Bio-banking: How customer physiology and financial services combine

London – At last week’s The Age of the Long Near Preview Network Evening, senior journalist Rowland Manthorpe sat down with Philip O’Dwyer, creative director of experiential design agency Method, to talk about the future of financial services.

The agency set itself the challenge of imagining a future scenario in which people’s self-quantified biometrics will be fed back to them by their bank. The result is The Bank of Physiology, a fictional money lender that aggregates real-time information about its customers’ hormone levels via connected devices, watching out for spikes in data and advising clients to undertake activities to offset this imbalance.

‘The bank worker’s role was traditionally a bureaucratic one, but in this kind of scenario the bank worker becomes more of a consultant with a wider view of the holistic wellbeing of the client, a therapist in a sense,’ said O’Dwyer.

Behavioural economics is proving that financial decisions, previously assumed to be made rationally, are as subject to physiological factors as other areas of life.

For more on how long-term thinking will affect brands building towards 100-year business plans, book a place at our Spring/Summer 2015 Trend Briefing. For more information, email Alena Joyette at [email protected].