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The role of trust capital for the acceptance of digital investment advice

Trust is a critical success factor for financial transactions in general and financial advisory services in particular. Surveys show that private investors consider trustworthiness as a decisive factor when choosing an advisor and indeed some inherent characteristics of financial advisory services - pronounced information asymmetry, decisions on entrusted assets on a significant scale, investment risk and last but not least potential incentive conflicts due to the remuneration system - require a special client-side leap of faith.

Due to the advancing digitalisation of financial services and the pandemic that acted as a catalyst for virtual interactions, financial advice is now increasingly taking place in the virtual space. The aim of this research project is therefore, on the one hand, to examine the extent to which correspondences of central sociodemographic characteristics of client and advisor, which in the case of face-to-face advice play a prominent role in the formation of trust capital (cf. Stolper and Walter 2019), also retain their validity in the virtual space. Furthermore, it will be investigated whether new determinants of counselling acceptance and the probability of implementation can be observed for the virtual client-advisor interaction.

With the research project "The role of trust capital for the acceptance of digital investment advice", which the Foundation for Science of the Savings Banks Finance Group will fund for one year from October 2023 with around €60,000, Prof. Dr. Stolper and his team want to investigate these questions and contribute to gaining knowledge regarding the importance of trust in the context of digital investment advice.