Behavioural economics has given us a powerful lens for understanding how people make decisions. But there’s a question it doesn’t always prompt us to ask: whether the research underpinning that understanding was designed to find the right customers in the first place.
Most research into financial decision-making finds the customer before the chaos. Or too long after.
When people are planning a major financial decision, with time to consider their options and a clear sense of what they want, they behave quite differently from people making the same decision under pressure. They look like rational actors. And research designed around them tends to find what it expects.
But a lot of consequential financial decisions don’t happen in that state. They happen when life is already complicated, when circumstances are changing and options are narrowing. Ask people about it afterwards and memory does its own editing – the small frictions that mattered most don’t always survive the retelling.
The purchase that fell through
Our original house purchase collapsed at the worst possible moment. The seller hadn’t been transparent about a building regulations issue, the solicitor hadn’t flagged it for weeks, and we’d already been in the chain for six months. The house we were renting was being sold from under us, and we had weeks, not months, to find somewhere and complete.
A probate sale came up. No chain. Wanted to move fast. We viewed it in December – it was dark outside, dank inside and had been empty for over a year. We made an offer because we felt it could rescue us.
We hadn’t bought for fifteen years. So I did what most people do: asked around, checked Trustpilot, spoke to the advisers the estate agent recommended. The more I looked, the harder it got. Too much choice, too little basis for comparison.
What I wanted, and this surprised me, was to speak to a person – not to fill in a form or get an automated recommendation. I wanted someone to tell me it was going to be okay.
In the end, I went with an adviser recommended by a friend of a friend who’d moved recently. A chain of two human connections I trusted. She was extremely laid back, which created its own anxiety. But every time circumstances changed – and they changed several times – she said the same thing: don’t worry, I’ll sort it. And she did.
The rate wasn’t the point – we just didn’t know that yet
We went in focused on rate. What we didn’t appreciate was how much the lender’s processes would matter. When our purchase fell through, we had to switch properties. When we renegotiated after the survey, the loan value changed. We switched solicitors midway through. Each time, our adviser absorbed it without drama.
She’d chosen our lender partly because she knew from experience that some handle mid-transaction changes badly. That knowledge – not a rate, not a comparison site score – is what kept our purchase alive. The operational flexibility was a feature we didn’t know we needed until we needed it desperately.
The milestone and the chaos
Almost every decision came down to a personal recommendation, a gut feeling, or someone who said the right thing at the right moment. Human networks, all the way down.
Mortgage providers frame this as a milestone – unlocking your dream home, where your journey begins. That’s built on real insight. Some customers do experience it that way, with time, choice, and a sense of progression.
But there are also people like me… buying under severe pressure.
This is what I think of as the “chaos customer” – not a fixed segment, but a state people move in and out of depending on what’s happening in their lives. It overlaps with vulnerability, but it isn’t the same thing. What chaos customers share is the conditions in which their decisions are made.
And those conditions aren’t rare. Life events like divorce, bereavement, redundancy or relationship breakdown frequently cluster around house moves. As do positive ones – trying to complete before a baby arrives. The chaos isn’t always unhappy. But the time pressure, the reliance on trust over comparison, and the decisions made under constraint are often the same.
The problem isn’t that firms have built around the milestone customer. It’s that milestone framing, left unexamined, produces experiences that work well for one type of buyer and quietly fail another.
What this means for research
Three things follow.
Pre- and post-decision samples should be treated as distinct – they are not the same cohort. Decisions made under disruption need to be deliberately included, not treated as outliers to be cleaned from the data. And longitudinal approaches – even light-touch ones, a check-in at key moments, a short diary – surface things that neither intentions research nor retrospective accounts can catch. The app that’s always a step behind. The communication gap that turns waiting into anxiety. The friction that gets edited out in hindsight.
The chaos customer isn’t an edge case to design around. They’re what happens when normal life collides with a complex financial process.
Who you talk to matters. But when you talk to them dictates what you hear.
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