Banking and finance: the complete file is your real product

In financial services, nearly everything a communications agency normally reaches for is unavailable. The rate cannot be promised, the approval cannot be promised, the timescale depends on a third party, and comparison with a competitor is slippery ground.

What remains looks minor and is not: precision. The exact list of documents, the real hour the counter opens, what happens if something is missing, and how many times somebody will have to come back.

It is minor to a communicator and central to the customer, because the cost they bear is not financial. It is an afternoon of leave, a journey, a queue, and the discovery at the counter that a photocopy is missing.

So this article is written the other way round from most: it starts with what cannot be said, then covers what remains — and what remains is considerable, because nobody finds it interesting enough to attend to.

An incomplete file is almost never the customer being careless. It is a chain of partial information, and every link looks reasonable at the moment it is put in place.

The first is vocabulary. A document named by its exact administrative title is not recognised by the person who has to bring it, who knows it by another name and believes they do not have it.

The second is the implicit. Some requirements are so obvious to the institution that they stopped being written down — a document still in date, a signature to be given in person, a joint holder physically present. Each of those three sends somebody home again, and none of them would have cost more than half a line.

The third is variation. What is required depends on the applicant’s situation, and a single list published for everybody mechanically produces an error for every case it does not distinguish.

The fix is dull and effective: name documents the way people name them, write down the implicit, and separate the commonest cases into distinct lists rather than into footnotes. A footnote does not get read in a queue, and a queue is exactly where the list is consulted.

Three measures are enough and they are taken at the counter. The first is the share of files complete on the first visit. It is the central indicator of everything in this article and it exists almost nowhere.

The second is how many visits it takes to conclude, counted by type of formality. A formality that always needs three visits does not have a timescale problem, it has a list problem.

The third is the question most often asked at the counter and on the phone. Record it in one line for a fortnight and it points at exactly the sentence missing from your page.

What we will not give you: an approval rate, an average processing time or a branch waiting time "observed in Algeria". We know of no dated, checkable series for those three, and we will not substitute an estimate for a source.

That absence is not a gap in the article, it is information about the market: when a supplier quotes you those figures, ask for the year, the publisher and the scope before granting any weight to the rest of their proposal.

No financial institution has ever won a customer by writing that it is reliable. It is the word everybody uses, including those who are not, and it therefore carries no information.

What carries information is checkable precision. An exact list, correct hours, a stated time that is kept, an answer that says "I do not know, I will check" rather than a confident approximation. Each of those four costs an effort of organisation and nothing else, which is precisely why so few institutions manage them.

The mechanism is simple: the customer cannot assess your financial soundness, but they can assess whether what you wrote was accurate. They extrapolate from the second to the first, and they are right to.

Information security belongs to the same register. Saying what you will never ask for — a code by telephone, a password by message — protects your customers and distinguishes you more effectively than any declaration of seriousness.

And the incident procedure has to be written down: what to do, who to call, at what hour, and what happens next. An institution that wrote that before an incident will not have to improvise during one.

What we will refuse: any wording promising an approval, a return or a timescale that does not depend on you, any named comparison with a competitor, and any urgency hook on a financial commitment.

A limit of competence, stated plainly: we are neither lawyers nor compliance, and we do not certify that your communications meet regulation. We know what is plainly to be avoided; your compliance function decides, and we work with its calendar rather than against it.

We will also refuse to publish a document list nobody in your institution has agreed to put their name to. A list with no owner ages silently, and a wrong list costs more than no list at all.

What we do: document lists written in people’s vocabulary, with originals, copies, special cases and a last-updated date; branch pages carrying the hours actually kept and the operations not handled; and a page saying what you will never ask for by telephone.

And what you should do without us this week: ask your counters to record, for ten days, the document most often missing. One line. That document is nearly always the one badly named on your page, and correcting it is free.