Consumers consistently make illogical and even harmful decisions about their personal finances. This report highlights surprising, counterintuitive, and instructive examples showcased at the Boulder Summer Conference on Consumer Financial Decision Making.

“Leading banks have begun to tailor their products and services to take account of consumer behavior,” says Dan Latimore, senior vice president of Celent’s Banking practice and author of the report. “The challenge is that the good intentions of these programs’ architects are based on intuitions that are often proven wrong in the field, or confounded by unanticipated second order effects.”

This report distills two-and-a-half days of academic presentations into 13 pithy observations and provides banks eight key ways to interact with customers differently.

This 15-page report contains one figure.