/Case 009
Halcyon Pensions
2023
Fintech
Editorial
Pensions,
in plain English.
A workplace pension provider rewrote eleven years of customer correspondence and lost the call-centre queue.
We rewrote our annual statement. Calls about it halved.— Sara Whittingham, Customer Director, Halcyon
/ 01 · Brief
Make the annual statement readable.
Halcyon's annual pension statement ran to seven pages of legal-mandated copy. The plain-English audit gave it a Year 11 reading age. The regulator was patient. The customers weren't.
The brief was: keep every legal clause, drop every redundancy.
/Case 0092023
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[ Annual statement — before / after ]
/ 02 · Approach
We rewrote it with a paralegal in the room.
The studio embedded with Halcyon's compliance team for the duration. We rewrote the statement, then the welcome letter, then the consent flow.
We kept a working list of "words to retire" — currently 84 long.
/Case 0092023
[ Customer letter — onboarding ]
/ 03 · Outcome
Call-centre volume on statement queries down 34%.
The reading age came down to Year 7. The bridge round closed at £780K six weeks later.
Halcyon now publishes its style guide externally. We helped.
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