More on financial transparency
From a conversation with Richard Thinks yesterday: Thanks for the link today...looking back through the emails I notice we had another conversation about transparency a few months ago. I think the idea of publishing standardised information about financial products is one of the strongest part of Osborne's proposals - but the way it's sold as enabling "price comparison websites" is a bit misleading. One of the oddities about the price comparison market (and I wrote, with a colleague, the first version of confused.com so I have a bit of inside knowledge) is that they make their profits precisely because the providers do not offer their products in a standardised way. Instead, everyone (deliberately) distinguishes their products in many different dimensions so that they cannot be directly compared. Ever tried to figure out which mobile phone deal is the cheapest? This is why those sites are so popular. If everyone did publish their terms and conditions in a common mach...