Help and support.
We get asked questions all the time. We’ve selected the most frequently asked questions and provided concise answers to help you. Select a question from the list below.
About Financial Wellbeing
If you’d like to know more about financial wellbeing you might find the following resources useful.
- Read one of Chris Budd’s two books on the subject.
- Study the subject via the Financial Wellbeing Certificate.
- Listen to one of over 100 episodes of the Financial Wellbeing Podcast (from here or your usual podcast provider).
- Join the Institute for Financial Wellbeing (IFW).
Financial wellbeing is a broad topic about the relationship between money and happiness.
Measuring your clients’ financial wellbeing will enable you to help the client improve their relationship with money. This is likely to lead to the client be more engaged with their financial plan. This in turn leads to happier clients, increased client loyalty, and great client referrals (according to research by Aegon).
About The Pulse
Centre For Thriving Places (CTP) launched the Happiness Pulse several years ago. Built around a core set of questions which cover Be (who we are), Do (what we do) and Connect (our social relationships), it then allows for additional modules to be added to create more specific measurement tools. The Happiness Pulse has been very well received and this new financial addition is all part of making the core solution even more effective.
The three contributors met on a number of occasions to discuss the methodology, the question areas, and the specific wording of the questions. This is summarised in a Methodology Paper produced at the end of the process. The paper is available on request.
The additional question sets have been added to the core CTP questions to create the Financial Wellbeing Pulse. They draw on both a behavioural and a wellbeing approach to the subject of our relationship with money. It covers three particular areas:
- Financial security and competence
- Meaningful values and attitudes
- Financial satisfaction and need-fulfilment
In this way it covers all aspects of a person’s relationship with money, starting with an understanding of the sources of wellbeing.
You can view a video demonstration of the Pulse on this website. This gives you a flavour of the type of questions that are asked. We purposely do not share all the questions freely on this website.
35. One of the strengths of the Pulse is that it is a comprehensive assessment of a person’s wellbeing and whether the relationship to money helps or hinders this.
That depends on how much time is taken to the answers, but one might expect fifteen to thirty minutes.
Possibly. However, the Pulse is designed to generate real engagement. Not everyone wants to spend time considering their relationship with money, so we would not expect every client to want to complete the Pulse. Those that do, however, will find it extremely meaningful.
Management Information
You will receive anonymised data base scores achieved by its customers. This can be interrogated by the following filters:
- By date
- By advisor
Consumer Duty requires firms to demonstrate the impact of its advice. The Pulse helps a firm to meet this requirement in two ways.
Firstly, by using the Pulse demonstrates to the FCA that the firm is putting in place procedures.
Secondly, the firm can gather data on how their advice has impacted their clients’ financial wellbeing.
The Pulse is designed to be simple and quick to use, and is priced accordingly. However, the data being collected can be interrogated in many different ways, for example by question and by age. This is an area of expertise for Centre for Thriving Places.
If such analysis is of interest, please get in touch for a discussion about bespoke reports and consultancy services.
I don’t want to do training, I just want the scores for Consumer Duty purposes. Is the Pulse for me?
Absolutely. Your client will get a brief report along with the score which will be self-explanatory. If they want to know more, but you are not comfortable with this, you can direct them to Chris Budd‘s books and podcast.
In addition to the above books and podcast, Chris Budd is available for creating content and providing consultancy to firms who wish to step deeper into financial wellbeing.
Pricing
The Pulse is an annually renewable license based upon uses per annum. The minimum term is therefore 12 months.
The license is renewed each year. The license is therefore renewable at this point, rather than being cancelled during the year.
The Pulse is owned by The Financial Wellbeing Pulse Ltd, who shares it’s revenue with the Centre for Thriving Places.
Need more help? Contact us via the enquiry form and we will get straight back.
