The FCA says avoid jargon. But how do you evidence it?

As part of Consumer Duty obligations, firms are expected to think carefully about the language they use with customers, avoiding jargon where possible and explaining unavoidable technical terms.

But the operational path from that expectation to a repeatable, cost-effective and academically grounded process is far from obvious. It leaves a difficult question: how can a firm distinguish an unavoidable technical term from an avoidable unfamiliar word, and how can it evidence that distinction consistently across client literature?

That question is harder than it sounds, because familiarity is very subjective. A word that may be technically correct, and entirely ordinary to one person can just as easily feel unfamiliar, unnatural or needlessly specialised to another. Whether it be their age, level of education, or financial experience, every target market will have its own nuances. And for those trying to make the assessment, you run into a basic problem of your own… you cannot unknow what you already know.

Why expertise distorts familiarity

The people writing communications are usually the worst judges of whether their own language feels familiar. Not because they are careless, but because familiarity is heavily contaminated by expertise. Once a term has become normal to you, it stops sounding difficult. That is why a phrase can pass through multiple internal reviewers without anyone noticing that an ordinary customer might never use it, hear it, or properly grasp it in the form presented.

Equally, you cannot judge the appropriateness of a word for a retail audience simply by whether the word has the correct meaning. For example “Per annum” and “every year” both mean the same thing, but the first is far less familiar to many retail readers. The same problem appears in more nuanced cases. “Indices” is a correct financial term, but many ordinary readers would more naturally say “indexes”. These are the kinds of distinctions that matter in financial literature, because familiarity is not only about whether a word is valid. It is about whether it is likely to feel natural to the audience in context.

The problem is not just theoretical. If a firm wants to move beyond gut feel, what is it actually meant to do? A typical page of client literature may contain around 400 words, and even if only 10 to 20 of those words raise a genuine familiarity question, the task quickly becomes difficult to manage manually. Across multiple pages, multiple documents and repeated document updates, firms need a consistent way to help identify which words may create a familiarity burden for the intended audience.

Why familiarity is harder to evidence than it first appears

One popular option is to fall back on traditional readability scores, such as Flesch-Kincaid, Gunning Fog, SMOG or similar formulae. Many of these measures penalise longer words or words with more syllables. That can be useful as a broad indicator of textual complexity, but it is a crude was of judging whether individual words are familiar. A short word is not automatically easy. A long word is not automatically difficult. For example, “yield” is short but may be unfamiliar or ambiguous to a retail investor, while “information” is longer but widely understood.

The other obvious answer is to ask customers, but that has limits too. It’s impractical to ask customers to rate every word in every document. And even if you could, self-assessment has its own flaws. People often think they understand more than they do, especially when a term looks vaguely familiar or sounds like something they have heard before.

That is why CUE treats familiarity as something that needs to be evidenced systematically, not inferred from author judgement, readability formulae, or customer self-report alone. The good news is that when you stop treating familiarity as a matter of instinct and start treating it as an evidence question, you find yourself walking into a surprisingly deep body of research.

Why subtitles matter

At first glance, subtitles can sound like an odd place to begin when assessing financial communications. But in psycholinguistics, subtitle-based frequency data is valuable because it gives a useful proxy for everyday language exposure, rather than relying only on formal written sources. Building on subtitle-frequency research associated with Brysbaert, New and colleagues, the UK subtitle data we draw on at CUE contains more than 200 million word occurrences. That gives a far stronger baseline for familiarity than internal instinct or a generic list of “plain English” alternatives. It helps answer a practical question that firms otherwise struggle to evidence: is this word common in ordinary language, or does it mainly feel familiar because professionals in financial services see it every day?

That is a much better starting point than guesswork.

Familiarity is not one signal

However, frequency is only one part of the picture. Academic work on word recognition and comprehension also looks at when words are typically acquired, how concrete they are, and how easily they connect to sensory or mental experience. That matters because an unfamiliar word is not always difficult to understand. If a word points to something concrete, visible, touchable or easy to imagine, a reader may have a better chance of working out its meaning from context. By contrast, abstract words can place more burden on the reader because there is less to picture, sense or mentally anchor. So, the useful question is not simply “is this word common?” It is “what kind of processing support does the word give the reader, and what kind of effort does it demand?”

None of these is a complete answer on its own, but together they give you a much more serious starting point than simply asking whether a word sounds fine to the person who drafted the client communication.

Why substitution is not enough

The point is not to replace every unfamiliar word. The point is to identify where a word is likely to create avoidable burden, then decide whether to replace it, explain it, or retain it with appropriate support.

Once a word has been identified as potentially burdensome, the question is not simply to grab your Thesaurus.  Financial communications often contain terms that cannot simply be swapped out without losing legal or commercial precision. That is where familiarity starts to overlap with jargon in a more interesting way. If a term is essential and cannot safely be replaced, the task changes. You are no longer trying to remove the word. You are trying to make sure the reader is properly supported to understand it. In other words, the problem becomes one of explanation, context, framing and burden management, rather than simple substitution.

That sounds tidy in theory. In practice, it is anything but.

A typical five-page document can contain hundreds of words or phrases that may need some kind of familiarity judgment. Not because they are all wrong, but because each one may need to be considered in context. Should this word stay? Is there a more familiar alternative? Would that alternative lose meaning? Would it blur legal precision? Does the type of client I am considering (target market) change the answer? Does the sentence around it already provide enough context? If not, should the fix sit in the wording itself or in an accompanying explanation?

Why guardrails matter

This is exactly where manual judgment starts to break down and where guardrails become more important than the thesaurus.

A careful process has to protect against less obvious failure modes: changing a condition or threshold, weakening a duty word such as “must” or “may”, blurring who is acting, changing timing or duration, breaking a standard phrase such as “eligible for” or “subject to”, replacing part of a recognised legal or financial expression, or choosing a word that is simpler in isolation but unnatural in formal customer literature. In other words, the work is not substitution. It is controlled substitution: improve familiarity only where the replacement survives the full sentence, the surrounding context and the role the term is performing.

“Surrender value” is a useful example. A firm might be tempted to replace it with something like “cash-in value”, and sometimes that may help. But the decision cannot be made from the word alone. The phrase may be a recognised product term, it may connect to a defined amount elsewhere, and it may sit inside conditions that affect when or how the value is available. The safer intervention may be to keep the term and explain it clearly, rather than replace it with a friendlier phrase that changes the scope.

No sensible firm should be expecting a marketing team member to sit with a thesaurus and make hundreds of these nuanced decisions, across every client communication , under time pressure, while trying to be consistent from page to page. Even if someone attempted it, the process would be slow, subjective and highly vulnerable to drift. Two reviewers would make different calls. The same reviewer would probably make different calls on different days.

What an evidence-led process needs

At CUE, we try to close that gap by treating familiarity as something that should be evidenced rather than guessed. Part of that means drawing on academic research-led lexical signals such as frequency, age of acquisition, concreteness and imageability, instead of relying on internal instinct alone. Part of it means calibrating thresholds rather than inventing them casually. And part of it means recognising that identifying a potentially unfamiliar word is only the start of the job, not the end.

The real work comes next.

If a word looks problematic, you still need to decide whether it should be changed at all. If it should, you need to decide what can replace it without damaging meaning or legal context. If it cannot safely be changed, you may need to explain it instead.

Done properly, this is a controlled, auditable, judgment process. Those decisions need to be consistent, explainable and recorded.

And it is also why firms need records, not just outputs. Not only what changed, but what did not change, and why.

Once you see the subject that way, familiarity stops looking like a soft drafting preference and starts looking like something much more serious. It becomes part of how a firm can evidence that it has genuinely thought about whether its communications will feel usable to the people expected to read them, rather than just acceptable to the people who wrote them.