The paper provides a critical overview of the use of behavioural economics and neurofinance insights for financial consumer protection. The objectives that consumer protection institutions expect to achieve by incorporating these clues into their activities are described and their actual ability to help strengthen customer protection policies is assessed based on some specific cases.
The analysis shows that behavioural economics and neurofinance have the potential to strengthen policies for the protection of consumers of financial products. Experience is still rather limited and not always accompanied by success stories. Research in these fields is rather expensive and requires close cooperation with academia, but the implementation of the resulting insights into interventions by the authorities can be relatively inexpensive, and effective in fostering informed choices by consumers.
