ABOUT PETER
From Financial Services to the Stories Behind the Numbers
I have spent much of my professional life at the intersection of financial services, customer experience and human stories.
I started my career in financial services in the 1980s and worked across pensions, life insurance, banking, investments and financial planning, including roles with UAP, Prudential, ABN AMRO, AMEV/Fortis, Robeco, Syntrus Achmea and other financial-services organisations.
I learned the financial world from the inside.
I learned how products work.
How financial decisions are made.
How organisations think.
And, increasingly, how difficult it can be to make financial services genuinely meaningful to the people they are supposed to serve.
That question stayed with me:
Why do people often remain so disengaged from their own money, even when they receive excellent financial information and advice?
Then I discovered the power of stories
Alongside my work in financial services, I became increasingly fascinated by the stories people tell about their lives.
Since 2007, I have conducted thousands of interviews and conversations with people about their work, ambitions, choices, successes, failures, transitions and dreams.
I discovered something that changed the way I look at both people and organisations:
The answer people give you first is rarely the whole story.
Ask a better question.
Pay closer attention.
Go deeper.
And another story begins to emerge.
The story underneath the story.
That became the foundation of my work with The One Great Story.
The One Great Story
Over the years I have explored the patterns that appear again and again in human stories:
12 Characters.
7 Plots.
36 Dramatic Situations.
2 Endings — Tragedy or Happiness.
These patterns became a way of understanding people’s journeys — not as abstract theory, but as something that can help us see the choices, conflicts, turning points and possibilities in real lives.
And eventually I began to ask:
What happens when we apply the power of stories to one of the most important forces in people’s lives — money?
That question led to Telling the Financial Story.
From financial expert to Financial Storyteller
I don’t believe financial professionals need more information about storytelling.
They already know their profession.
What they need is a different way of seeing and understanding the people sitting across the table from them.
StoryDiscovery helps them move beyond the first answer.
Storytelling helps them connect their expertise with what matters most in a client’s life.
Together they can change the conversation:
from information to meaning
from products to people
from transactions to relationships
from advice to engagement.
The next chapter
I am now inviting 100 innovative financial services professionals from around the world to share their stories.
They are the Explorers and Creators who believe there must be a better way.
I want to learn from them.
What are they changing?
What are they creating?
What are they discovering about people and money?
What should financial services become?
Their stories will help shape the next chapter of this work.
Because I don’t want to simply teach financial professionals how to tell better stories.
I want to help change the way financial services engage people with their money.
Changing the way financial services engage people with their money — through the power of stories.
Peter de Kuster
Founder,Telling the Financial Story
From Story to Strategy
Peter works with financial services organizations that want to move beyond selling products and managing money, toward guiding customers to achieve their aspirations.
He brings together insights from the world’s greatest storytellers, behavioural psychology, philosophy and business strategy to help financial institutions understand the human side of what they do.
For the organizations he works with, this means rethinking:
- What their customers are actually trying to become.
- Where their industry sits on the path from products to transformation.
- What conversations, journeys and cultures make that transformation possible.
- What excellence looks like when the goal is no longer the sale, but the story that follows it.
Because financial services is not, at its core, a products business.
It is a transformation business that has forgotten to act like one.
In Search of Excellence in Financial Services
Peter’s work is grounded in ongoing research into how financial institutions are moving up the value curve — from products, to services, to experience, to transformation — and what the excellent ones are doing differently along the way.
This research shapes everything he brings into an organization: keynotes, advisory work and Learning Journeys are all extensions of the same body of work, not separate offerings.
Creator of Living Books About Story
Telling the Financial Story is one of Peter’s Great Online Story Books — a growing collection exploring how story creates understanding, connection and transformation.
Other works explore the Hero’s Journey, the Heroine’s Journey, the power of personal story, and the deeper question of what people want their lives — and their money — to make possible.
Together, these books form a larger body of work: how story helps people, and the institutions that serve them, discover what they aspire to become.
Why Financial Storytelling?
Financial institutions have extraordinary expertise. But expertise only creates value when customers can see themselves in it, trust it, and act on it.
The financial institution of the future is not only an expert.
It is a guide — one that listens deeply, understands the aspiration behind the transaction, and helps customers write their next chapter.
Peter’s Mission
Guiding customers to achieve their aspirations, one story at a time.
To help financial institutions discover and tell the stories that matter — stories that build trust, inspire action, and connect ambition to meaningful decisions.
Because behind every financial relationship, there is a human aspiration waiting to be understood.
Welcome to the journey.
Telling the Financial Story 