Families and Money
60% of people in the UK don’t have a will. This means that if they die, the state will determine how their money and assets will be split up among the family.This is not what most people would want, yet the 60% finding is consistent over time. Why should this be?
How Our Money Beliefs Keep Us Poor
Very early in life, children begin to internalize messages about money’s purpose – how it works, what it promises, its overall significance.
Money and Couples
Money is an emotive subject. Money issues are the biggest cause of divorce and suicide in the world. What is it about money that causes this problem ?
Understanding Wealth – Wealth Building
Wealth building is a process that starts with understanding your emotions, patterns and behaviour around money. Positive emotions around money underpin positive financial behaviours and drive our ability to turn surplus income into savings; this allows us to build wealth. These are the key pillars of wealth building. Only once wealth reaches a certain level, [...]
Behavioural Economics And Investing – The Comfort Gap
The ability to quickly absorb billions of information points from your environment and then have an accurate, corresponding response ready within seconds is an incredibly valuable tool. This is our reptilian brain, which manages the ‘fight or flight’ response, helped keep us alive over millennia, and still drives about 25% of our behaviour. As humans [...]
Financial Literacy and the Psychology of Money
In 2004, two US economists named Anna Maria Lusardi and Olivia Mitchell set out to measure what people knew about basic financial principles. They attached the following 3 questions to a 2004 Health and Retirement Study being conducted in the US*. 1. Suppose you have $100 in a savings account and the interest rate was 2 percent per [...]
Digitisation – Continuum, not Compartments
Technology underpins everything we do in Banking and, while the industry prides itself on being relationship based, there is nothing to say that this relationship is limited to being between two individuals. Wealth Managers have been working hard for many years to institutionalise clients, and Amazon has shown how to create exceptional loyalty with almost [...]
Financial Services – the road ahead
Previous posts have looked at some of the issues that challenge Financial Services (FS) firms as they wrestle with data, customer experience and legacy technology challenges. This article looks at some ways that FS firms have used customer needs and lifecycle events to build customer loyalty. Let’s begin with a couple of basic principles. Firstly, when it [...]
Data Challenges in Financial Services
I can’t remember the last time my bank sent me a birthday greeting. That’s because they have never sent me a birthday greeting, even though I have banked with them since the 1990’s and they have all my contact details. In fact, they have a vast amount of data on me with a full financial [...]
How can we trust Banks?
The 2017 Edelman Trust Barometer* make for sobering reading. The general population’s trust in all population’s trust in all four key institutions — business, government, NGOs, and media — has declined broadly. Counter-intuitively, trust in the Financial Services (FS) sector increased slightly, though from a post-crisis low, and there is no room for complacency. Peers (defined [...]