iscoverAn accountant, CFO, and business owner has uncovered the truth behind “behavioural finance” and how this influences how clients choose to, or choose not to, listen to advice.
Is behavioural finance impacting the advice you give clients?
27 October 2025
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8 minute read
Behavioral finance accounting is the way forward when dealing with clients who are resistant to listening to or adopting the advice of their accountant.
Speaking at the Access All Areas event last week in Melbourne, Goldi Group founder Amy Fox uncovered the psychology and influence involved with behavioural finance and how she found this to significantly influence the decisions of her clients.
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Fox said it could be very frustrating for accountants when their clients simply ignored their advice and got themselves into “sticky situations” or made a suboptimal financial decision.
Fox added that while the frustration on the accountants’ side was valid, and she understood from personal experience, she also emphasised that it wasn’t always the clients’ fault.
“They’re not ignoring us, their brains are actually protecting them and they don’t actually know that they’re making really bad decisions for them. It feels like a safe decision because psychologically something in their brain is telling them to make these decisions,” she said.
“It feels safe to them. It might be what their parents have taught them or something they have learnt through different periods of their life. That’s what they feel safe doing and you’re telling them to do something different.”
According to Fox, behavioural finance simply referred to the behaviours, psychology, thoughts, and feelings around an individual and the way they saved or spent their money.
Fox shared with the audience how she stumbled upon the concept when trying to build a plan and strategies around clients who had ignored logical advice – prompting her to change her approach from ‘advice’ to ‘influence’.
It was noted this was often a common problem between accountants and their clients, as there were two systems in the brain.
Accountants operated in the logical, analytical system, and clients operated in the emotional and irrational system – both of which hardly married up nicely.
“If a client’s behaviour doesn’t make logical sense, it actually makes emotional sense. Based on accountants living in a different brain system to us, we are separated in that way,” Fox said.
“There have been countless times when I have communicated very logically, very analytically but the client has made a very fast, emotional and intuitive decision. It never made sense and so many times I thought, ‘why on earth did you do that?’
“But, there’s obviously a reason they did it, and it makes sense to them. It’s a decision they thought was the right one.”
Fox’s motivation to understand behavioural finance came about when she wanted to ensure her clients were getting their value from the fee they were paying her, as well as fulfilling her responsibility as an accountant to encourage them to make better decisions.
A helpful strategy Fox found had worked well with this knowledge of behaviour was a gentle “nudge”, which was defined as a way of creating clients a path of little resistance, which helped them effectively make their way to achieving their goal.
“When determining or working out a client’s behaviour, it’s not an interview process, you just have to work it out from working with them and uncover where their biases lie,” Fox said.
“Normally, this will show up just when you look at their numbers and chat to them. Usually, you can immediately see what their biases are without having to do some ‘psychology session’ when onboarding a client. It’s about understanding them and giving them a path they feel safe to follow.”
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