For many clients, it’s natural to see their financial personality change as the years go by.
 

Their immediate income priorities, past investing experiences and ongoing capacity for loss will all help to shape their appetite for risk at any given time. Understanding how these priorities can shift can help you to sharpen your support as your clients move to and through retirement.

 

How financial personalities and preferences can change

If you’ve yet to use Dynamic Planner’s attitude to risk questionnaire, it can help you to build a deeper understanding of your clients’ behaviours, thoughts and emotions around financial risk.

With each completed questionnaire, you can access enriched analysis of the five elements that help to shape a client’s attitude to risk over time. This is designed to help you better understand how their priorities are likely to change and what might be important to discuss with theme as they get older.

To help bring all this to life, Dynamic Planner has analysed the results of almost 25,000 of their completed risk profiling questionnaires. Their findings, shown in the chart below, tell the story of how the average client financial personality tracks and evolves over time.

 

Tracking Dynamic Planner's
five core risk personalities

 

How client attitudes to investment risk can change

As we’ve seen, when clients move into the Retirement Risk Zone, their focus will often shift from looking to grow their pension savings towards preserving what they have. This explains why, the closer clients get to retirement, the less appetite they are likely to have for riskier investments - as shown in the findings from our Retirement Voice study.

"I’d be happy to take more risks with my money
to get the chance of higher returns"

 

77%
Gen Z (aged 18-27)

 

75%
Millennials (aged 28-43)

 

38%
Gen X (aged 44-59)

 

23%
Baby Boomer+ (aged 60-80)

 

Figures show the percentage of clients who agreed with the statement shown. 
Source: Standard Life, Retirement Voice, 2024.

Support for your client conversations

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Money invested is at risk. Tax may change in the future. 

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