Applying Behavioral Economics to Financial Services

Join us for an evening of engaging conversation to learn what banks can do to help clients manage their spending habits during the holidays.

Emotional spending is at its highest during the holiday months. Consumers are tempted with seemingly attractive deals, the desire to be generous, and the pressures of reciprocity. These issues, along with planning fallacies and optimism biases, become the perfect storm for overspending.

Behavioural Economics (BE) offers deep insights on why consumers overspend. Further, BE can help credit organizations design strategies that nudge responsible spending and repayment.
"Pre-emptive nudges," a term coined by BEworks, can be deployed to guide spending and savings decisions before they lead to costly long-term consequences.
Pairing big data with behavioural interventions delivered through digital channels can help long-term savings behaviours. Behavioural Economics can also help position the bank as an ally in cash management rather than an adversary in collections.
Research and case studies that illustrate the potential BE has on driving better outcomes will be shared in this interactive session.

Schedule:
5:30-6:00: Doors Open for Registration, Networking and refreshments
6:00 - 6:15: Understanding Consumer Psychology - A Behavioural Diagnosis of Impulsive Consumer Spending with Sarah Carpentier, PhD
6:15 - 6:30: Q & A + Collective Brainstorming - what nudges shift discretionary spending to savings instead?
6:30 - 6:45: How BE can be deployed through digital banking channels to drive responsible spending and savings with Mark Morrissey, PhD
6:45 - 7:00: Q & A with speakers
7:00 - 7:30: Interactive Networking

Sarah Carpentier Bio:
Sarah holds a MA and PhD in cognitive neuroscience from the Department of Psychology at the University of Toronto, and BA in psychology from Queen’s University. Her PhD work was nominated for the Governor General’s Gold Medal. Her academic research was multi-disciplinary, with a focus on brain network dynamics and cognition, exploring topics such as how experience and training change brain activity, how information is represented in brain signals, and the neuroscience of music enjoyment. She has particular expertise in research methods and statistics, and she has instructed undergraduate and graduate-level university courses on these topics. She has multiple peer-reviewed publications and has presented her work to scientific communities in 6 different countries.

Mark Morrissey Bio:
Mark is an Associate at BEworks on the Discovery and Behavioural Diagnostics team. Prior to joining BEworks, Mark was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT in Cambridge and completed his PhD in Behavioural Neuroscience at the University of Toronto. Mark has studied learning, memory and decision making at both the level of behaviour and the brain. His research has been published in top-tiered scientific journals like Science, eLife, and Nature Reviews Neuroscience and covered in the media from BBC Health and the Boston Globe, to ScienceDaily. Mark has also taught courses in Physiological Psychology and Behaviour Modification at the University of Toronto. At BEworks Mark has worked on several projects applying a scientific approach to understand behaviour with clients ranging from large financial institutions to non-profit organizations and topics ranging from customer acquisition and retention, to loyalty, promoting saving behaviour and closing the say-do gap.

About BEworks:
BEworks is the world's first management consulting firm dedicated to solving business and policy challenges using behavioural economics. We provide scientific research, evidence-based strategies and fully implemented solutions to our clients, which include Fortune 100s and governments around the world.