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.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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.
That distinction also matters when things go wrong, and they will. A client who's disappointed after a rough stretch of market performance has a competence perception problem. You address that by investing in better outcomes over time. But a client who feels betrayed? That's a broken benevolence bond and a much harder thing to repair.
The upside of getting this right is significant.
"If you build up your benevolence perceptions amongst your clients ... they're in a position to do things like invest in riskier assets ... and not be obsessed by watching every uptick and downtick in the market." — Herman Brodie
Strong benevolence perceptions create a cushion. When clients believe someone genuinely has their back, they stay calmer in volatile markets, take a longer view, and give you more room to operate.
Key Takeaway
Clients are making two trust judgments about you at all times. The one that matters most isn't about your credentials or your returns. It's about whether they believe you genuinely care about their outcome. Advisors who invest as deliberately in showing that care as they do in demonstrating expertise will build deeper relationships, retain more clients through difficult markets, and recover more quickly when the inevitable disappointments come.
Watch the Podcast Episode
This article draws from our Exceptional Advisor Podcast conversation with Herman Brodie, behavioral economics specialist and Founding Director of Prospecta Limited. In the episode, Herman goes further into how market noise pulls client attention in the wrong direction, why vulnerability outperforms self-promotion, and how political polarization is quietly showing up in client relationships.
Watch the full episode.
