&ldquokiss&rdquo is a popular acronym among hipster silicon valley types. it refers not to the hit single by prince, nor the spandexclad dinosaur rockers from detroit. it stands for &ldquokeep it simple, stupid&rdquo and is meant as a guiding principle of website design.the financial services industry has been singularly bad at kissing, though. it seems to have taken every opportunity available to overcomplicate things, dress simple concepts up in impenetrable language, and present information in such a form as to make it virtually incomprehensible.often, this has been to assist with systematic overcharging. at other times, it has been to comply with overprescriptive regulation possibly imposed as a result of overcharging or other poor practice. either way, it&rsquos got to stop.here&rsquos why. when it comes to investing, there are broadly two camps. there&rsquos a relatively small group of enthusiasts, who tend to be older and wiser.many are retired. they are savvy consumers of financial services they do lots of research they shop around. they are likely to buy individual shares or investment trusts, and perhaps attend annual meetings. in short, they can look after themselves.but there are fewer and fewer of them. in private, many retail stockbrokers are quite prepared to admit that theirs is a dying industry, and that they&rsquore just pinching the same clients off each other. the heady days of the 1980s, when people who had never bought shares before wandered in off the street to pick up a prospectus for british gas, are gone.the other group is much larger. it consists of individuals who may be intelligent and successful, but who are timepoor and find finance bewildering andor boring. just deciding what to do with their isa each year is a burden. they&rsquore fearful of being ripped off.as a consequence, their savings languish in cash, losing purchasing power year after year, or they&rsquove jumped on the buytolet bandwagon because property is an asset that is tangible and easy to understand.if the industry wants to mobilise this money, it needs to rethink how it does things. first up should be to cut its product ranges.most fund management groups offer far too many products, with the result that there are over 2,000 openended funds and about 400 investment trusts. often, new funds are launched just to harvest more assets and take advantage of a particular fad bric funds are an obvious example, but they&rsquore far from alone.subsequent performance is often mediocre. the same is true of exchange traded funds, where there are dozens of subscale products.one company that seems to get that less is more is vanguard. its uk product range of index trackers and exchange traded funds largely track the major equity and fixedincome indices because that&rsquos more or less all investors need.then there are fees. in no other business would you buy a product without really knowing what it&rsquos going to cost you.surely, 2015 has to be the year when the funds industry agrees on an allencompassing measure of costs, decides what to call it, and displays it prominently on all literature. failure to do so will lead investors to the inevitable conclusion that there&rsquos something to hide, and they&rsquoll stay away.promotional literature, application forms and regular investor communications need to be radically simplified. peter hargreaves, cofounder of hargreaves lansdown, noted in his autobiography that every additional question on a form resulted in 5 per cent fewer people filling it in. others should take heed.industry types might complain that a lot of what they put in their documentation is &ldquoboilerplate&rdquo, inserted on the orders of uk or european regulators. they too could look at how best to protect consumers the financial conduct authority has already acknowledged that merely providing massive amounts of information does not necessarily result in better decisions.what could achieve that instead minimum standards might help.when isas were introduced, the government of the day laid out &ldquocat standards&rdquo short for charges, access, terms.they&rsquore somewhat maligned and definitely outdated maximum charges of 1 per cent aren&rsquot exactly competitive these days but the basic idea was reasonable enough, and has been partially revived in the shape of the charge cap on autoenrolment pension funds.perhaps a modified kitemarking scheme could be devised, and regularly reviewed, to identify products that are transparent, fair and simple. investors might then be more likely to invest, rather than simply to save.financial times
