EVENTS Andy Hart,
EVENTS Andy Hart, financial planner and founder of the Humans Under Management conference too, like politics, business and retail. When one of the founding academics, Richard Thaler, won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2017 it confirmed its acceptance as one of the most important and defining ideas of our era. The behavioural finance community continues to expand and develop today. I can see it in my own experience among fellow financial advisors. There was a time was when it was just a small huddle of us nurturing this new philosophy in our profession but there are more and more of us every time I look. It started as a niche, but that niche is growing daily, monthly, yearly. Independent financial advisors are on the front line and deal with humans every day, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that they should be the early adopters. But now even some of the big asset managers are cottoning on to the insights of behavioural thinking and employing them at a more corporate level. Bringing the community together I organise the annual Humans Under Management conferences which bring this community together in the UK and beyond. They are the first fully-focused behavioural finance events of their kind and the place where practitioners can meet to learn from each other and compare experiences. There’s one coming up in South Africa on 10 September and this year’s London conference is scheduled for 4 December. The Cape Town conference includes a keynote speech from Christo Brand, a South African former prison guard who was one of several that were responsible for guarding Nelson Mandela, and who developed a close friendship with the statesman over the years of his incarceration and beyond. Clearly someone who will understand a little about human behaviour. In London, we’ll be joined by Dr Moira Somers. Moira is a psychologist, professor, author and executive coach who brings a unique combination of expertise in neuroscience, financial psychology, mental health and behaviour change to bear on any number of personal and professional challenges. Both conferences will include speeches and input from a broad range of practitioners on all things behavioural. And that’s one of the things I like most about these events and the behavioural discipline in general – the mix of people we attract from a variety of different backgrounds, both speakers and delegates. It’s relevant to so many fields. Last year’s events in both London and Dublin saw speeches from not just financial advisors and experts in behavioural finance, but also from areas as varied as management consultancy, think tanks, the media, riskprofiling and fintech. This is why I believe behavioural finance advice is so powerful: because it channels the insights of so many areas and is open to input from such a broad spectrum of disciplines. It allows us to keep developing into ever-more sophisticated advisors so we can give our clients the best insights and service possible. In this community, our clients are the most important members of all. When you work so closely with them over many years through the significant phases and transitions of their lives you can get to know each other very well. It’s unsurprising that employing such a human approach to helping clients doesn’t just bring them into the community, it often turns them into friends too. From an idea born in 1970s, recession-hit America, behavioural finance has created a community that makes our profession proud. 50 www.bluechipjournal.co.za
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