Financial Regulators Editing and Proofreading Services

A regulator's authority is exercised almost entirely through writing. A rule that can be read two ways will be read the more convenient way by the firms it governs, and defended that way when challenged. Guidance that is vague produces either over-compliance by the cautious or under-compliance by the bold, and often both simultaneously in the same market. Meanwhile the same institution must write for consumers who have been harmed, for a legislature that funds it, and for the press, in registers that have almost nothing in common.

We edit what regulators and supervisory bodies produce — consultation papers and policy statements, rulebook and handbook text, supervisory statements and guidance notes, cost-benefit analyses and impact assessments, feedback statements summarising consultation responses, thematic and market study reports, enforcement notices and public censures, warning notices and decision notices, authorisation and application guidance for firms, consumer-facing warnings and educational material, annual reports and business plans, international liaison and standard-setting contributions, and speeches and public communications. Our editors work within your drafting conventions and are used to material that must be precise, neutral in tone and defensible on judicial review.

The consultation paper is where regulatory writing does most of its work, because the quality of the responses depends entirely on the quality of the questions. A paper that describes a problem at length and then asks "do you agree with our proposed approach?" collects a pile of unquantified agreement and disagreement that supports no particular decision. We rewrite consultations so the problem is stated with the evidence and its limits acknowledged, so the options genuinely considered — including doing nothing — are set out rather than only the preferred one, and so each question asks for something specific and useful: the cost to a firm of a particular requirement, the number of customers affected, the data the regulator does not have. We pay equal attention to the feedback statement, because a document that shows exactly how responses changed the policy, including where they did not and why, is the single strongest thing a regulator can publish for its own credibility with the industry it supervises.

Everything you send is treated in strict confidence, including pre-publication policy material, enforcement documents and unreleased research. We are editors rather than lawyers or policy advisers, and we offer no view on regulatory substance — the policy and its legal review remain yours. What we can do is make the drafting precise, consistent across a large publication programme, and readable by every audience it must reach.