Ayesha Ofori, founder and CEO of Propelle.
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Ayesha Ofori is the former Goldman Sachs wealth adviser who quit her high-profile job to tackle the UK's gender wealth gap after realizing her career was to make the rich richer .
Ofori is a 40-year-old female founder and CEO of a financial investment platform. Properlaunched on Wednesday. The app-based platform offers a variety of investment options, such as funds from Vanguard, BlackRock and HSBC.
Ofori told CNBC Make It that Propelle has raised more than £1.2 million (about $1.6 million) in pre-seed funding and is backed by Google, which invested $100,000 in the platform. Other investors include Stefan Bollinger, chief executive of Julius Baer and a former Goldman Sachs executive, and Lucy Demery, managing director of fintech investments at Barclays.
Ofori, who spent six years at Goldman Sachs managing more than £500m of client money, said she typically worked with entrepreneurs and first-time founders who built highly profitable businesses and then sold them at high prices. However, despite breaking the glass ceiling as a black woman in finance, she was not satisfied.
“I've reached a point in my career where things are going really well,” Ofori said. “I was promoted to executive director and I started making a lot of money. I hit the $500 million threshold. That's what they tell you to aim for. I passed.”
Ofori recalled being in a meeting with one of her bosses and thinking about where she would be six to ten years from now. “I realized it was just more of the same… I lost my sense of purpose every day. It almost became 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 like 'I make extremely rich people richer, that's what I do day in and day out, '” she added.
Ofori said she began to question the lack of women in investing. “What I found is that, overall, the vast majority of women invest at a much lower level than men.”
although Women live longer on average Compared with men, “we have less money that we don't get the use for,” she said.
The UK’s gender investment gap Data from British financial research company Boring Money shows that investment currently stands at 567 billion pounds, an increase of 54 billion pounds from January 2023 to January 2024. of investment was £1.01 trillion, compared with £1.01 trillion for men.
In addition, the latest data from Prospect, a British trade union representing 157,000 professionals in industries such as technology, education, transportation and law, established The gender pension gap is 37.9% between 2021 and 2022, more than double the gender pay gap, which was reported to be 14.9% in 2022.
The pension gender gap refers to the difference in retirement income or retirement wealth between men and women.
Ofori said she was shocked by the statistics she uncovered, which prompted her to quit her high-paying executive job at Goldman Sachs in 2018 and begin working on her mission to empower women economically.
“Women are born to save”
Ofori said the women she spoke to were more inclined to save and mistakenly believed that putting money into an individual cash savings account (ISA) was a form of investment.
An ISA is a high-interest, tax-free personal savings account in the UK with an annual allowance of £20,000.
“Saving and investing are not the same thing. The two words are often used interchangeably. It annoys me because they are different and women naturally default to saving. They think they are investing, so they save,” Ofori said.
She added: “Despite the best intentions in the world, you may think you've invested because you put your money into a cash ISA, but you won't achieve your goals.”
Research shows that women are more hesitant to invest. Nearly half of women worldwide believe that A 2022 report from BNY Mellon Investment Management surveyed 8,000 men and women in 16 countries and found that investing in the stock market through individual securities or funds was too risky. Only 28% of women are confident in investing.
The way these platforms portray information and structure investing has nothing to do with how women view investing and building wealth.
Ayesha Ofori
Founder of Proper
Ofori said there are two key reasons women are being left out of the investment bubble: lack of time and confidence.
“First of all, a lot of women tell us they don't know where to start. There's too much information. There's so much information out there that they don't have time to sit there and figure it out,” she said. “So instead of making a mistake, they're doing nothing.”
Before leaving Goldman Sachs, Ofori began hosting events for women in London to share her story of creating wealth for herself and her clients—and within months, 2,000 women had signed up.
“I realized I was on to something,” she said. “Just because women haven't invested doesn't mean they don't want to invest. They obviously do.”
Ofori noticed that people attending her events were bored with conventional investing platforms and didn’t know where to start.
“The way these platforms portray information and structure investments has nothing to do with how women view investing and building wealth,” Ofori said.
That's when she decided to build an FCA-regulated multi-asset class investment platform for women. “I knew my purpose now was to help women create wealth,” Ofori said.
Investment platform designed for men
Women who speak to Ofori about their investment journeys often complain that conventional investment platforms are often male-centric.
Factors that turn women off include the language used, a lack of transparency about varying levels of investment risk, and funding that is not tied to personal goals.
“Most, if not all, of these platforms are run by men and their teams are overwhelmingly male, so when you think about the teams that design the products, it’s natural that they build the products with men in mind. … The data speaks for itself, if you look at the customers of these companies, the majority of them are men,” Ofori said.
Propelle is designed with women in mind every step of the way.
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In contrast, Propelle will roll out features in the coming weeks, such as a risk assessment tool that explains the different types of risks involved, as well as measuring a user's personal risk tolerance. 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 offers investment options based on users’ personal values, from sustainable to Shariah-compliant funds. The company eventually plans to add alternative investments such as subdivision real estate, investments in new startups, and investments in wine and art.
“I don't want to build a platform that women invest in just because it's there, but it doesn't work for them. We really try to make sure it's suitable for women, no matter what background she comes from,” Ofori said.
“Just because you may have less money, why should you be excluded from the asset classes that the rich have invested in for years and made a lot of money? That's why the rich are getting richer.”