I’m not a paraplanner. I don’t write suitability reports, and I wouldn’t pretend to know what should go in every section of one. But I talk to a lot of people who do, and there’s a slightly awkward question that comes up more often than you might think.
A suitability report is usually read properly by the paraplanner who wrote it, the adviser who checks it and, depending on the firm, compliance too. What is much harder to know is how much of it the client actually reads. From the conversations we have with firms, there’s often a suspicion that clients focus on the summary, the recommendation and the cost, rather than reading every page from beginning to end.
That isn’t a criticism of clients. Most people do not want to spend their evening reading page after page about their own circumstances in language they do not use every day. What they really want to understand is fairly simple: did you understand my situation, what are you recommending, why, what is it going to cost me, and do I trust the advice?
So who is the report actually for?
The truth is, it is doing two jobs at once. It has to help the client understand the recommendation in front of them, and it also has to create a clear record of why that recommendation was suitable.
Both matter. The problem starts when the second job begins to overwhelm the first.
We see this most clearly when we start working with firms that have been using the same report template for years. A paragraph gets added after one case. Another gets added later because something once felt like it should have been covered. Then a disclosure appears because someone worries it might be needed one day. None of that is bad practice. Usually, it comes from a perfectly reasonable desire to make sure nothing gets missed. But over time, the report grows, and it’s often not until a new firm sits down with us and sees their own template laid out fresh that they notice quite how much it’s grown. More than one has told us that they’d rather start again with ours than keep adding to their own.
How reports gradually get longer
At some point, it becomes worth asking whether every section is still helping this particular client understand this particular recommendation. That is often part of the early work we do with firms through our suitability consulting support, not cutting things just for the sake of making a report shorter, but asking what each section is there to do and whether it still earns its place.
Because client understanding is not the same thing as information volume.
That is close to what the FCA’s Consumer Duty guidance on consumer understanding is getting at too. The aim is not simply to disclose information, but to communicate it in a way the customer can understand, at the right time, so they can make an informed decision.
Client understanding vs evidence
Some cases absolutely need detail. Some clients want more explanation than others. There will always be parts of the file that exist because the advice needs to be properly evidenced.
But pretending every paragraph is there for exactly the same reader, doing exactly the same job, probably does not help anyone.
A good suitability report should be able to do both: explain the advice clearly to the client and evidence the reasoning properly for the file. The challenge is making sure one does not drown out the other.
If a client read the whole thing, would they understand it, or would they just feel like they’d been told something very thoroughly?
Sound familiar? Whether it’s a template that’s grown well beyond what any client actually needs, or a nagging feeling that nobody’s quite sure who the report is written for anymore, it might be worth a second look. We’re always happy to talk it through, no obligation, just a conversation about what’s actually needed and what isn’t.
