SPEAKER_01 0:00

What was coming up for me as I was listening to actually is, you know, here in at least the US, like we talk about like long-term care and insurance, like for that. And I was just thinking, like, what an assumption to make, or pushing like your own values as an advisor that, hey, long-term care insurance, like that is important to have, or it might be important for a client. But what if that client comes from more of a Eastern cultural background and they are not individualistic, like we a lot of Americans or American culture is like, what if the client's like, no, I'm not, I don't want to do that because my kids are going to be taking care of me. And if you're like, that's wrong, no, like your kids have their own lives. Do they even want that? Like, well, that's just that can be just an example like of a place to really understand, you know, and ask some of those questions around the values piece, then how does that play into the financial decision? Welcome to Planning and Beyond, the skill where financial planning meets human understanding. As an exceptional financial advisor, you know that financial planning is about more than just numbers, it's about giving clients the clarity they need to align their money with what matters best, which is why each episode is designed with that goal in mind. You'll learn how to uncover the psychology behind client decisions and gain insights and behavioral strategies needed to create deeper, more meaningful client relationships. You'll discover techniques for navigating emotional science situations, conversations with leading industry experts, and behavioral finance psychology, communications, and more. Whether it's mastering discovery meetings, handling sensitive client conversations, or understanding what is truly keeping your client staff. You'll walk away with not only strategies that you can use in your next client meeting, but also the confidence to do so. Oh, yeah. Hi. Welcome to Planning of the Office, the podcast where financial planning meets human understanding. I'm your host, Ashley Kwamey, and today I'm thrilled to welcome Dr. Amanda Kraft to the show. Dr. Amanda Kraft is a researcher and educator whose PhD work examines the cultural intelligence in the financial advisory space. When I saw her on LinkedIn and her posting, that's how I should say stalking, really. But when I found her work and then started stalking her, I was like, oh my goodness, like she has to come on and share a little bit more about it. So, Amanda, thank you so much for coming on. So excited to have you here.

SPEAKER_00 3:01

Thank you, Ashley. I'm excited to be here.

SPEAKER_01 3:04

Yeah, yeah. Now, before we kind of get into all the good stuff, can you just maybe take 30 seconds to a minute, just high level a little bit about you, a little bit about the work you do?

SPEAKER_00 3:15

Right. Exactly as you said. I'm a researcher at Western Sydney University. And I finished my PhD at the beginning of 2025 after about nine years of working on it, looking at exactly as you said, the cultural intelligence of financial advisors. So I suppose the inspiration came from my own sort of studies and work in financial planning and realizing that in a multicultural country, we teach other business students about cross-cultural management within other degrees. And it certainly wasn't something I studied it in a different field, and then I sort of wondered why don't we teach financial advisors about culture when it seems so obvious to me that you walk into any large financial planning practice in Australia and clients are multicultural. And surely that must make a difference to how you provide advice to a client. So I got a bit of pushback from the industry when I first started. Sad sadly, like I'm not surprised. So the initial, yeah, the initial feedback I got was either this topic doesn't exist, like this doesn't exist, there is no issue because we treat everybody as individuals. So no problems. Or it doesn't matter to me as an advisor because all of my clients are the same culture as or the same ethnicity as me. So it's not an issue. And then I thought, well, don't you think that's a bit strange? Don't you think it's a bit strange that you only attract people who are the same as you? What isn't that limiting your client base? So I proceeded to do the research anyway to try to find out initially just to find out what was happening in the space. So that was the subject of my first article was interviewing advisors and asking them what do you experience does culture make a difference? And that's what I found out from the first round of interviews was exactly that same sort of split that I actually got it in in data, that some advisors saw no problem at all. And other advisors who were those advisors who came from multicultural backgrounds themselves saw all kinds of different people. They said once they had once they had skill that they couldn't necessarily quantify, this skill of being able to work with people who are different from them, it opened up all of their horizons to a broader client base. And they, you know, just because you were an Indian advisor didn't mean you were you were mainly advising Indian clients. You had Italian clients, you had South African clients, you had Chinese clients. It didn't matter what the client culture was, but because you were used to dealing with people who were different from yourself, you could build relationships with a wide variety of people.

SPEAKER_01 5:59

I'm so glad that you said no to the naysayers and continued to follow like that passion and that per and that pursuit there. That little bit of, I don't know if you're a rebellious person, but a little bit of that, like, you know what? Challenge accepted. I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna keep going for it. Okay, so you've thrown out the word culture here. We've talked, we've said like culture a few times here. Before we maybe continue down this path, I'd love to hear like how you define culture, like in this context. I think that that's really important for our listeners that maybe we're all on the same page here. I know many people, when they hear that word, there's an automatic maybe association to you know ethnicity or race. But I think that you have a broader definition. So I'd love if you could talk a little bit about how do you define culture.

SPEAKER_00 6:51

No worries. Exactly as you said, culture is often thought of in like the average person would say, Oh, you're talking about race or ethnic or nationality, the country someone comes from. But it doesn't have to be that. Basically defined as your system of values, the assumptions you make about how the world works, what the societal norms are that you're used to, what communication style you use, and the lived experiences you've had throughout your life that shape your behaviors and your attitudes towards things that come from the group memberships that you've had. So a culture can form, as people do, like a culture can be related to the ethnicity you belong to, a culture can be related to the nationality you belong to, can also be the family you belong to, the age demographic you belong to, the socioeconomic group you belong to. Culture is multifaceted in that way, in that you draw your beliefs about the world and about how the financial world works and how you should operate inside it from those values and attitudes you've acquired from other groups you've been a member of and the people you associated with and what they thought.

SPEAKER_01 8:06

I love that. My background just in marriage and family therapy, like when we look at things across a systemic, a lot of those things, right, come into place and how everything that you just said there. And so I think that it is really important that when we are working with people, like as practitioners, right, when our job requires us to work with people, that we have just a better, more all-encompassed like understanding of just who and how people are and everything that you just shared around uh someone's culture and what that means and what it could mean. It's important for them to know. Now, when we look at advisors, though, because your research focused on advisors. And when you surveyed them, I know this was an Australian advisor demographic. Most of our, we do have actually quite a few Australian listeners, maybe a few more after this episode. But while a lot of ours are US-based or uh UK-based, probably some overlap and similarities here, I would imagine. But when you were surveying financial advisors in Australia and compared them to just other professional groups, where did they land just with their like cultural intelligence level or the skills?

SPEAKER_00 9:18

Exactly. So what I measured was rather than look at exactly at the cultures of the advisors or just interview them, I wanted to quantify something, right? Like I wanted something measurable that I could report that we could perhaps improve with education or training or something like that. So I used the framework that's called cultural intelligence. And rather than think of it like IU, think of it more like EU, emotional intelligence. It's a skill you can grow. So it's a framework about how the areas in which you can develop skills in dealing with people who are different than you, essentially. So when I surveyed the Australian advisors, I tried to compare them to other professions, but it was difficult to find data. So it just became sort of groups, other groups that had been surveyed. So it was things like international students in the U studying in the US, or managers who'd been stationed in Singapore, or interestingly, accounting lecturers in Australia was another group.

SPEAKER_01 10:20

That is interesting.

SPEAKER_00 10:21

The answer is I came up with as many, as many different studies as I could. So I had I had about more than a dozen different other groups to compare them to. And as I suspected, Australian advisors are below average in their skills, in their intercultural skills. And I suspected, based on the fact that I was getting that that interview feedback of people saying this does not matter, I suspected that that group of people when they showed up in the survey would would just not care because one of the dimensions of having intercultural skills is caring about intercultural skills and having an interest in it. And I knew that that segment of the population was going to come through in the survey and say, Well, it doesn't matter, and I don't have an interest in it, and it's not my thing. And so that probably brought the scores down. Whereas you could tell there are some some people who are like, Yes, I'm absolutely fascinated by this. My score, yeah, their scores are off the chart because they're interested, they speak multiple languages, they've done training courses on it. So it was quite variable, but on average, the average Australian advisor is below average in their intercultural skills compared to the worldwide population. And I think the um the Cultural Intelligence Center would say that about 250,000 people have taken that test. So when I say like there is an average, and they are below the average of people who have taken the test. Not a lot, but a bit. And they are below Australian accounting lecturers, which is interesting too.

SPEAKER_01 11:53

That is it, that is actually really, really interesting. My father is a CPA here in the States. And while I love him and I adore him, I would be curious. I think, and I have my own hypothesis on where he would stand on just any cultural intelligence place. Maybe he would surprise me. I don't maybe he would surprise me. I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 12:16

And that was what I had to come up with sort of an idea. Like I'm like, why did accountants score better than financial advisors? And I thought maybe the difference is, and I've never been able to test this, but maybe future studies. When you choose a doctor or you choose an accountant, you don't really care about the the ethnic or cultural background of of the doctor or the the accountant that you go to see. You go to see whoever you think is is good, is technically competent, right? Or whoever's available that you can get an appointment with, right? Whereas with a financial advisor, you're much more picky, I think. You're more choosy, you take more time to find someone that you really vibe or gel with. And maybe that element is causing people to look for someone who looks or feels like them much more so than they would with someone they would have less. You do have a closer relationship with your financial advisor, it's going to be ongoing. It's a trusting relationship. And even though you may say that you have a trusting relationship with your medical practitioner, it's a 10-minute interaction every every so often. It's not the same. And so maybe the nature of financial advice relationships that makes this matter more here than in other professions.

SPEAKER_01 13:25

Yeah, I would agree. Yeah, I would agree. Now, there might be some people listening who are like, okay, Amanda, like this makes sense. Like I understand like about culture a little bit, like this definition, expanding this as is helpful and okay. Like as a professional, I'm probably maybe I'm not where I quite should be. But how does culture shape the financial decisions of my clients? Like, how does understanding that culture help me to understand my clients better? Can we just maybe talk a little bit about like how does culture show up in client behavior?

SPEAKER_00 14:03

Sure. So you could imagine that it's my example is often imagine you have two clients who are otherwise identical with identical investment profiles and identical, theoretically the same goals out of life, but they make completely different decisions. And you think, why would these two people who who look on paper very similar make different decisions? And it can be around their values. So we can take the word culture out if people don't like the word culture and just put it down to you. Well, their values are different. They they think different things are important and they prioritize differently. Now the reason they prioritize differently is because of the background that they've come from. It will be differences differences around whether individual responsibility or family responsibility is what drives their decision making. So you know in a Western financial planning context, we often prioritize individualization and individual optimization and personal wealth accumulation. But people who come from other nations, particularly places like Asia, which are more collectivist, financial decisions like that aren't individual decisions. They're family decisions. And sometimes it means you don't have the right decision makers in the room if you only have the individual client or an individual couple, because there's multiple generations and extended family members sometimes who are involved in the decision making. So it can also be things like supporting family members as they age. So in our most western context, we would put our families into aged care and we would expect either some sort of government contribution or individual funding and maybe children chip in a bit into that that care. But the expectation is parents go to a facility where they are provided with medical care for end of life. Whereas in most eastern countries, that does not happen. Someone in the family will will sacrifice their career and take care of that person at home. If you are working overseas, you will be sending money back to support your parents. Even if you build your own nuclear family in the West and you have your own spouse and children, you still feel familial obligation to support upwards. Whereas in the West, most of us in an Anglo-Australian context, parents support children, not children support parents. So the flow of capital is different depending on your value system and whether you have obligations to communities. So that's a thing with um with a lot of indigenous populations and First Nations people, there will be communal ownership of funds, particularly in Australia. They go out to work, they earn, they get their paycheck. There is communal obligation that if their uncle needs the car repaired and their cousin needs a school uniform and someone else needs groceries, that all comes out of your paycheck because your money is family property, is communally owned. And the theory B, and then so you get you have no personal savings and you have no ability to make personal savings. But it's a reciprocity system. The next time someone else gets paid, your needs will also be met. But it means there's no individual banking or savings culture and they don't see a use for it.

SPEAKER_01 17:23

Right. Yeah. You've talked about, I think one of the things in one of our calls that I made a note of because I thought that this was really it was relevant for me and interesting just around clients who prefer like tangible assets, like and how culture like can impact that. Can you can you talk a little bit about that piece?

SPEAKER_00 17:44

Yeah, the first time someone, one of my students raised an issue for me with an exam was exactly on this topic. And I was going to say the student, I am fairly confident that the student was from Syria. And he said to me at the end of the exam, Miss, I I couldn't answer question five. I said, I I don't understand. How come? That was a very simple sort of exam question in investments, which was a young couple had gone together, the the woman had a large deposit saved, the the the gentleman did not have much of a deposit saved, he he hadn't worked as long as as the woman had. And so they'd come to you for advice on on how to own property jointly while protecting the interests of each party and acknowledging that they were bringing separate amounts into the relationship and that they hadn't been together very long. And the student said, I well, you you I couldn't you didn't give me all the information. What information didn't I give you? And the answer was they said, he said, um, well you haven't told me how much the parents are chipping in on each side or the uncles. And I said, Well, there is no parental contribution, no uncle contribution. And he said, Well about the siblings, how much what share are each of the siblings going to have in this house? None. It's just these two people. He said, That's not how it works. Like that's not how you buy property. It's like in in my family, in my community, property everyone helps the next person get on the property ladder. And so all the family will chip in for the next person in line when they sort of turn 18, 20, whatever, and it will be jointly owned and everyone contributes. And then you do it for the next person. So I can't answer your question because you didn't tell me what everyone's contributions were. And I thought this surely is something that a financial advisor must come across if my financial advising students are coming across it and telling me that this is their their you know their lived experience in Sydney, Australia. Who's advising their parents? Who's you know, what's happening out there? That because you do see exactly that, that there are certain communities from their cultural values who prefer tangible assets, whether that's gold, whether that's cash, whether that's real estate, but they want to be able to see and touch it because they don't trust the theoretical system of banking. And so they and that can be because of historical reasons, particularly people who have been through uh war zones and conflicts, or have been through countries that had, you know, massive inflation issues and currency devaluations, they have learned experience not to trust those things, and they pass that down through generations. And I think the research shows on generational values go at least the third generation. So they do eventually sort of peter out, but for the first the first generation will absolutely hold tight to tangible assets, the second generation will have a preference for it, and the third generation will like it better.

SPEAKER_01 20:33

Yeah, yeah. I had this situation show up with an advisor where the father, so the G1, like was wanting to utilize his liquid, right? Asset to buy and purchase land for the family, like for the family, but it was his adult daughters who were coming up, you know, and it's like I need to buy like land and like property, like for them. And the advisors struggled because like they weren't even, I think one of them was in university, the other was getting ready to go into university. And the advisors struggled because they're like, but what if these like young women like want to like what if they don't want to live by you? Yeah, like what if they want to go off? And and and so it was a struggle just from understanding culturally. And they did come from um historically a you know war-torn country. And so it was just interesting, just that mindset around like protection, protection of assets, right? And also what do we value? We value safety and security, and we see that through land and having that there. And so I just love like all the stuff that you were mentioning here, and just how culture it really does shape how clients come to do money and their preferences and their preferences there. And I guess for me, like on the financial. Therapy side of things, like to me, this connects a lot to like emotional safety and financial trauma there, particularly, you know, as we were just talking for clients who have been displaced or living in environments where, as you mentioned, like institutions can't be trusted, like the banking system. If we can't trust that, then how can we feel safe in that? I'd love to maybe hear from you though, like how can advisors start to recognize maybe a client's financial behavior? Like, when is it rooted in something different?

SPEAKER_00 22:32

Right. So the first step is awareness. So being aware, which I hopefully at the end of this podcast, everyone is now very aware that it's a potential issue. The next step is simply exploring with the client in the getting to know you process, asking certain kinds of questions that will bring out that kind of information if you suspect that culture is an issue and not some sort of individual quirk. Sometimes the clients got their own values for their own reasons. So you can ask them, I suppose these almost feel like financial therapy questions sometimes. You know, how was money talked about when you grew up? You know, do you feel responsibility financial responsibilities towards other members of family or community? What does financial success mean to you personally? Does that mean individual success or does that mean sort of success for your family, your broader community? Like what does it mean? Do you have any particular cultural or religious values that you think shape how you interact with the world? And when you make financial decisions, who else do you who else is involved? Uh who else do you consult other than me? Like as an advisor, other than me, who else do you talk to? And I think that one always brings out the really interesting ones when you find out who else is actually in on the decision making that you know that you didn't realize. Mum or dad actually hears everything and before the decision, like before your advice is acted on, it actually is going to a whole bunch of other people first.

SPEAKER_01 24:07

Yeah. And mom and dad may not always agree with what you And they won't agree, right?

SPEAKER_00 24:12

Because they weren't in the room with you when you delivered your advice and explained your reasons. So they didn't really say, you know, they are getting a secondhand version of what you said, and then they have come in with their own biases and belief systems and values, and they're pushing it down. And so but if you didn't know that that was happening in the background, knowing that that was happening in the background might change how you then approach that client.

SPEAKER_01 24:38

Yeah, yeah, I think those are all like fantastic, fantastic questions to ask. If advisors were maybe if we think about this as maybe I'm trying to organize it, and you have a framework here, the four factors of cultural intelligence. Can we organize this maybe in such a way to where talking about these factors, like what are they? And maybe that will help just where do we place like some of these questions, right? You know, and how we think about like a client and their culture.

SPEAKER_00 25:09

That sounds like a whole research project. Wow, research project, I could turn it into like a four-factor model. Yes, excellent. So on the fly, I start with the first thing to know is that you're interested in it. So the first is being willing to be uncomfortable yourself as an advisor and ask questions that you might get answers that you don't expect. And to admit that you don't know the that you don't know the the consequences of the answers that you might get. So you might you might ask a question thinking, please tell me you're not going to be one of these people that wants to do tangible assets because I feel like diversification and for you is the right thing. And then they say it and you think, oh now I have a problem to solve. So yeah, first of all, being being aware of your own reactions, that they are totally perfectly normal and human, that you are you're not expected to be an expert on other people's cultures. You don't have to always agree that their values are correct or that their values are going to serve them. Right? People can bring a whole bunch of biases and values into a advisor-client relationship that are not going to get them to their goals. And so that's where you have to use professional judgment and ask yourself first of all, for your conscience, am I prepared to budge my value towards the client and sort of do it their way because it's the client's interest that is paramount? So am I prepared to budge? And if I don't budge because I genuinely believe that that would not be in their best interest, how am I going to manage this in the relationship? Am I going to try to educate or am I going to try to get them to say to see a financial therapist to work on what I feel may be holding them back from achieving their goals because it's a value that they're holding on to that no longer suits their situation? So if is is it in fact, like you said, is it's the value that's come really from a financial trauma rather than from just a different perspective on the world, in which case that's something you might want to identify is this is to be overcome or worked on versus this is part of who the person is and is sort of fairly fixed in stone and I need to adapt to work with that person. There is no hard and fast rule on that. That is absolutely something that everyone has to make their own personal judgment on. In terms of practical things for what advisors could do to get started, I would look at if I was an advisor again, I would look at the hidden assumptions in my onboarding form. Do I assume one that a student picked up and once asked me, which I thought was quite interesting, was why do you assume that there's a male client and a female client? And why is the male client always on the left and the female client on the right? Like they're secondary? That's a good question. I don't know. Yeah. It's an assumption that we make about our forms. Like, well, how and in yeah, in in Sydney, Australia, the question is, well, how do you know there's not a third person in the couple?

SPEAKER_01 28:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 28:17

Okay, I don't. I don't, and my form does not does not allow for that. Or if the the couple are the same gender, my form doesn't allow for that. When I ask my onboarding, do I ask about my about their family background and whether they were, you know, how many we know everyone in Australia at least. Everyone is a migrant. So do I ask any questions about how far back the migration point was in your family? No, I don't I don't ask questions like that. So there are hidden assumptions in our form, in our in our onboarding forms about what people or even down to the um some of our risk uh risk tolerance questions sometimes are a bit oversimplified, but assume you are familiar with a Western financial system and then you think, ooh, does this person and that's why if you well I think where we train everyone here to verbally walk people through the risk tolerance form because if you don't hear at least people don't seem well will often misunderstand the meaning behind the question. So we'll interpret the question a certain way and answer it that way. And if you hear them talk through the logic of, well, why did you answer the question that way, you'll go, oh no, that's not what the question was asking. And you find out a bit more about well, tell me why you thought that's what the question was, and you'll find out that's because in their country of origin or in their family of origin or the socioeconomic group that they grew up in, that was an assumption that they had that the form doesn't cater for exactly.

SPEAKER_01 29:47

No, I think that I think those are all fantastic ones. And what was coming up for me as I was listening to actually is you know, here in at least the US, like we talk about like long-term care and insurance, like for that. And I was just, you know, thinking like what an assumption to make or pushing like your own values as an advisor that, hey, long-term care, you know, insurance, like that is important to have, or it might be important for a client. But what if that client comes from more of a Eastern cultural background and they are not individualistic, like we a lot of Americans or American culture, right, is like what if the client's like, no, I'm not, I don't want to do that because my kids are going to be taking care of me. And if you're like, that's wrong, no, like your kids have their own lives and do they even want that? Like, oh, that's just that can be just an example like of a place to really understand, you know, and ask some of those questions around the values piece, you know, and then how how does that play into the financial decision, financial decision making? And if as an advisor, if you feel that it's that that that is putting wrong, like kind of in quotes, but if that's a struggle for you, because it's in contrast to what you believe, you know, as you said, like that's okay, that can be your reaction, but how do you support the client? Because ultimately, like you are doing work that is in service of them, not you yourself. So I think looking at those questions and the onboarding, like kind of questions, it's such a wonderful place to capture uh and get kind of that baseline there. So you gave some pretty pretty great examples, pretty great examples for places where advisors can start. Now, if people are listening and they're like, this is really like awesome. Everything that you know Amanda is talking about, and I'm realizing that I probably did should do some work here, um, or our firm, our practice should do a little bit of work. If people want more of this, if they want more Amanda in their life, where can they where can they connect with you? Where can they find you? Where can they learn more about this stuff?

SPEAKER_00 32:00

Yes, you can find me on LinkedIn. There are two profiles because I have a university academic Dr. Amanda Craft profile, and then I have my financial therapy Amanda Craft profile. So they both go to me. So you're welcome to connect with me on either or both of those. I also have AmandaCraft at gmail.com to keep things simple. I am a uh certified cultural intelligence workshop leader, so I can run the cultural intelligence workshops. They're not I have not yet developed on on the plan, developed ones specifically for financial advisors. But the general one that is done for all professionals, I I am capable of running. Or if you prefer to do it with um, you can do them directly with the Cultural Intelligence Center, which is based in the US, and they have certified trainers all over the world in all different time zones.

SPEAKER_01 32:57

I love that. That's such great information. We'll make sure that we include those links in the show notes for uh everyone to access easily. Thank you, Amanda, for coming on and sharing all of your wisdom, all of your insights here. I wish that we had another 30 minutes to just continue, continue the conversation. I wish. I think it just means you'll have to come back on and we can talk uh a little bit more nuance. Yeah. That'd be great. Uh and thank you to all of you for allowing Amanda and I into your ears and into your mind today. If this conversation resonated with you, I would love to keep the conversation going. You can find me on LinkedIn at Ashley Kwame, where I share weekly insights on the human side of planning. And if you'd like a little bit more, maybe not Ashley, but beyond the plan, if you'd like a little bit more of that in your life, you can head over to our website, www.beondthefp.com and sign up for our monthly newsletter where we share all kinds of strategies and insights on how to integrate the human side of planning into your work and into your firm. But most importantly, make sure to follow the show wherever you get your podcast so that you never miss a future conversation like this one. And as always, my friends, remember finances don't have feelings, but your clients do. Until next time, keep planning, keep growing, and keep going beyond. Thanks for joining me on this episode of Planning and Beyond. I hope you found today's insights valuable and inspiring for both your practice and your personal growth. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe and leave a review on your favorite podcast platform. Your feedback helps us reach more advisors like you who are dedicated to making a difference. For more resources, tips, and to continue the conversation, visit our website at BeyondTheF.com. You'll find articles, tools, and information about upcoming episodes designed to support your journey and practice. Stay connected with us on social media and never miss an update. Follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn. And remember, the best way to grow is to keep learning and sharing. Until next time, keep planning, keep growing, and keep going and speaking.