COVER in conversation with Paul Nixon, head of behavioural finance at Momentum, and Sonja Steyn, head of wealth management strategy

In recent years, I’ve noticed how the conversation around technology in financial services has grown louder, sharper, and more urgent. At our own TechFest2025, the theme that kept resurfacing was simple but profound: where does the human fit in a digital world?

Technology is essential to survival and growth, but advice, especially financial advice, is ultimately about people. It’s about trust, context, emotion, and lived experience.

I was reminded of this when I sat down with Paul Nixon, head of behavioural finance at Momentum, and Sonja Steyn, head of wealth management strategy, to discuss their initiative called the Money Fingerprint tm. What struck me was how this tool represents more than a product feature, it symbolises a shift in mindset about advice itself. It is about redefining financial advice for the human era.

Moving beyond the numbers - Sonja framed the discussion with Momentum’s purpose: to build and protect clients’ financial dreams. She was adamant that advice cannot be reduced to spreadsheets or portfolio allocations. True advice demands deeper connections and conversations with clients. It means meeting them in their context, their world, their priorities, their fears.

“We want to focus on the being as well as the money,” she said. That line resonated with me. For too long, our industry has been comfortable treating people as balance sheets. Sonja reminded me that numbers without context disempower clients. They switch off when faced with jargon, when we fail to acknowledge what truly matters to them.

Why a “money fingerprint”? - Paul explained why the traditional risk profiling approach has been flawed for decades. The old questionnaires – asking whether someone enjoys bungee jumping, for example – never measured true financial risk tolerance. Risk is domain-specific: someone may skydive on weekends but only invest in fixed deposits.

The danger, Paul pointed out, is that traditional questionnaires often capture perceptions of risk at a moment in time, which shift with life events. A promotion, a job loss, or a windfall will change answers dramatically. What we need to measure, he argued, is the underlying psychological construct – a person’s enduring willingness to take financial risk.

The money fingerprint addresses this by layering other dimensions onto risk tolerance: personality, money attitudes, anxiety levels, and spending patterns. It paints a holistic picture of how someone actually relates to money.

Transforming the advice conversation - Where I saw the power of this approach was in how it changes the client–advisor interaction. Instead of leading with risk and return jargon, advisors can start by asking simple but profound questions: Do you worry a lot about money? What dreams or fears shape your decisions? These are not complex models, but they are deeply human entry points.

Sonja highlighted how this creates alignment between financial context and personality. It allows clients to “buy into their own plan” rather than feeling a plan has been imposed on them. That shift builds trust. When a client says, “you get me,” you know advice has moved from transactional to transformational.

Momentum Financial Planning has taken this philosophy to heart, embedding behavioural science into the very fabric of its advice process. With experts like Paul Nixon from Momentum Investments guiding the integration of behavioural insights, the business is equipping its advisors to move beyond conventional product-led conversations. By combining tools like the Money Fingerprint™ with outcomes-based advice, Momentum is creating an advice environment where clients feel seen and understood — not just as investors, but as people with values, fears, and aspirations. This positions Momentum Financial Planning as a champion of a new era of advice, where behavioural understanding is not a peripheral add-on but a core enabler of better long-term financial decisions.

Connecting finance and behaviour - Paul unpacked behavioural finance in refreshingly practical terms. For years, academia has catalogued biases – loss aversion, anchoring, the IKEA effect. But labelling clients with biases doesn’t help them change behaviour.

What matters is recognising that psychology has value. People don’t always make wealth-maximising decisions; sometimes they buy Range Rovers because it makes them feel respected. Financial plans that ignore these realities fail. Plans that integrate them stand a chance.

This is where behavioural finance is evolving: less about “irrationality” and more about normal people making normal money decisions. Our role as an industry is not to judge those decisions but to guide clients towards trade-offs they can live with – ones that serve both their emotions and their long-term well-being.

Long-term well-being and behavioural tax - Circumstances change, but personalities are surprisingly elastic, they tend to snap back after life events. Money attitudes, however, are more malleable. This is where advisors can add enormous value.

Sonja gave a practical example: Predicting which clients are more likely to withdraw funds under South Africa’s two-pot retirement system. These decisions can act as a “behavioural tax”,, devastating long-term wealth because of short-term impulses. By identifying those clients early, advisors can intervene and guide them toward better choices.

Here, the money fingerprint isn’t just descriptive; it becomes predictive. It helps advisors prevent costly mistakes before they happen.

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