Why Brain Health Belongs in Wealth Planning – An Exclusive Interview with Elena Howarth
Elena Howarth is a Swiss private banker who advises ultra-high-net-worth individuals and families. She is also a brain-health advocate, connecting insights from academia with preventive public health. Through science-based community initiatives, speaking engagements and creative workshops, she explores the neuroscience of creativity and the role of art in brain health, while advancing the concept of brain capital.
Elena was named Best Female Private Banker 2025 by Citywire Switzerland. She is the founder of Creative Brain Academy, a Swiss-based initiative that brings the science of the mind into everyday human experience, and a co-creator of the Geneva Longevity Summit 2025, developed within the Science for All concept.
In this interview, Elena explores why brain health belongs in wealth planning, what neuroscience reveals about financial decision-making, and how we can build wealth that supports creative, purposeful and balanced lives.
Elena Howarth, Wealth Manager & Founder of Creative Brain Academy
You have spent decades working with some of the world’s wealthiest families. What led you to connect wealth management with neuroscience and brain health?
Private banking gave me the opportunity to work closely with all kinds of brilliant people who had one common trait: substantial wealth. I witnessed them navigating some of their most important financial decisions: generational transfers, the sale of a business, periods of profound uncertainty, volatile markets, complex family situations, and decisions with consequences for both business and philanthropy.
I began paying attention to how those decisions were made. Some people demonstrated a quality of attention that I had rarely seen elsewhere. They were able to filter noise almost instinctively. Others had developed habits of reflection that helped them navigate uncertainty. I became interested in the resource beyond the numbers, and the next step was to understand the mechanisms behind it.
Another important factor was that the next generation in many of these families thinks about health and prevention differently. They are more deliberate about it, more open in discussing mental health topics, and increasingly expect the people advising them to be able to understand and hold those conversations.
I wanted to have the tools to meet that need. I started reading the behavioural finance literature, and one course followed another. Curiosity gradually became expertise through formal education: an MSc in Applied Neuroscience at King’s College London, followed by a CAS in Brain Health at the University of Bern.
What did neuroscience help you understand about financial decision-making that finance alone could not explain?
First, emotions are not the opposite of clear thinking. They are part of how thinking works. For someone trained to treat feelings as noise to be filtered out of a decision, that is an important reframing.
Emotion influences what we notice, how we assess risk and what we consider important. We cannot simply subtract emotion to produce a purer result. We may end up with a poorer one.
Second, neuroscience led me towards prevention. Sleep, nutrition, movement and social connection may sound like unusual topics in a private-banking conversation. However, they are among the well-evidenced factors associated with maintaining brain function across a long life.
This matters because every financial plan quietly assumes that the decision-maker will remain able to understand information, assess options, express preferences and change their mind as circumstances evolve. We model market, currency and liquidity risks, but we rarely model the possible loss of the decision-maker’s cognitive capacity as a risk in the same way.
This is not an abstract concern. The World Health Organization reports nearly 10 million new cases of dementia each year, with 57 million people living with dementia worldwide in 2021. Global estimates suggest that the number could rise to approximately 153 million by 2050.
What does your idea of “Attention Under Management” reveal about how investors make decisions during uncertainty?
On my blog, Brain, Behaviour, Billions, I connect financial and neuroscience concepts in a playful way to raise awareness of how the mind influences our daily and financial lives.
One example is “Attention Under Management”, or AUM, a play on the familiar financial term “Assets Under Management”. It asks not how much money someone has, but how their attention is distributed, particularly during periods of uncertainty.
Two clients can start with the same portfolio, the same strategy and the same adviser, yet end up somewhere completely different. During volatility, some clients devote enormous amounts of attention to their investments. They check their portfolios several times a day, read every headline and react to every movement. Others deliberately narrow their focus to a few meaningful signals and remain anchored to their long-term strategy.
The market and information may be the same, but their Attention Under Management is completely different. The key issue is not how much attention you dedicate, but how focused and stable it remains under pressure.
Attention does not behave like capital. More capital is generally beneficial; by contrast, more unstructured attention can produce noise. That noise can become self-reinforcing: uncertainty makes you check your positions, checking provides brief relief, and that relief encourages you to check again. The loop tightens precisely when the stakes are highest and stress narrows your capacity for sound financial choices.
What is traditional wealth management still missing about how people actually make financial decisions?
Finance does not ignore human behaviour. Behavioural finance has been questioned and refined over the years, but I remain convinced that biases such as confirmation bias or loss aversion, along with stress and pressure, significantly influence our choices. It would be helpful to see more advisers paying attention to these factors in a systematic way.
As life expectancy increases, advisers are more likely to work with clients experiencing cognitive change. People with cognitive decline may be more vulnerable to fraud and exploitation, sometimes by someone close to them. Missing the warning signs can harm the client and expose the institution to reputational risk.
Institutions therefore need clear policies that guide advisers while protecting clients in vulnerable circumstances. This is not about taking control away from clients, but about protecting their dignity, autonomy and the wealth they have built over a lifetime.
Advisers do not have to diagnose dementia, but they may be expected to notice warning signs, document concerns and adapt how they support the client, bearing in mind that a person may not notice their own decline.
In private banking, where relationships with clients and their families often span many years, should we not be paying more attention to this?
If brain capital matters economically, what should institutions start doing differently?
Brain capital is a framework that treats brain health and brain skills, such as focus, emotional regulation, creativity and adaptability, as assets that serve social and economic goals.
In an organisation, it shapes the quality of decisions, innovation and resilience. We deliberately manage financial capital, but rarely brain capital with the same level of intention.
The groundwork already exists. In the United Kingdom, the Financial Conduct Authority asks firms to consider customer vulnerability, including cognitive impairment. Switzerland relies mainly on adult protection law, which offers the lasting power of attorney (mandat pour cause d'inaptitude) and allows banks to alert the adult protection authority. However, the focus is on responding once a difficulty has emerged. Prevention receives far less attention.
Banks cannot give medical advice, but they can create the conditions for prevention: brain-health education at client events and family meetings, next-generation programmes, retirement transition support and planning that treats health as part of wealth. Equally important are workplace brain health for employees and support for brain-health initiatives.
What I believe is needed is more shared research on how cognitive change affects financial decisions in practice. We need training that covers the foundations of cognition, not only investing. We need accessible educational material produced by qualified professionals, without it becoming financial or medical advice. And we need clinicians, advisers, lawyers and regulators to work together.
What are some practical ways people can strengthen their cognitive resilience before problems appear?
The Lancet Commission's 2024 report identified 14 potentially modifiable risk factors, including high blood pressure, hearing loss, physical inactivity and social isolation, and concluded that addressing them could theoretically prevent or delay nearly half of dementia cases. This is a population-level estimate, not an individual guarantee, but a strong reason to start early.
Beyond those factors, a good first step is sleep. Before trying to fix it, just observe it. Notice what six hours costs you the next day and what seven and a half gives you. Many people have never made that connection explicitly.
Second, build in something cognitively, physically or socially engaging that you enjoy. A brain-training app alone is unlikely to be enough. Choose a challenge that ideally involves other people, such as learning a language, playing an instrument or dancing. With colleagues at the University of Bern, we run a public brain-health initiative built around dancing: simple, joyful and social.
Third, the step people often skip: decide in advance what you will do under pressure. Write it down or tell someone. Stress impairs the brain's planning functions, so a plan made in calm protects your decisions when it matters.
Nothing guarantees we will avoid dementia, but every small step is better than doing nothing and hoping for a good outcome.
Why does Creative Brain Academy use music, movement and other creative practices alongside neuroscience education?
Creative engagement is demanding in a useful way. It asks for flexibility, novelty and sustained attention, and it is often social, which matters more than many people realise.
During my studies, I explored depression and dementia risk reduction and the effects of creative activity, including music, art and movement, on well-being. Prevention advice often fails not because people disagree with it, but because they stop following it. Almost nobody sustains an activity they find joyless. Would you?
Creative practice is one of the few approaches that people may continue in the long term because they want to, not simply because a professional told them to.
This is also personal for me. I write, paint and play the piano, although none of these activities is professional. I was doing them long before I could explain why they mattered.
How has studying the brain changed your own definition of a successful or prosperous life?
I still believe that money is one of the most useful tools we have. It can buy time and security, and it can help us care for the people we love or support the projects we believe in. But experiencing and enjoying anything requires a mind that is functioning well. So do decision-making and communication with others, including the ability to tell your family what you actually want.
Having wealth and being able to enjoy it are two different accomplishments. Wealth planning has concentrated almost entirely on the former.
That is where the concept of the Life Portfolio came from. It treats financial well-being, brain health, emotional resilience and purpose as one system rather than four separate projects.
It leads us to ask some less conventional questions. Does my money support the life I actually want? What am I doing this year that my brain will still benefit from in the long term? Does my money have the impact I want it to have?
This idea relates to all of us, regardless of how much money we have. I run free financial-literacy masterclasses because I believe that understanding wealth should not be a privilege. Access to that knowledge should be available to everybody.
What is one idea you hope readers will reconsider after this conversation?
If I could ask only one question, it would be this, "How do you want your wealth to make you feel in ten years?" Not, "What do you want your wealth to be worth in ten years?" But, "What do you want it to feel like?"
It may sound like a soft question, but it is a powerful instrument for uncovering deeply held values and priorities. Once someone starts answering it honestly, it quickly stops being a question about money. Everything that follows, such as the strategy, the habits and the succession plan, becomes easier to design and put into practice because it is connected to what that person genuinely wants and values.
I am aware of how this sounds coming from a banker. But my experience so far has been encouraging. This approach is not yet standard, and it is not something one person can build alone. It requires researchers, institutions, companies and individuals who are willing to test the ideas in their own lives.
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