<p>This paper reviews the history and ongoing debate surrounding neuroeconomics, outlines the main brain imaging techniques, and provides an overview of applications in neurofinance and consumer neuroscience and how these translate into policy relevance. The goal is to contribute to an understanding of the discipline and to an assessment of its potential benefits in providing policy guidance, especially for customer protection authorities. The review highlights that the debate between proponents and sceptics of the use of neuroscience tools in economics is still ongoing and often heated. However, even those who are critics tend to recognize that neuroeconomics can provide a contribution to traditional economics, in particular in the applied domain. Regulators and supervisors can enhance the effectiveness of their intervention by incorporating neuroeconomics' insights into the design, implementation and monitoring of consumer protection policies such as in the regulatory process and financial education initiatives. Moreover, neuroeconomics experiments can be used to assess consumer protection practices prior to their formal legal mandate. The review also shows that that in many cases these studies do not explicitly address all the policy implications of their findings even when those findings have clear relevance for consumer and investor protection, leaving valuable opportunity for increased collaboration between academic researchers and institutions in order to fully realize the potential of this emerging discipline.</p>