Receiving a credit card statement, going through it to identify the essential elements, understanding them, knowing why it's important to pay it in full or, at the very least, to pay the minimum amount due on time, being aware of the consequences if you don't do any of these things, may seem trivial.

For people with low literacy skills - 42% of the Canadian population - it's not. These people have difficulty deciphering and understanding the information on their credit card statements. They also tend to have little financial knowledge. It is certainly important to put in place mechanisms to help these people, improve their skills and prevent illiteracy. But the aim of this report is more modest.

By giving a voice to people with low literacy skills, to people who work with them on a regular basis, and to an expert in legibility, we wanted to understand and describe the difficulties encountered by people with low literacy skills in financial matters. We also wanted to be able to discern, on account statements, the elements that are easy to understand from those that are not. Our aim was to develop expertise in this area, and to make recommendations as to how credit card statements could be improved.

With this in mind, we submitted a sample of 18 statements and gathered feedback from professionals who work with people with low literacy skills. Elements that seemed to make them difficult to read included too many pages, too tight a layout, poorly organized information, important elements not highlighted, type that was too small or too pale, words that were complicated or part of a specialized vocabulary, dates written entirely in figures, interest rates expressed with too many digits after the decimal point, contact details that were difficult to find, and terms that were too legal.

We then met with 42 low-literacy consumers and presented them with 3 account statements: CIBC, Desjardins and Hbc. They were asked to tell us what they found easy and difficult to understand, and then to comment on each statement. They were also asked to identify key items on the statements, such as balance, minimum due, due date and interest rate. Because they had the humility to point out what they didn't understand, to admit that they didn't find certain elements essential, to risk making mistakes by misinterpreting certain data, they helped us realize just how difficult statements can be for them to read.

We also asked an expert in readability to propose the elements of an observation grid applicable to the front of statements, and then to use it to analyze the account statements we had collected. She began by outlining two concepts that, taken together, represent the elements that consumers must master in order to understand their account statements: intelligibility and legibility. She then analyzed 16 statements, highlighting the elements that facilitate intelligibility and legibility. Her work provides a good idea of which elements to emphasize and which to avoid to make statements easier to understand.