Better financial education starts with better financial communication
The financial decisions we make today shape the lives we live tomorrow. Yet the information that surrounds those decisions has often been difficult to understand.
Our industry has a history of giving information that is based around an organisation’s structure (rather than the customer’s way of thinking): lengthy, overly technical, and structured around disclosure obligations rather than genuine understanding. Meanwhile, the people receiving it arrive with vastly different levels of financial literacy, numeracy, confidence, digital skill, language ability and familiarity with financial products. Accessibility, then, is not a niche adjustment for a small audience, but a core design challenge. And with regulations like the 2025 European Accessibility Act, increasingly a legal one too.
The goal is not to make every financial decision appear simple. It’s to make the explanation as clear and usable as the subject allows.
This article explores some of the ways organisations can work towards that goal. At Rathbones, we don’t claim to have all the answers, but I have shared some of the key considerations and approaches we’ve used, and the lessons we’ve learnt.
Design for understanding, not merely disclosure
There is a meaningful difference between making information available and making it understandable. Much of what is published in financial services meets the first test while failing the second.
Practical steps here do not require a complete redesign of communications. It may sound obvious, but the information people most need to make a decision should be what they get to first. Informative headings should describe the content beneath them. Summaries, bullets, and worked examples can all help. Explain unavoidable technical terms at the point they appear, rather than directing readers to a separate glossary page. Risk information, caveats and limitations need to remain present and legible, not buried or minimised in the pursuit of simplicity.
At Rathbones, we’ve been developing an AI-supported agent to help writers review how understandable their content is. It doesn’t replace human judgement, but we’ve found it can surface issues that standard editing might miss.
Build accessibility into every digital experience
For most people, the primary encounter with financial information is now digital. That means the accessibility of our websites, portals and apps has a direct bearing on financial understanding.
The foundations are well documented in recognised accessibility standards like the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.2. In practice, the tactics that can have big impacts include:
- Using semantic HTML so headings, lists, tables and interactive controls communicate their purpose clearly.
- Ensuring every important journey can be completed using only a keyboard.
- Providing meaningful alternative text for images that carry information.
- Maintaining sufficient contrast, generous spacing and support for text resizing.
- Using descriptive link text rather than “click here” prompts.
These are technical changes that can be made to digital channels like websites, but we’ve often found our significant leaps forward came from the intel we’ve gleaned from usability testing by people who use assistive technologies. We are soon to introduce the ability for readers to listen to our articles, a small but meaningful step toward meeting people’s different content preferences.
Make media and documents accessible throughout their lifecycle
People understand information in different ways. Some benefit from a concise written explanation; others from a diagram, worked example, short video, animation or interactive tool. Providing information in multiple formats is not duplication – it is the difference between reaching some of your audience and reaching more of them. Multiple formats can also improve your content’s discoverability by algorithms because they create additional search surfaces.
Layering information is particularly valuable for complex financial content. Try to allow someone to start with a summary and explore greater detail progressively, rather than presenting everything at once.
Calls to action should be designed with the audience in mind. A first-time reader may want a path to explore a beginner’s guide or educational tool, while a more experienced investor may be ready for deeper analysis or a conversation with an expert. Different prompts for different audiences at different lifecycle stages can support them and ensure confidence in taking the next step.
Where technical terms are unavoidable, provide definitions without forcing people to leave the page. An inline tooltip, expandable definition, or hover interaction can explain a term at the moment of need. We are working to enable this capability – allowing users to hover over key terms in our content and see a quick, plain-language definition in context.
Interactive tools that allow people to model possible outcomes can be genuinely useful, but the assumptions, limitations and indicative status of any results need to be clear. Generative AI is making these experiences faster and easier to build, but creating the interface is often the simplest part. The rules, assumptions and calculations can become very complex, and organisations need to have confidence that the tool responds appropriately across all potential inputs. That means rigorous testing before launch and ongoing monitoring and maintenance.
However good the digital experience, always retain a route to human support – particularly for higher-stakes decisions where a conversation matters.
Make video, audio and social content inclusive
Video and social media carry their own accessibility considerations. Caption every video, including not just speech but any other audio information needed to understand it. Transcripts extend reach further and support people who prefer to read. Once again, they’re also great indexable assets.
We use an internal AI agent to clean up caption files from video platforms like YouTube and convert them into consistently formatted (and British English-spelt!) transcripts – a process that has improved both accuracy and efficiency.
On social media:
- Avoid placing essential information only inside an image.
- Write social copy that works without the visual.
- Consider colour contrast, on-screen text duration, and the use of flashing or rapidly edited content.
- Carry important qualifications and risk information into the channel itself, rather than assuming people will follow a link elsewhere.
- Use accessible capitalisation in hashtags, such as #WorldFinancialPlanningDay, so screen readers can parse them correctly.
Documents need governance, not just good formatting
Accessible documents depend on more than design. Legible text sizes, strong contrast, and logical heading structures matter – but so does knowing who owns each communication, which templates are in use, and how someone can request an alternative format if they need one. Accessibility without governance tends not to scale.
Test whether people understand, not just whether standards have been met
Using accessibility monitoring tools (Acquia Web Governance, Silktide and Siteimprove are popular but other vendors exist) on your website can be useful, but a perfect score is not the same as a good customer outcome. The more important question is whether more people can understand the information and use it to make an informed decision. Qualitative research and usability testing with real users (available for fairly decent rates via platforms such as Maze, Qualtrics and UserTesting) can be key. Follow-up data on comprehension and action rates tell you things that automated checks cannot. Even having a way for users to give feedback on every webpage can be a great way to hear from users.
Start with one journey
If the scale of this feels daunting, start small. Choose one important customer journey, such as your homepage, a key product page or a customer-facing brochure. Experience it using only a keyboard. Review it with a screen reader. Look at its language, its structure, its formats. Then ask real people what they understand, and where they get stuck. Fix what you find. Measure whether the changes help people understand and act. Carry that learning into the next journey.
We may not remove every barrier at once, or get every communication right the first time. By listening to the people we’re trying to reach, learning where they struggle and improving one communication or journey at a time, we can help more people feel informed, included and confident about the financial choices ahead of them.