Investment goals and mental accounting in French retail clients

Mental accounting is a cognitive process that guides individuals’ personal financial decisions. Although well-documented, the investigation into how individuals form and select mental accounts, how these accounts evolve over time and are affected by environmental factors, has yet to be undertaken. In this paper, we identify how an external force, the MiFID questionnaire, may strengthen mental accounting. Based on a sample of more than 60,000 retail clients’ questionnaire answers and banking records, we identify the determinants of the number of investment goals. We build a typology of retail clients’ mental goals and show that the actual investment decisions of retail clients, fit their mental goals.