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, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Under assault from regulators since 2008 and distrusted by sceptical consumers, the Financial Services (FS) industry is still trying to fix past misdeeds. But in the interim, technological advances have changed the landscape forever. While FS firms were focused on IT, regulations and upgrading core banking systems, technology firms were busy changing the relationships between consumers and [...]