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What We Offer
Making financial decisions is challenging but being a financial advisor is even more challenging. To understand a clients needs and their decision making process is vital. To know the clients life situation allows an advisor to identify the clients needs, but what about their decision making process?

How investors make decisions varies across cultures, genders, and especially on an individual basis. Decisions depend on how the investor perceives and defines gains, losses, and risk. These variables can be identified and gathered into a unique investor risk profile, which match with an optimal asset allocation. With the principals of behavioural finance, Behavioural Finance Solutions works with you to develop and then implement a systematic investor profiling method.
Products
Investor Questionnaire

In this first step a custom questionnaire is built that fits your advisory process and your clients. Each questionnaire is made to identify the preferences and biases of your clients. The questions are made to identify loss aversion, risk preference, risk awareness, reference point, and other critical factors. Once we decide with you what the questions will ask, we consider how to ask the questions. This is to insure that the questions are best understood, the responses most accurate, and that the questions can be best implemented in your client advisory process.

Profile Building


The strength in a BhFS client risk profile is in how we optimally utilize the gathered information. The questionnaire results are inputted into a model which calculates the investor’s definition of gains, losses, and risks. A function is built which represents the investor’s decision making process. The model is state-of-the-art and reflects 50 years of advances in finance. The benefits are consistent, and the risk profiles significantly more accurate.

Portfolio Construction


See a portfolio the way your client does. Using a risk measure which does not match the client’s essential understanding of risk would lead to investment decisions which are suboptimal in the client’s point of view. Investors tend to be loss-averse rather than volatility-averse. They also tend to see gains and losses with regard to a reference point rather than in absolute terms. What level of ‘risk’ is your client content with, what asset mix will give him the most satisfaction? Behavioural finance identifies how investors see and evaluate their portfolios. With the application of behavioural finance portfolios can be built which gives the most satisfaction.

Interdependence - Client, Advisor, Bank


Collecting accurate and relevant information from the client is essential in the client advisory process, but only a part. The effectiveness of the advisory process depends on the interaction between bank, advisor, and client. Important aspects are the reporting frequency, content, and format. A second aspect would be to consider the extent of the advisors discretion in selecting a client portfolio. These two aspects, and others, have a significant impact on your client's satisfaction. BHFS is positioned to specially optimize your client advisory process.

Quality Test


Slight differences in the form of a question can easily have unintended interpretations and lead the investor astray. If specific questions not generated by BhFS are desired, this stage is necessary to ensure that the questionnaire is understood and the desired information is obtained. We can test the rigor of the questionnaire in our lab without risk of confusing clients.
Consulting
BhFS bridges the needs of the financial sector and the vast body of innovative academic knowledge in finance. Experts in the fields of behavioural finance, stochastic systems, financial economics, evolutionary finance, quantitative finance, and operations research are accessible.

We particularly apply behavioural finance in the client advisory process. Our leading expertise gives us the ability to explain why and in which ways people deviate from the paradigm of rational decision making. BhFS is positioned to serve the financial sector in two main areas:
  • Private Banking: To create an investment process where the dissonance between the decisions investors intend to take, and those they do take is minimized. This allows investment  goals to be reached, and investors satisfied.
  • Product Development: To design structured products that are best suited to serve the needs of private investors.
Presentations
At BhFS we give popular introductions to behavioural finance, and other areas of finance. As part of our advisory services, we explain key behavioural finance concepts, especially in the context of their application through our services. More in depth presentations to upper management are also available.
We Provide...
Client Understanding
Client Satisfaction