HUMAN FACTORS IN FINANCE

It is increasingly recognised that major failures in financial organisations have similar causes to those in domains such as nuclear power, healthcare, or aviation: namely, ‘human factors’ problems (e.g., errors in decision-making or teamwork) that lead to lapses in risk management. Yet, unlike safety-critical domains, little is known about the population of errors in financial trading, or how they can be prevented from occurring or causing harm. We investigated this by determining the nature and prevalence of risk incidents in financial trading, and establishing their human factors and cultural causes.