Key Insights
- Trust is actually two judgments happening at once: competence and benevolence—and benevolence carries roughly twice the weight.
- Most advisors over-invest in demonstrating expertise and underplay genuine care, making them look identical to competitors.
- Benevolence trust can form in minutes and collapse in seconds. Competence trust moves much more slowly in both directions.
- When something goes wrong, knowing which type of trust broke tells you exactly how to fix it.
- Strong benevolence perceptions act as a cushion. Clients stay calmer in volatile markets and give you more room to operate.
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Ask most financial advisors how they set themselves apart and you'll hear some version of the same answer: track record, credentials, process, technology. In other words, competence. It's an understandable instinct, and according to behavioral economist Herman Brodie, it's quietly costing advisors the very thing they're trying to earn.
Brodie has spent decades working with financial institutions on decision-making and trust, and his central argument is a little uncomfortable: most advisors are playing to the wrong audience.
Here's why. Trust isn't one judgment. It's two, happening at the same time. Clients are evaluating your competence, yes. But they're also evaluating your benevolence: do you actually have my back, or are you pursuing your own agenda?
And here's the part most advisors get backwards. Benevolence carries roughly twice the weight.
"In the financial services sector, professionals have a tendency to want to distinguish themselves from others by virtue of their competency and they spend too little time talking about their benevolence. They have benevolent intentions, of course, but they were not very good at showing it." — Herman Brodie
The practical consequences of this imbalance are real. Competence trust is slow. It builds over years of consistent performance and erodes gradually when results disappoint. Benevolence trust moves at a completely different speed. It can form within minutes of a first meeting and be destroyed in seconds the moment a client feels like you weren't truly in their corner.
