The Human Side of Regulatory Reporting: Why Words Matter as Much as Numbers

What do the U.S. military, the European Accessibility Act, and regulatory fund reporting have in common?

RiskConcile is featured in the November–December 2025 edition of Funds Europe.

The article explores the growing complexity of managing large volumes of regulatory reporting documents, such as KIDs and KIIDs. On one side, these documents must fully comply with applicable regulations like PRIIPs, remain perfectly aligned with other materials such as factsheets and prospectuses, and stay consistent across all translations. Even minor discrepancies can introduce regulatory and operational risk.

On the other side, the regulatory bar has been raised even further. With the introduction of the European Accessibility Act (EAA), firms must now ensure that investor documents are not only compliant, but also readable and accessible. This adds a new dimension to regulatory reporting: one that goes beyond data accuracy and layout, and focuses squarely on how information is understood by retail investors.

So how can firms objectively test whether a document is truly accessible? Artificial intelligence may seem like the obvious answer, but it is not the only, nor necessarily the best, solution. RiskConcile proposes a proven and transparent alternative, borrowed from an unexpected place: the U.S. military. For decades, the Flesch–Kincaid (F-K) readability formula has been used to assess the clarity of technical manuals for weapon systems, where ambiguity is simply not an option.

Applied to regulatory documents, the F-K formula offers a straightforward, objective way to measure readability and ensure that complex financial disclosures can genuinely be understood by their intended audience.

You can read the article here: https://funds-europe.com/funds-europe-november-december-2025/