Retirement Benefits Authority open days are an important part of providing consumers with an opportunity to hear from the industry. The seventh such event was hosted at the weekend in Nairobi and allowed consumers to ask whatever they want of fund providers and the industry regulator.

This is clearly invaluable, but more can and should be done to improve consumer awareness. A major shortcoming of the open- day approach is that it depends on the average consumer knowing which questions to ask. This is fine if all they want to know is what return a fund has had in the past, what penalties are levied on various infractions and the like.

These, however, are rarely the kind of questions that drive innovation or reform. Product development crawls along unchanged and consumers continue to get a poorer deal than they otherwise might have if financial regulators do not take the lead in asking the big questions. What does it say of banking that such ideas as fixed-rate mortgages or the annual percentage rate had to be forced on them by the media? RBA must be the driver of better practices and products, not consumers or the media (they are not experts).

What would we like to see? To begin with, mandatory and standardised disclosure in marketing materials, independent ranking of fund managers, annual reports with information on fund membership, investment policy, portfolio, financial performance, actuarial position and so on. And a host of other things only experts like RBA know we should get.