Overcoming financial planners’ cognitive biases through digitalization: A qualitative study

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to investigate cognitive biases among financial planners and, if and how, digital transformation through Artificial Intelligence (AI) can help overcome biases. The literature establishes that investors and financial services clients can exhibit cognitive biases. However, it is not evident whether the financial planners understand and detect cognitive biases among the clients and if they at all 'attempt' to address the biases whilst providing financial planning services. Utilizing the attribution theory, our paper contributes by exploring the gap in research related on cognitive biases among financial planners and provides a future research agenda for addressing the gap, through a qualitative investigation. Our study was designed over two stages, wherein we conducted in-depth interviews in both stages. The first stage included in depth interviews with 21 financial planners and a repeat 10 interviewers with select financial planners, with scenarios in the second stage. In total, we conducted 31 interviews to investigate cognitive biases among financial planners and how Artificial Intelligence can assist. Our findings suggest that cognitive biases exist among financial planners while providing services for the people in need, which is a major challenge for them. Our findings further suggest that digital transformation by using the Artificial Intelligence technologies might help overcome this existing biases, albeit, AI technologies ought to be combined with human intelligence. To the best of our knowledge, there exists no existing research on the association between cognitive biases and artificial intelligence among financial planners.