Press release

New aSpark software for emotionalised and personalised investment advisory

Zug, Oct 2021

Today's brain research proves that financial decisions are not rationally controlled, it is emotions rather that are decisive in the selection of financial investments. With the newly developed software solution aSpark^®, Confinale is providing to all banks the possibility to customise emotionalised investment proposals to the individual customer. This makes personalised, topic-related investment advisory very efficient and industrially scalable for a broad customer base.

With its new aSpark^® software, Confinale offers a solution for the "emotionalisation and personalisation" of theme-based investment proposals in order to efficiently deliver them to the relevant client. "With aSpark^®, life becomes much easier for investment consultants; tailor-made investment proposals for personalised consultations are available at the push of a button. The simple workflows allow automated marketing and investment campaigns via the customer-specific communication channel," explains Roland Staub, CEO and partner at Confinale.

Interfaces to the core banking system and to peripheral systems ensure that the rules already in place in the bank (portfolio optimisation, compliance restrictions, etc.) are taken into account when assigning investment topics. For the profiling of customers, the bank's internal customer management system (CRM) can be connected to the product via a programming interface (API). In this respect, aSpark^® is an important addition to a bank's existing wealth management solutions.

"The conscious and rational customer is an illusion," says brain researcher and psychologist Dr. Hans-Georg Häusel. " Firstly, purchase decisions are made to a large extent unconsciously, and secondly, they are always emotional. After all, the world only gains value and meaning through emotions." For banks or financial service providers, it is important to trigger positive emotions during consultations with their customers.

Neuromarketing pioneer Häusel was the keynote speaker at Confinale's LIVE webinar on October 12, 2021, in which he explained why and how emotions influence our financial decisions and how to use this in marketing investment products. The specialists from Confinale demonstrated with their new software aSpark^® how investment advisory can be easily emotionalised and personalised.

Häusel has laid an essential foundation for neuromarketing with his research work. Until the mid-1990s, the scientific opinion was that the cerebrum is where the mind and the logic reside, the limbic system is where the emotions come from, and the brain stem is where reflexes and instincts are located. "Today we know that ultimately our whole brain is more or less emotional," Häusel explains. "The old three-way division is a thing of the past. But even the rational cerebrum makes an important contribution in emotion processing, it plays the role of an emotional computing centre."

"Emotional boosting" is marketing from the brain's point of view and this is very different from classical marketing thinking," Häusel explains. In investment advisory, this implies to trigger numerous positive customer emotions in the subconscious first, which are followed by a conscious, rational evaluation of the customer.

People are individuals and have different emotional systems and values, which also influence the way they deal with finances and their investment strategy. In the sale of financial products, theme-based, personalised investment proposals therefore significantly increase the customers' readiness to invest. The success rates of banks that already use theme-based recommendations are proof of this. Numerous surveys in the financial sector have shown that clients want to be addressed individually and receive suitable investment proposals from their advisors based on modern technology.

Staub concludes: "Our software aSpark^® enables banks to use the findings of brain research and to offer effective and scalable investment advisory services that are emotionalised and personalised across all communication channels to a broad customer base."