Putting Financial Regulation to Work : Using Simplification and Visualization for Consumer-Friendly Information

Financial regulation and investment products have become more and more complex. Informa-tion disclosures tend to be off-puttingly long and densely texted documents. Investor behavior studies indicate that investors often skip and skim information – and even worse, sometimes they do not read it at all. Investors' abilities to comprehend and use financial information give no reason to cheer, either. Fortunately, we have tools to overcome complexity. Build-ing on our previous work where we have applied simplification and visualization to improve the communication of contracts, this paper explores the use of these approaches to financial communication