Dynamic Planner has drawn on the considerable anonymised data at its disposal to launch a Financial Happiness Index™, a real-time measure of client happiness, which explores the factors that most influence how people feel about their financial lives.
The Index draws on data from the responses of 4,000 people per month, to give advice firms a Consumer Duty-aligned benchmark from which to assess their own clients and add value through the advice and servicing process.
The data set and behavioural model will give advice firms insights to help to offer tailored content and support to reassure clients and build confidence throughout the advice and ongoing servicing journey.
The data is drawn from a 12-question questionnaire developed from Dynamic Planner’s Financial Wellbeing Questionnaire.
It tracks across three pillars:
• Financial resilience – day-to-day stability and ability to absorb shocks
• Emotional resilience – ability to cope, adapt and feel progress
•Financial knowledge and confidence – confidence, understanding and money-related worry
Dynamic Planner says the output can be used to:
• Measure clients’ financial happiness at a moment in time
• Track trends over time in financial and emotional resilience, knowledge and confidence
•Compare cohorts (e.g. age, gender, marital status) at an aggregated / anonymised level
Dr Louis Williams, Head of Psychology and Behavioural Insights at Dynamic Planner, said: “Financial happiness is not all about wealth. It is a state of mind achieved through financial security. The ability to meet basic needs is still important, but financial happiness comes from feeling in control of your finances, handling daily money-related stress and having confidence in your abilities to manage your finances.
“Early analysis indicates that the Financial Happiness Index is sensitive to real-world events and can reveal meaningful differences across segments – ultimately this will help inform advisers to better support clients. We can already clearly see detectable shifts in financial happiness around major national and global events such as the autumn budget, falling inflation, Trump Tariff Day and the subsequent recovery. The most recent data in March 2026 shows a drop in financial happiness across all factors as the US-Israel war with Iran began.
“What’s also really exciting is the power the Index offers in terms of the insights available across key cohorts such as gender and life stage patterns. For example, at the time of the November 2025 Budget, emotional and financial resilience dropped in the 18-54 female cohort to the lowest point in a 6-month period, while the comparable male cohort saw an increase in both resilience measures. Such insights provide advice firms with the opportunity to offer tailored content and support to reassure and build confidence.
“This is just the beginning of the Financial Happiness Index, and we look forward to evolving it, and working with our customers to use it to increase engagement and help unlock their trusted advice.”
Dynamic Planner said that the index enables firms to:
- Benchmark their own client cohorts: against the national picture, specific age / gender / life-stage groups, and, on the roadmap regional averages across the UK.
- Evidence Consumer Duty outcomes: on wellbeing, not only financial returns, providing quantifiable support for suitability and fair-value assessments, and for engagement with Targeted Support.
- Trigger proactive outreach: around events likely to depress resilience scores in certain client segments (e.g. Budget days, geopolitical flashpoints, market drawdowns) and measure the uplift advice delivers afterwards.
- Help close the advice gap: With only 8% of UK adults currently have access to a financial adviser, served by around 28,000 advisers, Dynamic Planner said the Financial Happiness Index™ ‘provides tangible evidence for the first time in the UK of the emotional uplift advice delivers sharpening the case for digital-hybrid models that can be used to serve more of the 92%’.
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