Ditch disclosure: Crossan

Speaking at the Institute of Financial Advisers Financial Awareness Week breakfast in Wellington this week, Crossan said she did not want to abandon the disclosure process, but would like to see the word itself replaced.

“I would like to ban the word disclosure because I think disclosure has come to mean a wodge of papers that lawyers look through and mean that the customer really doesn’t understand” Crossan said.

“We need to make the gobbledygook that we’ve heard and seen in disclosure documents much clearer.”

Crossan says these documents talk about volatility when they could say “you might get less back than you think”. “We talk about down-side risk when you might want to say ‘there’s a chance of losing all your money’.