[Research Seminar] Money Management Difficulty, Customer Protection and the Detection of Early-Stage Dementia
October 2nd, 2025
2pm – 3:30pm in Promenade Building (PR13) & on Zoom
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Speaker: Cal MUCKLEY, University College Dublin (UCD), Ireland
abstract
Financial institutions need to protect their customers in vulnerable circumstances.
We test if older persons’ difficulty in managing money, e.g., interacting with a bank, paying bills and making pension decisions, can help identify individuals with early-stage dementia. We show that clinically informed lead indicators of dementia, extended to include money management difficulty, can inform a high-performance AI model to predict a clinical diagnosis. Critically, invariant to extensive tests, after age, money management difficulty is consistently ranked the most important lead indicator of dementia.
Financial institutions, with sight of the concerns of customers’ on their financial difficulty, can enhance their protection of customers with dementia and, potentially, inform the inter-generational transfer of financial control to a reliable agent.