Ayesha Ofori, founder and CEO of Propelle.
Propelle
Ayesha Ofori is a former Goldman Sachs wealth advisor who quit her high-profile job to resolve Britain’s gender wealth gap, after realizing she had spent her career making rich men even richer.
Ofori is the 40-year-old founder and CEO of female-focused financial investment platform, Propelle, which launched on Wednesday. The app-based platform offers various investment options like funds from Vanguard, Blackrock and HSBC.
Propelle has raised over £1.2 million (around $1.6 million) in pre-seed funding and is backed by Google, which invested $100,000 into the platform, Ofori told CNBC Make It in an interview. Other investors range from Stefan Bollinger, Julius Baer CEO and former Goldman executive, to Lucy Demery, managing director of fintech investments at Barclays.
Ofori, who had worked at Goldman for six years, and handled just over £500 million in client money, said she typically worked with entrepreneurs and first-time founders who built highly profitable businesses and sold them for a lot of money. However, despite breaking the glass ceiling as a Black woman in finance, she wasn’t satisfied.
“I had gotten to a point in my career where things were going amazingly well,” Ofori said. “I was promoted to executive director, and I started to bring in lots of money. I hit that half a billion threshold. That’s the threshold they tell you to aim for. I passed that.”
Ofori recalled sitting in a meeting with one of her bosses and reflecting on what the next six to 10 years looked like for her. “I realized it’s just more of the same … I’d lost my sense of purpose every day. It was almost getting monotonous,” she said.
“It really shouldn’t have taken six years to hit me, but I remember one day I woke up and I was just like ‘I make incredibly rich men richer, that’s what I do, day in, day out,'” she added.
Ofori said she began questioning the dearth of women in investing. “I found that across the board, women, overwhelmingly, were not investing anywhere near the levels men were.”
Despite women living on average longer than men, “we have less money that isn’t being put to work in the way that it should,” she said.
Britain’s gender investment gap currently stands at £567 billion — an increase of £54 billion between January 2023 and January 2024 — according to data from British financial research company Boring Money which surveyed over 6,000 adults in the U.K. It found that men have £1.01 trillion invested compared with £450 billion for women.
Additionally, the latest data from Prospect, a British union representing 157,000 professionals across industries like tech, education, transport and legal, found that the gender pensions gap stood at 37.9% between 2021 and 2022 — more than double the gender pay gap, which was reported as 14.9% in 2022.
The gender pensions gap refers to the differences in retirement income or retirement wealth between men and women.
Ofori said she was stunned by the statistics she found, and this led her on a path to quitting her well-paid executive role at Goldman in 2018, and embarking on a mission to empower women financially.
‘Women naturally default to saving’
Ofori said that the women she spoke to were more inclined towards saving, and mistakenly believed that placing their money in a cash Individual Savings Account (ISA) was a form of investing.
An ISA is a high-interest, tax free, individual savings account in the U.K. which has an annual allowance of £20,000.
“Saving and investing are not the same thing, and the two words are used interchangeably often. That annoys me, because they’re not the same, and women naturally default to saving and they save thinking they’re investing,” Ofori said.
She added: “With all the best will in the world, you may think you’ve invested because you’ve put your money in a cash ISA, but you are not going to hit your goal.”
Research shows that women are more hesitant about investing. Almost half of women globally feel that investing in the stock market via an individual security or a fund is too risky, a 2022 BNY Mellon Investment Management report that surveyed 8,000 men and women across 16 countries found. And only 28% of women felt confident about investing their money.
The way that the platforms portrayed information and the way that the investments were structured didn’t relate with how women think about investing and building their wealth.
Ayesha Ofori
Founder of Propelle
There are two key reasons that women are locked out of the investing bubble, according to Ofori: a lack of time and confidence.
“The first thing is a lot of women tell us they don’t know where to start. There’s too much information. It’s too overwhelming and they don’t have time to sit there and figure it out,” she said. “So rather than make a mistake, they just don’t do anything.”
Before she left Goldman, Ofori started throwing events for women in London in order to share her story of building wealth for herself and clients — and, within a few months, 2,000 women were signing up to attend.
“I realized that I was onto something,” she said. “Just because women haven’t been investing doesn’t mean they don’t want to invest. They clearly do.”
Ofori noticed that attendees to her events were put off by regular investing platforms and didn’t know where to start.
“The way that the platforms portrayed information and the way that the investments were structured didn’t relate with how women think about investing and building their wealth,” Ofori said.
That’s when she decided that she was going to build an FCA regulated multi-asset class investment platform for women. “I know that now my purpose is to help women build wealth,” Ofori said.
Investment platforms are designed for men
Women who spoke with Ofori about their investing journey often complained about regular investing platforms typically being male-centric.
Factors that are off-putting for women include the language used, a lack of transparency about the different levels of investment risks and the funds not relating to their personal goals.
“Most, if not all of those platforms were run by men, and their teams were overwhelmingly men so when you’re thinking about the teams who are designing products, there are going to be natural inherent things in them that they’re building them with men in mind … the data speaks for itself, if you look at the customers of these companies, they’re majority men,” Ofori said.
Propelle was designed with women in mind at every step.
Propelle
In contrast, Propelle is rolling out features in the coming weeks such as a risk assessment tool which explains the different types of risks involved, as well as measuring users’ personal risk tolerances. Its smart goal setting feature will allow users to invest in funds with different risk levels based on whether those goals are long-term or short-term.
Propelle also has investing options that are based on users’ personal values from sustainability to Shariah-compliant funds. It eventually plans to add alternative investments such as fractionalized real estate, startup investing and wine and art investing.
“I didn’t want to build a platform where women were just investing in things just because it’s there and it’s not working for them. We really made an effort to make sure that it’s suitable for the woman based on whatever background that she has,” Ofori said.
“Just because, you might have a smaller amount of money, why should you be excluded to asset classes that the rich have been investing in for years, making tons of money? It’s obvious why the rich keep getting richer.”