Ex-Goldman director steps out to tackle UK’s gender investment gap

Ayesha Ofori is a former Goldman Sachs wealth adviser who quit her high-profile job to tackle Britain’s gender wealth gap, after realizing she had spent her career making the rich richer.

Ofori is the 40-year-old founder and CEO of women-focused financial investment platform Propelle, which launched on Wednesday. The app-based platform offers a variety of investment options like funds from Vanguard, Blackrock and HSBC.

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, Ofori told CNBC Make It in an interview. Other investors include Stefan Bollinger, CEO of Julius Baer and former Goldman executive, to Lucy Demery, fintech investment director at Barclays.

Ofori, who has worked at Goldman for six years, and handles just over £500 million in client money, said he usually works with entrepreneurs and first founders who build highly profitable businesses and sell them for a lot of money. However, despite breaking the glass ceiling as a Black woman in finance, she is 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 to bring a lot of money. I hit that half a billion threshold. That threshold they told me to aim for. I passed.”

Ofori recalls sitting in a meeting with one of his bosses and pondering what he would do in the next six to 10 years. “I realized it’s just more of the same… I’d lose my sense of purpose every day. It’s almost getting monotonous,” she said.

“It didn’t really take six years to hit me, but I remember one day I woke up and I was like ‘I’m making rich people rich, so I’m doing it, every day,'” he added. .

Ofori said she started questioning the lack of women in investment. “I find that across the board, women, overwhelmingly, don’t invest anywhere near the level that men do.”

Although women live longer on average than men, “we have less money that we can’t do the way we should,” she said.

The gender investment gap in Britain is now £567 billion – an increase of £54 billion between January 2023 and January 2024 – according to data from British financial research firm Boring Money which surveyed more than 6,000 adults in the UK. invested compared to £450 billion for women.

In addition, the latest data from Prospect, a UK trade union representing 157,000 professionals in industries such as technology, education, transport and law, found that the gender pension gap will be 37.9% between 2021 and 2022 – more than double the gender pay gap, which is . is reported to be 14.9% in 2022.

The gender pension gap refers to the difference in retirement income or retirement wealth between men and women.

Ofori said she was shocked by the statistics she discovered, and it led her to step down from her well-paid executive role at Goldman in 2018, and embark on a mission to empower women financially.

Ofori said the women he spoke to prefer to save, and mistakenly believe that putting money in an Individual Savings Account (ISA) is a form of investment.

An ISA is an interest-free, tax-free, UK-based individual savings account with 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 are not the same, and women naturally default to saving and they save thinking they are investing,” said Ofori.

He added: “With all the best will in the world, you might think you’ve invested because you’ve put money into a cash ISA, but you’ll never reach your goals.”

Research shows that women are more hesitant about investing. Almost half of women worldwide feel that investing in the stock market through individual securities or funds is too risky, according to a 2022 BNY Mellon Investment Management report that surveyed 8,000 men and women in 16 countries. And only 28% of women are confident about investing money.

There are two main reasons women are locked out of the investment bubble, according to Ofori: lack of time and confidence.

“The first thing many women tell me is that they don’t know where to start. There is a lot of information. It’s too much and they don’t have time to sit down and understand,” he said. “So instead of making a mistake, they did nothing.”

Before leaving Goldman, Ofori started an event for women in London where they could share their stories of building wealth for themselves and their clients – and within months, 2,000 women signed up.

“I realized that I’m onto something,” she said. “Just because women haven’t invested, doesn’t mean they don’t want to invest.

Ofori noticed that attendees at the event were put off by the usual investment platforms and didn’t know where to start.

“The way the platform portrays information and the way it invests is out of touch with the way women think about investing and building wealth,” Ofori said.

It was then that she decided that she would build an FCA-regulated multi-asset class investment platform for women. “I know that now my goal is to help women build wealth,” Ofori said.

Women who spoke to Ofori about their investment journey often complained about conventional investment platforms being mostly male-focused.

Disadvantaging factors for women include the language used, lack of transparency about different levels of investment risk and funds not related to their personal goals.

“For the most part, if not all of these platforms are run by men, and the team is overwhelmingly male, then if you think about the team that designs the product, there will be natural things that will be done with men … the data itself , if you look at the customers of the company, they are the majority of people,” Ofori said.

In contrast, Propelle is launching features in the coming weeks such as a risk assessment tool that explains different types of risk, as well as measuring users’ personal risk tolerance. The smart goal setting feature will allow users to invest in funds with different levels of risk based on whether the goal is long-term or short-term.

Propelle also has investment options based on users’ personal values ​​from sustainability to Shariah-compliant funds. Eventually plans to add alternative investments such as fractionalized real estate, startup investments and wine and art investments.

“I don’t want to build a platform where women just invest in things just because they exist and don’t work for them,” said Ofori.

“Just because, you might have a smaller amount of money, why should you put it in an asset class that rich people have been investing in for years, making a lot of money? It’s obvious why the rich are getting richer.”