Dynamic Planner, the UK’s leading digital advice platform, has enhanced its market leading Attitude to Risk (ATR) questionnaire with the launch of Financial Personality Insights. This equips advisers with a deeper understanding of their client behaviours, thoughts and emotions around financial risk, unlocking more levels of personalised financial advice than ever before.
Developed by Dr Louis Williams, Dynamic Planner’s Head of Psychology and Behavioural Insights, Financial Personality Insights provides enriched analysis of the core dimensions that underpin Dynamic Planner’s market-leading psychometric ATR questionnaire, originally designed in conjunction with Henley Business School at the University of Reading.
The launch of Financial Personality Insights enables advisers to go beyond calculating a client’s risk profile, to fully understanding what characteristics of a client’s personality is driving their attitude to risk. In line with Consumer Duty, it provides supporting evidence to assist with selecting a suitable risk profile and the most appropriate Dynamic Planner tools to use when explaining the trade-offs between risk and reward. This additional insight can help frame conversations that will resonate with clients, as well as providing a signpost to where coaching would be beneficial.
Financial Personality Insights has a robust theoretical underpinning that is well rooted in the psychology of financial decision-making using the same sound psychometric principles as Dynamic Planner’s ATR questionnaire, which has been completed by over 2 million people*. The five personality dimensions measured are:
- Risk-taking identity – our sense of who we are when it comes to taking risk, what makes us unique and what motivates our behaviours
- Fear-of-missing-out – our feelings of concern or regret for potentially missing out on a profitable investment
- Preference for certainty – our desire to opt for more certain gains rather than the prospect of larger gains if this involves taking more risk
- Tolerance of uncertainty – our ability to manage and accept the ups and downs we may experience along the investment journey
- Emotion towards taking risk – our feelings associated with financial risk, whether positive or negative
Dr Louis Williams, Head of Psychology and Behavioural Insights at Dynamic Planner, said: “Our newly launched Financial Personality Insights is designed to enrich the output from our market leading psychometric Attitude to Risk (ATR) questionnaire. Its key aim being to help frame conversations that resonate with clients and assist with selecting the right risk profile in line with Consumer Duty. Advisers are now able to more fully explore client behaviours, thoughts and feelings towards taking financial risk than ever before.”
Financial Personality Insights use the same data captured from the ATR questionnaire to provide the adviser with more information about their client’s financial personality, enabling them to understand what drives, prevents and enables them to take risk. A breakdown of a client’s financial personality score and additional tips related to this allow an adviser to have a more informed and in-depth discussion with their client.
Dynamic Planner is the UK’s leading digital financial planning and advice platform supporting 45% of investment advice firms in the UK, reviewing more than £100billion of client assets and profiling more than 1,900 investment solutions from 150 asset managers worth over £280billion each quarter.
