No Small Change

CHAPTER 5Retail Financial Services How?

This book's first pages touched briefly on one of the trickier issues we've had to grapple with: that arguably there isn't really a single, homogeneous thing that can be called ‘retail financial services’, and therefore there aren't really any generally applicable ground rules to tell us how they should and shouldn't be marketed.

Obviously if we accepted that argument it would be difficult to proceed further, so we don't. We think that despite its enormous size and diversity, there is a thing that can meaningfully be described as ‘retail financial services’, and there is a lot than can sensibly be said about marketing in it.

However, precisely because it is so very large and diverse, we feel an obligation to provide some kind of guide to the territory – a list, in other words, to make clear what's included and what isn't.

For two or three reasons, this isn't a completely straightforward exercise. For one thing, it feels uncomfortable to include a chapter that is so blatantly industry- and product-centric in a book that is supposed to emphasise the paramount importance of putting consumers first. Beyond that, a chapter that is basically a list could be extremely boring to write and indeed to read. And beyond that, we have had to ponder a number of decisions about what should and what should not be included. For example, is gambling a financial service? Or the huge personal car finance market, which is causing so much concern to the regulator ...