement, the report doesn’t need 3 or 4 pages for retirement options.

An example of good practice, he said, was a firm using three clear headings on their reports as standard. These were:

• What are the objectives?
• Why it is suitable?
• The disadvantages

Everything else on that firm's document was information specific and individual to that client, he said.

He urged Paraplanners to “think about what’s actually going to be useful for clients” and stressed that “objectives need to be relevant for clients, perhaps even using the clients’ own words”.

Report writers don’t need to recap on range of services the firm provides, he said. He emphasised the importance of the report’s aesthetics.

Mr Percival, who has held Chartered Financial Planner status, said: “I’m a great one for the look of things, if reports looked better more clients would look at them.

“There are two things that make a big difference. One is having one a half lines of space, that extra space and air makes it more appealing to read, and second, colour headings in bigger font. Just those two things will transform the document and make it more appealing to read and hopefully they’ll carry on reading.”

He said: “Overall what we’re trying to achieve, the core objective, is we’re trying to get the client to read them. It’s not covering firms’ back, it’s for clients to have documents that are engaging, informative and manageable.”