Episode 12: Academia and Practice in Financial Services Research
In this episode, host Chang Sun invited Professor Elisabeth Brüggen to join the DSMINDSETS Podcast. Elisabeth (Lisa) is a Professor for Financial Services at the Department of Marketing & Supply Chain Management under School of Business and Economics (SBE) at Maastricht University. She is also the Scientific Lead at Brightlands Institute for Smart Society (BISS).
Introduction
She is an expert in services marketing, financial well-being, consumer financial decision making, Human decisions and policy design, and pension communications. She is trained in customer-centric thinking and engaging with customers in a way that resonates with their needs. In 2013, Lisa developed a strong interest in financial services with a special focus on pensions. She was fascinated by the pressing challenges that the demographic change and financial crisis placed on the pension systems of western societies and the lack of knowledge about how to motivate participants.
Career Journey
After her studies of economics, Lisa was doubting whether she should stay in academia or work in practice as she enjoyed doing research and teaching but it was also important for her to see her ideas being implemented and that she could make an impact. Short, middle and long-term goal setting helped her along the way to find out what she wants to achieve, what was important to her and to grow into the different steps of her career. In the end, she found a middle ground while staying in academia as a professor but including a lot of co-creation with practice, sharing results with policymakers and stakeholders. Thereby, she can see her ideas being implemented while still being able to do research, bring change and have an impact.
Research
Lisa’s research focus is on Financial Services and pension communication. Her mission is to provide evidence-based insights to help people make better financial decisions.
In her work Lisa uses insights from behavioral economics and also psychology. Also, data science and digitalization are essential tools to make sense of data and find out how digital planners can help people, to work with automated financial advice or get overall richer insights from combining different sources of data.
Lisa also talks to our host Chang about an example of how Lisa uses data science in one of her projects: Novel developments such as multi-party computation can help to fight poverty. There, you can work with an algorithm that goes through different, distributed datasets to draw aggregated conclusions about whether someone is at risk of poverty.
Nowadays, pension funds also benefit from data science as it allows them to majorly improve their data analysis and consequently learn more about their customers and what they need.
Work at BISS
In line with one core theme of this podcast, BISS is a very interdisciplinary work environment that connects all faculties of Maastricht University. Colleagues with very different backgrounds come together which can be challenging as Lisa explains. In the beginning, you have to find common ground for example with the language you use and be aware that colleagues might have different understandings of the same terminology. But on the other hand, this work can also be very enriching and beneficial as people complement each other. Together, they have successfully worked on very interesting projects such as “AI in the classroom” about AI and education but they also found out how you can measure the weight of a cow using pictures. There are also projects on AI and health, poverty and debt.
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