Privacy risks, personal customer environments, and the use of financial support tools

Most financial support tools rely on consumer data to provide accurate personalized guidance and support. Consumers’ privacy concerns related to sharing these data may harm consumer engagement, quality of input data, and consumer decisions, posing risks to the effectiveness of these tools. We report four studies to investigate how privacy concerns affect consumers’ use of financial support tools. In the first study, we find that data privacy affects students’ engagement with an online savings calculator. In the second study, we find that a privacy breach negatively impacts disclosure of personal information and investment risk preferences in an online banking setting. In the third study, we find that a personal customer environment enhances consumers’ personal information sharing in an online mortgage calculator tool. In the fourth and final study, we demonstrate that a personal customer environment can mitigate the impact of high privacy risks on consumers’ reluctance to provide complete and truthful information in financial support tools. These results are important for the design of effective financial support tools. It is important to take measures to reduce consumers’ privacy risks concerns because this can lead to less complete or truthful information disclosure. Personal customer environments can mitigate these concerns and increase the functionality of financial support tools.