Paper Practices in Institutional Talk: How Financial Advisors Impress their Clients

Abstract

Paper is a persistent element of financial advisory encounters, despite the increasing digitisation of the financial industry. We seek to understand the reasons behind the resilience of paper-based encounters and advisors' resistance to change by understanding the paper's roles in financial advisory encounters. While applying multimodal analysis to a set of field and experimental data, we point to a range of prevalent advisory practices that rely on the use of paper documents and handwritten notes. We focus on the choreography of paper and how this intersects with the participants' institutional identities and goals. Specifically, we show how advisors' paper-oriented actions seek to convey a positive impression about the advisor and about the bank to the client, i.e. how they engage in seemingly mundane practices to impress their clients. Paper is far more than a medium for saving and presenting information: it is an interaction resource, a semiotic resource and an institutional resource; all these aspects of paper come into play during a financial advisory encounter. The manuscript concludes with suggestions on the design of technologies that may potentially replace the paper in financial advisory encounters and assesses the likelihood of this in light of the results.

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“…The advisor tends to dominate in verbal and material interaction. She also controls the IT and access to the material [10]. Both, the advisor and the advisee behave according to generic scripts that characterize the adequate and appropriate interaction [10], [11].…”

“…Financial advisory encounters are instances of institutional talk: they involve advisor representing the bank and the client acting towards his own goals; normally, the bank advisor controls the right to distribute turns, acts as host, and drives the interaction [10], [11]. The interaction sequence is characterized, to large extent, by question-answer adjacency pairs [13] and the literature argues for existence of specific modes or phases which are characterized as information collection, information provision and recommendation oriented at reduction of knowledge differences between the interlocutors [14], [15].…”

“…Recent studies approach the topic of material organization of advisory services. They identify ways in which the above mentioned roles reflect in usage of materials and documents [10], [16]. The advisor's dominance and control in verbal space correlates with her dominance over the space and access to material and tools -she is the one to structure and order the interaction space [10].…”

“…They identify ways in which the above mentioned roles reflect in usage of materials and documents [10], [16]. The advisor's dominance and control in verbal space correlates with her dominance over the space and access to material and tools -she is the one to structure and order the interaction space [10]. The documents she uses help structuring and segmenting the encounter [10], [16].…”

“…However, automated processing and documentation bears chance to reduce the pre-and post-processing overhead for the advisors [5], and enhance the transparency and persuasiveness [6]- [8]. Consequently, researchers made significant effort to hide the computer and to integrate the automated processing as much as much as possible with existing practices [9], [10].…”