Dynamic Planner launches the Financial Happiness Index™: UK’s first real-time measure of client happiness

Dynamic Planner, has today launched two major initiatives focused on the biggest challenges facing the industry, underlining its mission to work with firms to close the advice gap.

Unveiled at a briefing in the City of London, Dr Louis Williams, Head of Psychology and Behavioural Insights at Dynamic Planner, launched the Financial Happiness Index™, designed to explore the factors that most influence how people feel about their financial lives, and what that could mean for clients, advisers, firms and the wider UK advice gap. 

Dynamic Planner Financial Happiness Index™

The Dynamic Planner Financial Happiness Index™ is based on a carefully designed 12-question questionnaire developed from Dynamic Planner’s comprehensive Financial Wellbeing Questionnaire. Published monthly, it draws on responses from around 4,000 people per month who are engaging with an adviser or are already advised. Built on a live dataset established in July 2023, the Index provides a real-time view of financial happiness and a meaningful benchmark over time. It tracks across three pillars:

• Financial resilience – day-to-day stability and ability to absorb shocks
• Emotional resilience – ability to cope, adapt and feel progress
• Financial knowledge and confidence – confidence, understanding and money-related worry

The output can be used to:

• Measure clients’ financial happiness at a moment in time
• Track trends over time in financial and emotional resilience, knowledge and confidence
• Compare cohorts (e.g. age, gender, marital status) at an aggregated / anonymised level

Dr Louis Williams, Head of Psychology and Behavioural Insights said: “Financial happiness is not all about wealth. It is a state of mind achieved through financial security. The ability to meet basic needs is still important, but financial happiness comes from feeling in control of your finances, handling daily money-related stress and having confidence in your abilities to manage your finances.

“Early analysis indicates that the Financial Happiness Index is sensitive to real-world events and can reveal meaningful differences across segments – ultimately this will help inform advisers to better support clients. We can already clearly see detectable shifts in financial happiness around major national and global events such as the autumn budget, falling inflation, Trump Tariff Day and the subsequent recovery. The most recent data in March 2026 shows a drop in financial happiness across all factors as the US-Israel war with Iran began.

“What’s also really exciting is the power the Index offers in terms of the insights available across key cohorts such as gender and life stage patterns. For example, at the time of the November 2025 Budget, emotional and financial resilience dropped in the 18-54 female cohort to the lowest point in a 6-month period, while the comparable male cohort saw an increase in both resilience measures. Such insights provide advice firms with the opportunity to offer tailored content and support to reassure and build confidence. This is just the beginning of the Financial Happiness Index, and we look forward to evolving it, and working with our customers to use it to increase engagement and help unlock their trusted advice.”

The Financial Happiness Index™ has been designed from the outset to give advice firms actionable intelligence. It enables firms to:

• Benchmark their own client cohorts: against the national picture, specific age / gender / life-stage groups, and, on the roadmap regional averages across the UK.
• Evidence Consumer Duty outcomes: on wellbeing, not only financial returns, providing quantifiable support for suitability and fair-value assessments, and for engagement with Targeted Support.
• Trigger proactive outreach: around events likely to depress resilience scores in certain client segments (e.g. Budget days, geopolitical flashpoints, market drawdowns) and measure the uplift advice delivers afterwards.
• Close the advice gap: only ~8% of UK adults currently have access to a financial adviser, served by around 28,000 advisers. The Financial Happiness Index™ provides tangible evidence for the first time in the UK of the emotional uplift advice delivers sharpening the case for digital-hybrid models that can be used to serve more of the 92%.

The London briefing also marked the formal launch of Funding Happiness, a new Amazon best-selling book by CEO Ben Goss and the team at Dynamic Planner. Designed for advisers to share with clients and prospects, Funding Happiness draws on a unique dataset spanning more than 2 million clients advised through Dynamic Planner by thousands of advisers – setting out what works and what doesn’t when helping people fund the life they want at a level of risk that’s right for them.

• The central question: resolves the one dilemma every saver and investor faces – what truly makes us happy, and how much risk are we willing to take to achieve it?
• The value of advice: makes the evidence-based case for the trusted human adviser with the right tools as the single most powerful counterweight to loss-aversion, inertia and regret, the behaviours that quietly erode lifetime outcomes.
• Designed to be shared:  written to be given by advisers to their clients it acts as a conversation starter on goals, risk and financial wellbeing. For prospects the book provides insight into the risk-based planning process, the value of advice and encourages consumers who don’t yet have an adviser to work with one.
• Digital engagement: Digital content will be made available in Tram, Dynamic Planner’s white-label client app, as part of its off-the-shelf content programme to support ongoing client education and engagement.

Ben Goss, CEO Dynamic Planner said: “At a time when the advice gap is firmly in focus across the industry, our ambition with both the Financial Happiness Index and Funding Happiness book is to provide a fresh perspective and fresh evidence for the value of trusted advice and help firms and advisers engage in new and innovative ways driven by the latest data and models.

“Funding happiness means resolving one central dilemma: what truly makes us happy, and how much risk are we willing to take to achieve it? It is a deeply human dilemma and our instincts naturally lean towards avoiding risk. That is where human advisers play a crucial role. A trusted advice professional gives clients the confidence to make choices their instincts might otherwise prevent them from making and the Index now gives the industry a way to prove it.”

The book is available for sale on Amazon or direct from Dynamic Planner for larger quantities. 100% of profits are being donated to Urban Synergy, a UK based youth empowerment charity delivering financial education programmes in schools.

Leila Thomas, CEO & Founder of Urban Synergy Youth Empowerment & Social Mobility Charity said: “Financial knowledge is more than just what you are earning; it’s about understanding how to use it to shape the life you’ve always imagined, and Funding Happiness is a powerful resource in helping people do exactly that.

“At Urban Synergy, we are committed to helping young people thrive in education and careers, and resources like this play an important role in supporting that journey. This new book will help inspire young people to take control of their financial futures and build lives with stability and purpose.”