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11th December, 2024 - Webinar replay

In conversation with Chris Budd - introducing a new way to track your clients’ financial wellbeing

Phil Bray 

Good morning everybody, and welcome to our final webinar of 2024. Where have the last 12 months gone eh? Today we’re going to be talking about financial wellbeing, and specifically how to track your client’s financial wellbeing. There’s nobody better to be joined by for this than the godfather of financial wellbeing himself, Mr. Chris Budd. There you go Chris, what an introduction that is. Chris is the author of The Financial Wellbeing book, the founder of The Institute for Financial Wellbeing and owner of The Financial Wellbeing Pulse. Welcome, Chris! Thank you for joining us today.

Chris Budd 

Thank you. Godfather, good lord! I feel like I should be sat with a glass of wine and a big chair in Italy somewhere, which I can do. I can do that.

Phil Bray 

Before we get into it, this is going to be a nice, easy webinar for me today because you’re doing most of it, Chris. But before we get into it, Dan, would you do your usual housekeeping, explain to people how we do this, and what we’re going to be doing today?

Dan Campbell 

Yeah, of course. Wow, the last webinar of the year, that’s flown by quickly, hasn’t it? You know what they say when you’re having fun and all that. What a way to end our 2024 series of special guests, we’ve got the godfather himself with us. A cozy fireside chat with Chris Budd about financial wellbeing. What do we all need to know? Well, if this is your first Yardstick webinar, and looking at the chat, I can see a few people’s names which don’t look very familiar, so it may well be, we encourage as much participation as possible. Don’t worry, your microphones and cameras are not on, but you can still talk to us. How would you do that? Send us a comment via the chat, or use the Q&A box to get stuck in. As always, this is a very safe space, so, ask those silly questions, tell us if you agree, or, even better, tell us you respectfully disagree. We’re all here to learn, so let’s make the most of the hour. I’ll answer a question now that we always get right at the start. Yes, we absolutely are recording today’s session, and a video will be sent out along with a summary of any links or resources mentioned, and that will be in your inbox later today. I think that’s enough from me, so let’s begin. Chris, over to you.

Chris Budd 

Thank you. Right, wish me luck in sharing my screen. Can you confirm that you can see what you should be seeing?

Dan Campbell 

Screenshare confirmed.

Chris Budd 

Woo hoo. Technical issues overcome. Good morning, everybody. I’m going to do two parts to this. I’m going to talk to you for a bit about what financial wellbeing is for those of you who are new to it and a reminder for those who aren’t. Then I’ll answer some questions, so feel free to chuck your questions into chat. That’ll take about 15 minutes or so, and then I’m going to talk about The Financial Wellbeing Pulse and how you can measure your client’s financial wellbeing, or your own for that matter. Lots of questions to ask, please do, I’m very happy to be challenged and very happy to talk about stuff. The email address there enquiries@financialwellbeingpulse.com, after the @ is also the website address so if you want to go and have a look, that’s the website to look at. Okay. I’ve been talking about financial wellbeing for a little while now. I wrote The Financial Wellbeing Book that started all this off, back in 2015 and then Four Cornerstones of Financial Wellbeing. We’ve also done 100-and-God-knows-how-many, maybe 110 or something, episodes The Financial Wellbeing Podcast. You may be aware of the Institute for Financial Wellbeing, if you are not, please come and join because it’s a group of like-minded people who want to make the focus of their advice about helping clients to be happier, not just wealthier, which is what this is all about. Please do check out the institute, come along to the conference and get involved with the conversation. So, the four cornerstones of financial wellbeing. What do I mean by that? Well, the four cornerstones are, firstly, things that are true of all of us about what makes us happy and our relationship with money. For example, anybody will feel better if they get a hug from a loved one. That is true of all of us. That is universally true. If you see money as the objective of your life, that will not make you happy. That is also true. It’s important to stress right from the outset that none of this is “Chris Budd thinks” none of this is “I’ve been doing this job for 30 years, and I know this, that and the other”, this is all backed up by research. It’s all taken from research in topics like psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, academia, and religion; Buddha has been talking about this for 2500 years, right? This is not new stuff. We’re taking the existing research about what makes us happy and applying it to the financial planning process. So, the first thing is what is true of all of us. The second thing is what is true of you. Clearly, that loved one who’s giving us a hug and making us feel better is going to be different for Phil and Dan than it would be for me. At least I hope it would. So, finding out what makes you happy within those general truths is a process I call, “Know thy self”. It’s about helping your clients understand what makes them happy and also understanding some of the things that will stop them being happy. Their behaviours that they might be exhibiting, for example, which are true of all of us that get in the way of our own wellbeing. Behavioral finances have become a big thing over the last few years. I think it’s a fascinating subject and very deep, but this goes under the left-hand column of what’s true of all of us. We also have things that are true of each of us, self-limiting beliefs such as, “I’m not worthy of money”, or “I am worthy of money” both equally misleading and not helpful to our wellbeing. These are the four cornerstones that bring together all of the research, all of the ideas and thinking about what is going to make us happy, and whether our financial decisions will be increasing or decreasing our happiness. So, what are some of these general truths? Well, these are the five pillars of financial wellbeing that we use in the Institute of Financial Wellbeing. Again, stressing all this comes from research and if you want to know the references buy the books because they’re all in the back. Although you can always drop me a line if you want to know a specific one, and I’ll be very happy to share it. To talk about these very briefly; 1) a clear path to identifiable objectives. Well, that is financial planning, isn’t it? A clear path, that’s your cash flow forecasting probably, identifiable objectives is asking the simple question “What’s going to make you happy in the future?” There’s a line I use about financial planning all the time, which is, “Financial planning is very easy. You work out what you want from life and spend your money on that.” dead easy, right? The trouble is, working out what you want from life isn’t that easy. The other four are all fairly obvious, for example, control over daily finances, but these have been shown to be the main contributors towards our relationship with money. The one I want to touch upon more is: identifiable objectives. What does actually make us happy? What are those general truths? One of the major contributing factors is having some sort of meaning and purpose in life. Age UK runs a survey every year about what people report is making them happy or unhappy in their older age, and one of the most common variables that comes out of it is whether they are living a meaningful existence. If you have somebody, let’s say, in or working towards retirement, the questions you should be asking them are, “What does this mean for you?” “Where does meaning and purpose come in your life?” That doesn’t mean that everything you do has to be meaningful and purposeful, it’s quite okay to sit in the back room and read a book with some nice music on. That’s absolutely fine, but if that’s all you’re doing in retirement, you’re probably not going to be as happy as you could be. Having something that gives you some meaning and purpose in life is really important. So, as I always do when I do these talks, I will offer this challenge all the way through: are you having these conversations with your clients? Are you talking to your clients about, “Where does purpose occur in your world and where will it occur in the future?” We get to this concept of extrinsic and intrinsic motivations if we get a bit deeper into this. This comes from something called self-determination theory, which is a psychological theory, and it’s about what motivates us to do things. If we achieve the things that we are motivated to get, then will that make us happy? An extrinsic motivation is on the left, where you are driving a fancy car in order for people to see you driving a fancy car. Will that make you happy? Yes, as long as you’re driving down the road and a person is looking at you in that fancy car and admiring you, once you’ve gone past them, it’s gone, and you now have to find somebody else. The problem with extrinsic motivations and your happiness coming from other people is that your happiness is always on the other side of somebody else’s approval or applause. If instead, you have intrinsic motivations, which means you do things that will help other people, which may be quite hard to define why it makes you happy, it just does, then it’s much more in your control. I’m not saying that driving a fancy car isn’t a good thing to do, there’s no judgment here. If that fancy car is something you drive because you love cars and you’re a bit of a petrol head, great! That’s probably more intrinsic. Determine what the motivation is behind wanting that thing. Is it actually for your own personal joy, or is it for the approval of others? Again, are these questions you’re asking your clients? Money can actually get in the way of this. There was an experiment done, if remember rightly, from Elizabeth Dunne in ______ University, where they put an advert out saying, “Blood donors needed”, and they got lots of people emailing and saying, “Yep, happy to help.” They then separated those and moved them into three different categories. One category, they emailed back and said, “See, on Wednesday at 10, by the way, there’s no money in this.” To the second category they said, “See you on Wednesday at 10, by the way, if you turn up, we’ll give you $50” and the third category, they said, “See you on Wednesday at 10, if you turn up, we’ll give $50 to charity.” The lowest turnout on Wednesday at 10 o’clock was from the group they offered $50 to, the second was the charity, and the highest turnout was those they said, “there’s no money” to. The reason for that is because giving blood is a purposeful thing. You don’t give blood in order to make money, generally speaking, most people do it because it feels like a good thing to do. Once they offered money, it got in the way of that and prevented people from turning up. That’s a little example of how important having purpose and meaning in life is, and how it gets in the way of good financial decisions. Are you having these conversations with your clients? I want to touch on something called, “Set point theory”, which is a theory of happiness, which I think, is so revealing to our relationship with money. The theory says that we go through life with a set level of wellbeing. It’s set by the time you get your adult life, and it doesn’t tend to change. That’s the blue line. It might change and it is possible to change it over time, but it tends to revert back. So, we will use the word “wellbeing” for long-term, and “happy” and “sad” for in the moment and short-term. If something happens that makes us feel happy, then we go above our set point. That is what being happy is. That’s the orange line. But we get used to that feeling of being happy, and you’re not always happy, so we revert back down to our set level. Then, suddenly, one might watch the news, feel a bit sad and you go down below. You get used to that feeling, or you forget about what you’ve watched, and you revert back to your set point. We oscillate around our set point as we go through life. That is how happiness works but long term, our wellbeing doesn’t tend to change. The question that might come to you is, “Where does that happiness come from? How is your long-term level of wellbeing and my long-term level of wellbeing different?” Research would suggest that it’s 50% built into you by the time you get to adult life, that is it, it’s set, it’s in your DNA. 10% of your long-term level of wellbeing comes from your circumstances. That means your job, where you live, how wealthy you are, etc. but 40% of our long-term wellbeing comes from what’s called our intentional activity, what we say, what we do, how we act, how we react, our relationship with money. So, this made me realise, when I first saw this, we’ve been looking in the wrong place! With financial advice, if we’re only advising people on their 10%, we’re not advising on the thing that’s going to make them happier. We should be advising them on their 40%, and on their financial wellbeing their relationship with money. If you do a brilliant job with somebody, and you increase their wealth by 50% and change their circumstances, then you’re actually only increasing their overall long-term wellbeing by 5%. If you also work with them on their relationship with money, and you increase that by 50% as well, then you can increase their overall wellbeing by 25%. So financial wellbeing should be the focus of financial advice and financial planning. We should be educating people not about their money, but about their relationship with money, the 40% not just the 10%. That is what financial wellbeing is, it’s the study of the relationship between money and happiness. It’s not just about managing debt, budgeting, etc. it is a bit of that, remember, control of daily finances was one of the five pillars, but it’s a much broader topic of study of the relationship between money and happiness. Dan, I’ll stop there. Over to you. Any questions, any thoughts from anybody?

Dan Campbell 

Phil, I think you’ve got a question at the moment, haven’t you?

Phil Bray 

Yes. Chris, there are a few of us on this call that a bit long in the tooth in financial services. So, can you just talk about, if you had given this presentation 10 years ago about financial wellbeing, or 15 years ago, I suspect it would have gotten a very different reception, so can you talk a little bit about how financial wellbeing has become central to some firm’s propositions and how you see it might continue in the future?

Chris Budd 

Yes, okay. For me it is most definitely the direction of travel. That’s the phrase that I would like to use. Is it the norm? No, but it is very common, and what’s going to happen is that as customers over the next decade experience somebody talking to them about their lives, not just about their money, but about what makes them happy, then they won’t go back. You’re not going to go back to your old adviser or a different adviser who says, “I’m just going to talk about investment performance.” Once you’ve had that, it’s out the box. That’s one point. Another way of answering that question, Phil, is thinking about the first small steps people can take. Because it can feel quite overwhelming at times, a financial wellbeing proposition in its entirety, which I help firms put into place, can be all-encompassing, and mean entirely redesigning your whole process, which not everybody wants to do, to be honest. So, if I could illustrate this with one point, if there’s one thing that I would like people to do differently, it’s to shut up. When they’re in a meeting with a client and they ask the objectives question, you know, “What’s the objective? What do you want from your future?” And the client answers the question, don’t speak for one minute. It’s going to be really awkward, because the client’s going to answer the question, look at you expectingly, and they’re going to say, “I want to retire at 62” and you’re going to smile at them benignly and just look at them. They’re going to feel awkward, and you’re going to feel awkward and then 30 seconds will go by and you’ll feel really awkward. After 45 seconds, the client will say, “I say 62 but I’d love to retire at 50. They will start talking, and they will start talking about what they really want out of life. Get out of their way. Let them go. That is financial wellbeing, because what they’re now talking about is not their money. What they’re now talking about is their lives and what will make them happy that “know thyself” stuff. We don’t tend to have a very safe space in life to talk about this stuff, and financial advisers, in my experience, usually are too eager to give their solutions and not create the space for the clients to open up and truly talk and explore. 10-15 years ago, was when I started. I trained to be a business coach, a diploma qualified business coach, and I started using those skills in client meetings and just saw everything open up and change. So, that is a really good first step for people. Does that answer your question, Phil?

Phil Bray 

I think so. And there’s that saying, “There’s power in the pause.” I saw a brilliant presentation and I think it was recorded, so maybe people on this call can reach out to them. It was a brilliant presentation a couple of weeks ago at the CATS conference, Compliance and Training Solutions (CATS) conference in London. It was a lady called Becca Timmins, who did a brilliant 40 minutes about active listening. It was absolutely superb, and it plays into exactly what you said there. One more question from me to you, Chris, what are the benefits to both clients and firms following this approach? Twin benefits to clients and firms. Because I suspect a few people on this call and in the wider financial services space might be able to answer the first question more easily, benefits to clients, as opposed to benefits to their firm and them as planners.

Chris Budd 

I’m going to give you some statistics on this in a minute. The benefit to clients is transformational. I do get a lot of firms, or I have had over the last seven or eight years, saying, “Oh, we already do this.” No, you don’t. And that’s the honest truth, I’ve got to be blunt, no, you don’t. “We listen to clients.” Great. Good quality financial planning is halfway there but if you add this extra bit about the general truths and about educating people about what makes them happy, you add a whole extra layer, which is transformational. I can tell you many, many stories and there are loads of them in the books, of clients, not just of me, but of other people who have had complete life changes. That doesn’t mean to say that everybody has to have a life change. I want to dial that down a little bit, I see tweets and what not on social media like, “I’ve had tears in the meeting room” and people feeling really chuffed because they’ve made a client cry. That’s not a good thing, but it is or can be transformational when you encourage people to think about, understand, and learn about the things that will make them happy. It’s changed my life. I’ve no doubt whatsoever that understanding the principles of what will make me happy in life has changed my life. I’m much less worried about impressing people on social media these days, and much more enjoy sitting and reading a book while listening to some music at home. As for the firm, there are loads of advantages, and I’ll touch on some of them in a second, such as how good it is for loyalty and client retention, but I would actually just focus on one other thing: it’s fun. It’s a really fun way of doing the job because you have much deeper conversations with clients, and you see a greater impact on their lives. It’s really enjoyable, and it’s a really interesting subject as well.

Phil Bray 

Thank you, Chris. Do you want to share your screen and move into the second half of this now we’ve whetted everybody’s appetite for delivering this kind of service.

Chris Budd 

Okay, boss.

Phil Bray 

The Godfather is calling me boss. I’m liking that.

Chris Budd 

What does that make you then?

Phil Bray 

I don’t know actually.

Chris Budd 

Hang on, I’ve managed to mess this up. I’m not currently sharing, am I?

Phil Bray 

No, you’re not Chris.

Chris Budd 

How long have we been doing this now I still can’t do it right?

Phil Bray 

Thank you, Paul, “The great godfather”, I’ll go with that. It makes me sound really old, but yeah, we’ll go with that. Have you got them Chris?

Chris Budd 

There we go. I minimised you by mistake.

Dan Campbell 

So, what Chris is highlighting here is the power of the pause.

Chris Budd 

Oh, dear. How’s that?

Phil Bray 

Yeah, they’re coming on. Brilliant, well done.

Chris Budd 

Yay! I thought I’d leave a little minute or so for reflection, for everybody there. Right, so, The Financial Wellbeing Pulse. This is the culmination of many years of work for me where I have been trying to find a way to measure our relationship with money. By relationship with money, I mean the stuff that I’ve just been talking about. I’m not talking about whether somebody’s got enough life insurance or not, it’s about their feelings and relationship with money, which could reveal that they don’t have enough life insurance but it’s not a factual thing, it’s a relationship thing. It has been designed by myself through the Institute for Financial Wellbeing, an organisation called Center for Thriving Places – those of you who have been to some financial wellbeing things may have come across Liz Zeidler before – and also a guy called Professor Sam Wren-Lewis, a professor of philosophy. Center for Thriving Places have been running something called Happiness Pulse. You can go online right now and do it but don’t please, do that in half an hour. You can do the Happiness Pulse to find out how happy you are. Center for Thriving Places have been measuring happiness and wellbeing for over a decade, so I have been working with them to take their general wellbeing set of questions, which forms part of my Pulse, and adding on some finance-specific wellbeing questions. There are 30 or so questions in total, around half of them are about your general wellbeing and are from the Center for Thriving Places. Also, with fantastic support from Aegon, who have been amazing supporters of the Institute for Financial Wellbeing from the outset, particularly Dr Tom Mathar, who was very much involved with the methodology behind the Pulse. Coming back to your question, Phil, Aegon have done lots of research with the IFW about this and whether people actually want this sort of stuff. One of the stats I pulled out from this was that 81% of clients said that they would like to be asked about life objectives, but only 31% of advisers said that they thought that it was important. So, there’s a disconnect between what clients want and what advisers are giving them, and that is going to be a propulsion of this direction of travel. In a decade, I am absolutely certain, most people will be talking about financial wellbeing or happiness in some way or another. What’s the point of financial advice if it’s not focused on making people happier? What is the point? Another report from Aegon looked at the most important attributes of advisers as far as clients were concerned, and investment management was there, but only 42% put it in their top five. So, if you’re only or mainly talking to clients about investments, that’s not what most of your clients want. I can remember doing the job 20 years ago, going around with my investment pack, talking through benchmarking for individual funds. Oh, my God, how boring! Poor clients of mine 20 years ago. One day I decided I just wasn’t going to do that anymore. For the next year I went to every review meeting with my pack, and I would ask, “Would you like me to talk you through this?” I think three people said, “Yes, please.” It’s just not what people want. They want to talk about their lives, that’s why they go to a financial adviser or financial planner. One of the major reasons why I’m pushing the Pulse big time is consumer duty. Consumer duty requires you to demonstrate the impact of your advice and that has been the biggest scratching of the head that has been created by consumer duty. How do we demonstrate the impact of our advice? That is what the Pulse is going to enable us to do. So what is it? We have a bunch of questions. It’s a survey in simple terms. It’s an online survey with a whole lot of general wellbeing questions and then three sets of questions about  financial wellbeing. The first is about your competence with money. The second is about your values. The third is what that ends up meaning for your relationship to money. The idea is that this generates a score, and it generates a conversation. Let me just give you some examples of some of those questions. In the first section, financial competence, there’s things like, “I feel on top of my day-to-day finances”, and “I feel able to influence my long-term financial situation”. One of my favorite phrases or quotes is from Blaise Pascal, a French philosopher, who said, “I’m sorry I wrote you such a long letter. I didn’t have time to write a shorter one.” To get these questions looking this simple took a long time. What I like about these questions is that there is a lot of academic rigor behind every word in them. We have a full methodology report which explains all the thinking behind it all. One of the major things about the Pulse is the academic and philosophical research behind these questions. Financial values, “How I spend my time is much more important to me than how much money I have.” People answer strongly agree to strongly disagree on a scale of one to seven. “My self-worth doesn’t depend on my financial position.” What are you going to say to a client who has said “strongly disagree” to that last point? “My self-worth doesn’t depend on my financial position” strongly disagree. Going back to those intrinsic and extrinsic motivations, that would suggest that their self-worth depends on the approval of other people. That means their self-worth is something that they are always having to chase and that’s probably not making them very happy. That opens up a conversation for discussion in your meeting. It also opens you up to potentially sharing some financial wellbeing theory through your newsletters. Phil is going to talk about some of this such as how you market financial wellbeing. The financial wellbeing guides that we’ve produced for Yardstick that you can buy. All of this stuff. If you’ve got lots of clients who are strongly disagreeing with that last point, it opens the way for conversations. Then financial wellbeing, “My financial situation enables me to enjoy my everyday life” and “My financial situation enables me to spend time with those I care about.” I particularly like these, because “enables me to enjoy my everyday life.” there are two ways of solving that if the answer to it is “strongly disagree”. There are two ways of solving that. One you could argue is by having more money or getting a better paid job. But maybe it also could be about changing your relationship to money so that you do enjoy your everyday life, or understanding where that enjoyment comes from, that education on wellbeing not just on the money. I’m not suggesting it’s one or the other, it’s a combination of the two, and getting that right is what financial planning with a wellbeing bent is. Before I move on to the next one, I’ll just explain how it works. What happens is, when you’re going to see a client, wether they’re a new client or you’re doing a review, you send them a link. You get a dashboard, and you send the client a unique code. We can’t see the code so for GDPR, it’s completely anonymous as far as we’re concerned, but you can allocate it to specific clients so you can see which client is which. You send the client a code and they complete the Pulse. They’ll get a report, which I’ll show you a rough draft of in a second. The report says, “Your financial wellbeing score is ___%” Let’s say 55%. So, they get a number, they get a general happiness score, and a financial wellbeing score. The client also gets a short report explaining what they’ve answered and what that might mean. This is non-judgmental. We’re not wagging fingers and saying, “You seem to want to be rich and that’s not going to help.” That’s not the idea here, that’s not a very helpful approach. It’s simply pointing out areas that they have said that they may wish to consider, what the research tells us, and therefore, what they may wish to think about further. It’s a facilitation to conversation and thinking. The adviser gets a copy of the report, the client comes along for a meeting, and let’s say you have your investment pack, like I used to, the client’s going to say, “Actually, do you know what, can we not talk about investment system? Because I’ve got this thing that’s telling me how happy I am. Can we talk about that?” A year later, the adviser comes back for the next annual review meeting. They go through it again, the client’s report and it says, “Your financial wellbeing is 65%.” You can now say to the client, “We have increased your financial wellbeing, your relationship with money, by 10 points. That is as a result of our advice.” That’s really powerful stuff, that’s demonstrating the impact of your advice. The firm gets a dashboard, so you can average scores across all clients. For larger firms, you can drill down per adviser as well as per client, and you can get an aggregate score. That way, you can say, “As a firm, we increase the financial wellbeing of our clients by an average of 10 basis points.” You can give that to the FCA for consumer duty to demonstrate the impact of your advice. You can also use it for marketing purposes, I’ll leave that to the expert to explain how. Big impact. The other thing that’s going to happen, is almost a Trojan horse, because the consumer duty impact is such a massive deal that I’m tempted to stop there, but I think we have a receptive audience here. Going back into that meeting where the clients come along with their report, you’ve got a copy of it, you’ve got a conversation to be having. You’ve got an agenda for your meeting to be talking about the client’s life and their objectives, what their financial planning might look like, and what your cash flow is aiming for. Is it actually aiming for the things that are going to make them happier? Should you do some scenario modeling? You’ve got some more fees to be generated here and more conversations to be having. Your whole relationship with your client has opened up. We’ve been in soft testing mode for a while now, and the firms that are using it are saying that is exactly what’s been happening. The client gets a report, this is Lorem Ipsum, so it’s an early mockup, but it tells them what they answered and what that therefore might mean to them. Consumer duty says, “Consumers are equipped to make good decisions, and the firm’s products and services should be fit for purpose.” What does fit for purpose mean? Well, surely, it’s examples of what clients expect and going back to the earlier mentioned statistic, what clients want to talk about. I have lots of firms and lots of people who say, “I do this stuff already. ” Okay, great. Prove it. Prove that you are helping clients to be happier. How do you prove that? There is no other way. That’s what the Financial Wellbeing Pulse does. It costs £25 per month and a £100 setup fee. The way it’s structured, you get 100 uses, that’s 100 clients for multiple uses. So, if you have 150 clients who are couples, that’s probably the maximum most firms would have I would imagine per adviser, those 100 uses are probably going to do for all of your clients, because not everybody is going to want to do this. That will enable you to retest. Those 100 uses are 100 clients, as many uses per class as you want. So, you can see this is set at a pricing level that is dirt cheap. Why have I set this at a pricing level that’s dirt cheap? Honestly, financial wellbeing for me. I’m not doing this to make loads of money, I’m doing this to make an impact and to change the market. If it takes off and tens of thousands of people use it, well, that’s fantastic and I’d make lots of money. I wouldn’t complain, but that is not my purpose. My purpose is, and has been for a long time, to try and change the focus of financial advice in the UK, to be around happiness not just money. It’s deliberately set at an extremely low price point to try and get market impact so that people like you will have a go at it thinking, “Well, it’s not exactly a lot of money. I could try it out for six months and see how I get on with it.” If anybody is with a bigger firm that’s listening to this, there are discounts for multiple licenses, and much bigger firms, we can have a chat about making something bespoke. We’ve got lots of developments planned in the future, things like white labeling and putting your logo on the on the reports, and stuff like that. All of that stuff is possible. That’s me.

Dan Campbell 

Chris. I’ve got a question from Lucy on the service, if you could answer that just now? Lucy asks, “Does the license include general guidance on dealing with outcomes from certain questions? Or, for example, when someone’s score has decreased?”

Chris Budd 

It doesn’t, no. The license money is just to use the Pulse. For that kind of stuff, I would suggest you come along to the IFW, because those sorts of conversations are what we’ve been having on the in the IFW all the time with people. Or call me, I’m always happy to give people half an hour of free time. Developments like that are things that I’m interested in looking at over the next few years, the guides etc., but we have a couple of guides already, which I suspect Phil was going to mention. So, no, but there are ways that we can sort that out and help.

Phil Bray 

Thank you, Chris. Right, I am now going to share my screen. Dan, can you see that?

Dan Campbell 

I can, yes.

Phil Bray 

Brilliant. I want to talk about how firms on this call can use Financial Wellbeing Pulse in their marketing. That’s because there are clearly huge benefits to the clients, the financial planner, and planning firm of using the Financial Wellbeing Pulse. Both in terms of hooving the outcomes of how you help clients, consumer duty, etc., but also as I was talking to Chris when we were putting this webinar together about the Financial Wellbeing Pulse, it became clear that there are huge benefits and many ways that we can use the outcome and the results of the Pulse in your marketing. On the penultimate slide that Chris pulled up was “Prove it” in big, highlighted, green words, that leads beautifully into this slide, where I started by talking about showing, beats telling. So many firms in their marketing tell prospective clients about the value of working with them, but very few firms actually show people the value of working with them. Showing always beats telling.  Chris talked about proving it, I’m talking about showing beats telling and we end up in the same place. The Financial Wellbeing Pulse along with things like client testimonial videos, online ratings and reviews, client survey results, all of that sort of stuff is what I call client-generated social proof. They all come under that heading “Showing beats telling”. For me, this is another form of, or can be seen in the marketing context, as client-driven social proof. So, how would I use it? If you engage with Chris and you start putting the Financial Wellbeing Pulse into your planning process, the first thing I would be doing is discussing the benefits of using the Pulse anywhere you talk about the financial planning journey. Your website will probably have a journey page on there. This is the process you take clients through. Talk about the Pulse on there because that demonstrates that you’re actually paying attention to the outcomes of the journey, it’s not simply the journey itself. You’re showing people that you’re investing in tech that shows that the journey is working, and there’s meaningful change coming out of the journey. Talk about it on your website, talk about it in other marketing that you do. Blogs about financial wellbeing and if you buy any of the guides. We’ll get Abi to put links to those guides in the follow-up email. If you buy any of those guides that we’ve done with Chris on financial wellbeing, talk about it in those guides, we can add that in. Talk about it in the blogs that you write and talk about in your social posts. People talk about financial wellbeing, but prove it. Prove that you are committed to improving your client’s happiness and demonstrate that you are by using the Pulse. So wherever you talk about financial wellbeing, talk about the Pulse and how you use it. That then means you can use this as a differentiator in your marketing. Chris, you talked about the financial universe of advisers and planners, narrow it down to those that do financial wellbeing, and then narrow it down to those that use the Pulse, you get to a smaller number. So, firms can use this as a differentiator in their marketing. You can also, over time as you get clients completing this, this takes time and it takes an effort to get clients to complete the Pulse because we need a data set as large as possible, but over time, I could see how firms could anonymise the data and demonstrate the improvement that they’ve helped clients achieve in their financial wellbeing. Firms could come up with a financial wellbeing score for their clients at one point, one fixed point and then look at the fixed point 12 months on and show the change. Demonstrate the change. It could be used in anonymised case studies as well. Hell, clients are happy to appear in testimonial videos and talk about the effects of financial planning, how cool would it be in a testimonial video for a client to mention the score that they had on Pulse when they started working with the planner, and the score that they had 12 months from then. Let’s use the data, either on an individual level in your marketing or anonymised as a group. I think there are some massive benefits there. Finally, celebrate the successes. Celebrate a client who came to you with a – Chris, what did you talk about? – financial wellbeing score of 50% and in 12 months’ time it’s 75%. Celebrate that in your marketing. Clearly, you’ve got to ask client’s permission to do this, but there are masses you can do from a marketing perspective to build on the other brilliant reasons for using this, and I’ve only scratched the surface with the ways the Pulse can be used for marketing your firms, but those are some basic ideas to whet your appetite. I feel a blog coming on, I’ll probably write about this. So, as I say, four or five ways to whet your appetite for the ways that it can be used in your marketing, which isn’t the main purpose, but it’s a nice cherry on top of the cake. Dan, I can see some questions coming in.

Dan Campbell 

They’ve all been answered. Madeleine was asking about a promotion that Chris has going on at the moment where, if you join the IFW, you get the first month of Pulse free. So, for anybody interested in that, Chris has put a little message in the chat with an email address. Take him up on his mention earlier of it’s not about him making loads of money, get that first month free from Chris and get some get some Pulse with your clients.

Phil Bray 

Brilliant and Chris just tell people one last time what they should do if they want to get their hands on the Pulse.

Chris Budd 

So, the website, www.financialwellbeingpulse.com, has got all that you need to get to signed up. It’s got the pricing on it, it’s got some FAQs on it, and it’s also got how to sign up on it. You can sign up through that website. I will then send you a guide of what to do. There are also some training videos about how to use it and how to set it up. It takes a short bit of time to set the thing up, not a great deal. That’s it, it’s dead easy, really is.

Dan Campbell 

Chris. We’ve had two similar questions through, actually. Is there a discount for existing IFW members, for Pulse?

Chris Budd 

Yes. Same thing, same code. Message me and I’ll send you a code.

Dan Campbell 

Lovely, thanks, Chris.

Phil Bray 

Cheers Chris. Before we go, as it’s our last webinar of 2024, we do this every year, we want to get a bit of feedback from you guys on how we’ve done this year. As you know, this year has been different with our webinars. While we’ve done some of the educational webinars, where myself, Dan, and Abi have been talking about various marketing topics, we’ve had some fantastic guests as well. The first guest of the year was Rory Sutherland , and the final guest of the year is Chris Budd, and in the middle of the year, we’ve had people like Ross Simmons, Phill Agnew, Marcus Sheridan and a bunch of others. So we’ve done things a bit differently this year, and we want to get your feedback as to how we’ve done and what you’d like us to do next year. We’ve put together a few short questions. Dan is going to put the link in the chat. We’re finishing a little bit early today, so you’ve got 14 minutes of your life back. If you could use five of those just to complete that short survey, so we can make these webinars even better next year, we’d really appreciate that. So, that’s where we are, 2024 that’s our final webinar done. There’s the reminder of contact details for both the Financial Wellbeing Pulse and Yardstick. If you want to go and follow Chris on LinkedIn, if you want to follow me on LinkedIn, here are the details. We will send all this out later on today, Abi will, me and Dan are going nowhere near it. Abi will do that later today. You can watch Chris back, go and have a look at www.financialwellbeingpulse.com, if you have any questions message Chris. Chris, I’m sure you’ll be happy to answer those. Other than that, Dan, unless we got anything else, that’s a wrap for 2024.

Dan Campbell 

No, not at all. Thanks guys, see you next year!

Phil Bray 

Thanks everybody. Cheers. Bye, bye.

Chris Budd 

Thank you. Bye, bye.