The FIPI Framework

The FIPI Platform

The Finliti Investor Profile Indicator (FIPI) is a psychometric assessment and interactive feedback platform that helps investors understand how they allocate attention, make decisions, and react to important market events. The FIPI assesses four investing-related traits—Zeal, Inhibition, Conventionality, and Swag—identified in original studies as examining self-directed investors' beliefs, preferences, emotional experiences, and behavioral tendencies. 

The FIPI assessment aims to help self-directed investors better understand their own tendencies. When investors understand their own mindset, preferences, and emotional reactions, they can allocate effort toward learning and improving those areas most important to them. The FIPI can be used to develop tailored user journeys and deliver personalized educational content. 

To our knowledge, the FIPI is the first and only psychometric assessment designed to comprehensively assess how self-directed investors differ in their typical ways of thinking, feeling, acting, and reacting.

• The FIPI complements the Know-Your-Client process to understand clients' needs and preferences better and provide them with richer feedback.

The FIPI is the culmination of considerable research and development. We have presented our research documenting the development of the FIPI at the 7th Biennial Conference for the Association of Research in Personality in July 2021 and, most recently, at the Annual Convention for the Association for Psychological Science, which was held in Chicago, Illinois, from May 26 to 29, 2022. In June, we will be presenting additional research at the Annual Convention for the Canadian Psychological Association in Calgary, Alberta. 

We are preparing manuscripts for peer-reviewed journals in the domains of personality science and behavioral economics. We are committed to a rigorous empirical approach: For an assessment tool to have practical utility, it must help one draw valid conclusions and we use the scientific method to realize that aim.  

Recognizing the importance of individual differences, some financial institutions have begun using the "Big Five" personality model to profile and advise their clients. The Big Five model is a consensus framework in academic research on personality traits. However, the Big Five traits only describe the broadest, superordinate dimensions of human personality and, critically, Big Five assessments do not take the investing context into account. 

In contrast, the FIPI was designed to assess individual differences, specifically within the investing domain. The FIPI traits hold coherent associations with the Big Five traits—as we expect them to—but we have found that the FIPI traits better predict investing-related outcomes than the Big Five. 

With more people carrying their investment portfolios on their mobile devices, financial service providers are asked to deliver high-quality, customized financial guidance wherever and whenever people want it. We also recognize that scaling custom financial advice for lower net-worth individuals is challenging. Clients often lament that guidance is inaccessible or buried under financial jargon.

The FIPI represents a scalable solution. A means to optimize client engagement and education. At Finliti, we believe everyone deserves high-quality and personalized financial guidance.

Finliti's core mission is financial inclusivity and commercializing the FIPI, which creates a powerful tool that allows financial institutions to deliver higher quality financial guidance over their digital channels.