Behavioral Interview with Pepa Vilaplana Pérez

Interview with Pepa Vilaplana Pérez, behavioral consultant at BeWay and financial health expert.

1. Tell us about you and your experience.

For more than 22 years I worked in banking, serving thousands of customers. Over the years, I realized that each person had very particular preferences, attitudes and behaviors so that, given the same explanation of a financial product, their decision was totally different from that of another customer.

Obviously, there were similar patterns among groups of people and I was drawing conclusions on my own. For example, I observed that, in a situation of great stock market turmoil, where the value of the client's investment fell sharply, the emotion of panic completely dominated the situation and many people ended up redeeming their positions, regretting it later when they saw that the markets eventually recovered.

2. How did your interest in Behavioral Science begin?

I was very curious to understand human behavior and to really meet the needs of my customers with the products and services I offered them.

I did a master's degree in behavioral economics, which revealed to me all that behavioral science could do to improve that deep understanding of people and help them make better decisions.

I had the great opportunity to join BeWay as a behavioral consultant and I was fascinated by the idea. Because of my technical financial background, I specialized in everything related to financial health and the only thing I needed was to enrich that knowledge with the psychological part.

I was part of the financial health research team, responsable to read and share the findings of more than 90 scientific articles and there I really came to deeply understand all the variables that we had to take into account if we really want to improve people's financial health.

3.What is financial health?

Complicated question! At present, there is no clear and consistent universal definition of what financial health is, and on many occasions people speak indistinctly of financial health or financial wellbeing.

Anyway, the definitions that I like the most are those that use objective and subjective characteristics to define it as, for example, Joo's (2008) which is the most cited: “Financial well-being is described as a comprehensive and multidimensional concept that incorporates financial satisfaction, objective state of financial situation, subjective perception and behavior”.

4. How can behavioral science be applied to improve financial health?

Behavioral science facilitates not only the understanding of behaviors, in this case financial behaviors, but of all their influencing variables, such as the psychological and socioeconomic factors of the person, their attitudes, knowledge, etc.

In addition, the discipline takes into account other variables, such as context and, thanks to the different methodological frameworks for behavioral change, it can provide solutions so that this optimal behavior ends up happening or is more likely to happen.

5. Tell us more about your research and the most relevant results.

The research showed that the main variables that make up financial health are:

• financial education

• financial attitude

• financial capability

• financial behavior

• financial concerns.

It would be best to delve deeper into each of these variables and see how they relate to personal financial wellbeing.

Additionally, in the research, we saw that the context of the country in which we live and how we compare ourselves with our reference group is key to understanding why some people feel less satisfied with their financial health and others more, that is, we should not only contemplate the objective part of financial health but also how our subjective part is (that feeling of control or financial security, among others).

6. What would be your advice for students or specialists who are beginning to discover Behavioral Science? How can they learn more about the discipline?

Some useful tips, which I would have liked to receive, would have been the following:

• First of all, we must familiarize ourselves with the fundamentals of BeSci and for this, there are “essential” books that we should have on our bedside table, such as “Think Fast, Think Slow” by Daniel Kahneman or “Nudge” by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein.

• Then, delve into some frameworks and methodologies used to design and implement behavioral changes, such as the COM-B Model, the ABC Framework, etc.

• And, finally, explore research and publications in the field that interests you most in specialized journals such as the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, Psycholgical Science and others.

Thank you so much Pepa for answering the questions! I hope readers can learn from your experience and suggestions 😄

Silvia Cottone

Behavioral Science Consultant & Worldwide Speaker

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This interview is part of the "Behavioral Interviews" series. It is fully written and edited by the guest. You can read more interviews with behavioral science experts here.