Retail Banks Editing and Proofreading Services

Retail banking generates more written contact with the public than almost any other industry, and most of it arrives unasked. Statements, rate change notices, terms updates, fraud warnings, branch closure notices, letters about accounts that have gone dormant. Individually each is minor; collectively they form what customers believe about the bank, and they are frequently written by whichever team owns the process rather than by anyone thinking about the person opening the envelope. The gap between how a bank sees itself and how its post reads is usually large.

We edit what retail banks and building societies produce — account terms and conditions, product summary and key features documents, interest rate change and terms variation notices, overdraft and charge disclosures, statement design and transaction descriptions, current account switching communications, fraud and scam warnings, authorised push payment reimbursement correspondence, bereavement and power of attorney process material, financial difficulty and forbearance letters, branch closure and service change notices, complaints correspondence and final response letters, vulnerable customer procedures and frontline staff guidance, and digital banking help content. Our editors check that the same product is described consistently across the app, the website, the terms and the letter, which in most banks it is not.

Bereavement correspondence is the writing that most defines a bank's reputation with the families who receive it, and it is where process language does the most harm. Someone has died; a relative is ringing to tell you, then being sent a list of documents, then receiving letters addressed to the deceased because a system flag was set on one product and not another. We rewrite this material so the first letter acknowledges the death before anything procedural, so the document requirements are stated once with what to do if a document does not exist, so the customer is told which accounts have been frozen and what will still be paid out — funeral costs, direct debits that should continue — and so they are given one named contact rather than a general number. We also work through the automated communications that continue after a death is registered, because a marketing letter to a dead spouse undoes every considerate sentence the bereavement team wrote.

Everything you send is treated in strict confidence, including customer correspondence, product terms in draft and complaint material. We are editors rather than legal or regulatory advisers, and customer communications must be approved by your compliance function. What we can do is make them plain, humane and consistent across every channel the customer encounters.