Canada-Based Wealth House Expands Behavioral Finance Skillsets

Tom Burroughes

20 December 2019

Canada-based Pascal Financial is partnering with two prominent behavioral finance experts, helping advisors tap into the insights of this growing field and hence building business growth and retaining clients.

The firm has teamed up with Prasad Ramani and Alain Samson. Ramani will serve as chief strategist - behavioral finance and Samson as chief scientific advisor - behavioral research.

“They have distinguished themselves as leaders in the growing field of behavioral finance and will have a critical role to play as we integrate behavioral finance into the InvestorDNA component of our platform. Behavioral science informed InvestorDNA not only helps advisors better understand, engage and serve their clients, it helps guide compliance at every stage of the investment process,” Frances Zomer, CEO of Pascal, said.

Behavioral finance uses insights on mental traits, acquired over hundreds of thousands of years, to explain how people handle money, how they are influenced by crowd behavior, and why they are more worried about losses than they are pleased about gains, and so on. The area is becoming more important in wealth management, even influencing opinion among regulators on how to judge whether products and services are “suitable” or not.

With more than 20 years of experience in quantitative finance, Ramani is a recognized leader in behavioral finance strategy, applying research in behavioral science to use tech applications in financial services. He is a regular guest speaker at the London Business School.

Samson is a leading behavioral scientist with more than 13 years of experience working with companies on behavioral science theory, methodology and applications. He is the founder of the Behavioral Economics Group on LinkedIn with more than 41,000 members, editor of the Behavioral Economics Guide and a behavioral science columnist with Psychology Today.

Pascal also intends to launch new behavioral finance tools early in 2020 for individual advisors, dealers, employee benefits programs and insurance companies. Samson and Ramani, who co-founded Syntoniq, a US-based behavioral finance firm, will serve as strategic advisors, integrating their research and technology with Pascal.

The firm is also launching the only fully integrated, AI-powered wealth management platform in Canada in the first quarter of 2020, with future launches planned for the US and Cayman Islands.