Answering Calls for Retail Banking Simplicity Not So Simple

Ah, simplicity.

If only it weren't so complicated. Customers say that disclosures from banks are confusing. They aren't clear about when fees will be incurred or how to avoid them. Offered an array of checking accounts, they struggle to figure out which one suits them best. And finding an answer online, or getting one on the phone, isn't as easy as it should be.

All of this makes people suspicious, says Brian Rafferty, global director of customer insights for the brand strategy firm Siegel+Gale. "In a sense, it's like, 'They're trying to rip me off and that's why I can't understand what they're saying to me.'"

Rafferty says he doesn't believe banks intend to be so perplexing, but the fact that their customers think so—a perception evident in his firm's annual simplicity study-cannot be ignored.

"If you agree there's been a kind of crisis of trust in the general public with the financial services industry, to rebuild trust is not to do a large ad campaign saying, 'You can trust us.' It's to really demonstrate it through these daily interactions with people," Rafferty says.

Though complaints about complexity are long-standing ones for the industry, addressing them is taking on new urgency. Customers are revolting over new fees, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is now watching to make sure banks speak to consumers in language they can understand, and startups like Simple and Movenbank are getting a lot of media buzz by promising to be more transparent and easier for customers to interact with.

"I think there is an industry imperative to simplify," says Michael Beird, the director of banking services at J.D. Power and Associates. "A lot of banks are so afraid of being in trouble from a regulatory perspective that they hide behind their disclosures, but I think there is a desire to step away from the legalese," he says.

JPMorgan Chase is a case in point. The company announced in December that it was simplifying disclosures, starting with its Total Checking account, which has 8 million customers. The move was part of what Ryan McInerney, CEO of Chase's consumer bank, describes as a broader mission to examine interactions through the eyes of customers to make sure the bank is being clear and simple.

Chase held focus groups and one-on-one customer interviews to get feedback on its existing disclosures and thoughts on how to reword them.

McInerney says the bank started with the model disclosure form proposed by Pew Charitable Trusts, a group that has been advocating for more consumer-friendly communications from banks, and then applied tweaks based on Chase's own research. The process took several months.

The new three-page summary of disclosures—culled from a document that McInerney says is significantly larger-details all of the instances that would trigger fees and ditches the typical bankerspeak.

"One of the most complicated things for customers is this arcane banking topic called posting order," McInerney says. The new disclosures contain phrases like "how deposits and withdrawals work"- which is the language customers used after Chase explained to them what it meant by posting order.

"What we've found is, you really do have to talk to customers and just describe to them what you are trying to convey, and give them a piece of paper and a pen and say, 'How would you talk to your family about that?'" McInerney says. "That's the approach we took."

Chase plans to carry through in the same way with other types of disclosures and customer letters. When unveiling the new disclosures for its Total Checking account, Chase also eliminated several fees, including a $25 charge that applied to anyone who closed an account within 90 days of opening it.