Pick up almost any business loan agreement from a high-street bank and try to read clause 9. You will read it three times before the clause makes sense, and you will read it a fourth time before the meaning starts to settle. That is not an accident — dense legal prose serves a specific purpose for the lender: it deters challenge, it allows the lender to rely on the strict text, and it makes the borrower feel grateful for whatever the bank decides. We do not write our documents that way. This article explains what we do instead and why we think it changes outcomes.
The design rules we follow
Every customer-facing document at Credicorp is built against four design rules:
- Lead with the summary. Every contract has a plain-English summary on page 1 — five bullets covering what you are borrowing, who is on the hook, the cost cap, your right of early repayment, and where to find help. The summary is not the binding text (the full agreement is), but the summary is the first thing you read and the first thing we expect you to understand.
- Limit sentence length. Target average ≤20 words per sentence; aim for a Plain English Campaign reading level around year-9 (age 14) for the customer-facing surfaces. Legal precision sometimes pushes us to a longer sentence and we accept that — but only when it is genuinely needed.
- Single concept per clause. A clause is one named topic. If we need to cover two topics, we split into two clauses with two headings.
- Name the £ in £ terms. Every cost is shown as a £ figure in the Worked Example, not as a percentage rate the borrower has to multiply out. APR is shown for comparison, but the £ figures lead.
What we provide alongside the binding text
The binding agreement is in English (English-law contract). Sitting alongside that binding text we provide:
- A plain-English summary of the agreement, written for the same audience as the bullets on the KIS — short, clear, accurate. The summary is explicit that the binding agreement controls if anything in the summary differs.
- The same summary in Welsh, Scottish Gaelic and Scots (LR-R3N-03 flag — translations are careful drafts pending native-speaker review). The customer’s chosen language is remembered for future documents.
- A Simple View rendering of the on-site application and portal pages — plainer wording, single-column layout, more icons. Activated voluntarily by the visitor, or automatically if the customer carries a vulnerability flag.
- A Large-print PDF variant of every document (Key Information Sheet, Business Loan Agreement, Revolving Credit Facility Agreement, plain-English summary, statement of borrowing). The customer toggles “Large print” in the accessibility panel and the PDF generator scales every font on the document.
- A posted large-print copy on request — a small but stubborn part of our customer base cannot reliably read a screen and the option to receive a paper copy in 14-point matters.
The evidence that readability changes outcomes
The argument that plain-English documents change borrower outcomes is sometimes treated as a soft claim. The evidence at Credicorp specifically is harder than that. Three measurable things have changed since we moved from the standard small-print contract to the plain-English design:
- Forbearance requests come earlier. The median time between a missed Direct Debit and the borrower opening a conversation about it dropped from 9 working days to 4. Early forbearance is easier to deliver, lower-cost for the lender, and better for the customer.
- Complaints fell in volume and rose in quality. Total complaints per 1,000 active loans dropped 27% in the year after the redesign; the share of complaints that needed multiple rounds of clarification dropped substantially because the borrower had a clearer view of the original agreement to refer to.
- The proportion of disputes that escalated past the first-line complaints handler to a senior reviewer fell from 14% to 6%. The borrower and the handler are reading the same document, in the same language, with the same shared mental model. Disagreements get resolved faster.
None of this is a finance-industry revelation — the consumer-credit world has known these effects for years. The point is that they apply to business-to-business lending too, and that a small lender choosing to invest in readability sees the return in customer behaviour, not just in compliance comfort.
The honest limit
Plain-English design does not make a contract less binding, does not waive the lender’s rights under the agreement, and does not replace the need to read the document. We try hard to make it possible for a director to read and understand the agreement they are signing; the responsibility to actually read it stays with the director. The Read the KIS in 60 seconds article is the short-form orientation; the Business Loan Agreement template is the full text.
