InvestmentNews looks to recognize and honor women who are trailblazers in the wealth management industry. Our Women Advisor Summit, coming up in October, is the leading event for women within the industry who come together to help grow their practice, expand their influence, and lead with purpose. Additionally, InvestmentNews' Women to Watch Awards formally recognizes the best and brightest who are leading the way. We had the chance to connect with Dr. Naomi Win, a behavioral finance analyst, at wealthtech company Orion. Win is an excellence awardee for the Financial Literacy Champion award. Win breaks down for us her use of behavioral finance and its practical application for financial advisors.
NAOMI WIN: Behavioral Finance is a multidisciplinary approach that explicitly acknowledges and accounts for the bidirectional interplay between our most human attributes and our financial behaviors. Humans so often have gaps between what we want, what we think we want, and what we do, and psychology offers a range of explanations for this.
Some of the most common mechanisms cited include cognitive biases, heuristics, or ways in which emotions can hijack rationality. I think that these reflexes have a common root: reactions to uncertainty. Uncertainty engenders unease, and when uncertainty pertains to economic stability, it can feel like a threat to the underpinning of our survival.
Our finances predicate so many of our hopes for the future, or ideals for day-to-day living, and acute sense that you’ve no control over that, can be difficult to process. My approach to behavioral finance is to examine ways we can improve our ability to metabolise uncertainty as the immutable facet of life that it is, so that our decisions neither deny what makes us most human - our emotions, our ability to experience contradictory desires, and so on - nor be entirely governed by it at the expense of wise long-term decision making.
WIN: Research consistently indicates that use of behavioral finance tactics is a huge value-add, since it lends to wiser investment behaviors: a greater ability to stay invested during periods of market volatility; better tolerance for emotional reactions to market events that lends to long-term decision-making; a stronger advisor-client relationship characterised by trust, higher degrees of personalization, and the benefits afforded be taking a more holistic approach.
Advice is only as good as client ability to stick to it, and behavioral finance directly informs ways to catalyse that.
WIN: Any wealth management professional that successfully integrates behavioral finance-informed techniques into their work stands to gain professional edge: increased returns, reduction in client value-action gap, strong rates of retention and client acquisition, higher client commitment to consistent financial behaviors, and more resilience through market turbulence.
WIN: Shifts in client segments indicate uptick in women holding more wealth, and when we put that in tandem with research indicating that many women in heterosexual partnerships have historically been the ‘non-CFO spouse,’ there’s implication that many women may have increased likelihood of experiencing universal barriers to seeking financial advice.
There is fear they don’t know enough, fear of being shamed, or scolded. Wealth management professionals able to adopt behavioral finance techniques uniquely position themselves to be more responsive to this demographic, by approaching with curiosity before judgement, being more capable of listening properly, and seeking understanding before delivering solutions, so that strategies are more personalized and clients are more empowered to commit to enacting them consistently.
WIN: I think some unexpected benefits to adopting this approach is how far-reaching the impacts of it can be.
A wealth management professional who infuses their work with behavioral finance is a professional that is investing in their work and their client in ways that, yes, lend to better returns and financial behaviors, but can also ease the anxiety of living.
Worrying about money is often cited as American’s number one concern, and behvaioural finance approaches wealth management practices in a way that responds to the client as a whole person, in the context of their own life, with focus brought to understanding them on their own terms, which invokes a cascade reaction of not just better financial behaviors, but reduction in life-stress and augmentation of purpose and meaning.
The Women Advisor Summit is on October 21, 2025, at Tribeca 360 in New York. The Summit will be followed by the Women to Watch 2025 Awards. Dr. Win and the rest of the awardees can be found here.
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