Former Goldman boss resigns to tackle UK gender investment gap
Ayesha Ofori, founder and CEO of Propelle.
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Ayesha Ofori is a former Goldman Sachs financial adviser who quit her high-profile job to tackle the UK’s gender wealth gap, after realising she had spent her career helping rich men get richer.
Ofori is the 40-year-old founder and CEO of a financial investment platform for women, Fan bladelaunched on Wednesday. The app-based platform offers a variety of investment options such as funds from Vanguard, Slat And HSBC Bank.
Propelle has raised more than £1.2 million (about $1.6 million) in a pre-seed round and is backed by Google, which invested $100,000 in the platform, Ofori told CNBC Make It. Other investors include Julius Baer CEO Stefan Bollinger and a former Goldman executive, and Lucy Demery, managing director of fintech investments at Barclays.
Ofori, who worked at Goldman for six years and handled more than £500m of client money, said she often worked with entrepreneurs and first-time founders who had built highly profitable businesses and sold them for huge sums. But despite breaking the educational barrier as a black woman in finance, she was not satisfied.
“I got to a point in my career where things were going really well,” Ofori said. “I got promoted to CEO and I started making a lot of money. I hit half a billion. That’s the threshold they say you have to aim for. I crossed that threshold.”
Ofori recalls sitting in a meeting with one of her bosses, contemplating what the next six to 10 years would look like for her. “I realized that everything was still the same… I was losing my purpose in life every day. It was almost monotonous,” she said.
“It didn’t take me six years to realize, actually, but I remember waking up one day and thinking, ‘I help incredibly wealthy men get 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. “I found that in general, women, for the most part, were not investing at anywhere near the same level as men.”
Even though Women live longer on average Compared to men, “we have less money that is not being used properly,” she said.
UK gender investment gap currently stands at £567 billion — up £54 billion from January 2023 to January 2024 — according to data from British financial research firm Boring Money, which surveyed more than 6,000 adults in the UK. The firm found that men had invested £1.01 trillion compared to £450 billion for women.
Additionally, the latest data from Prospect, a British union representing 157,000 professionals in industries such as technology, education, transport and legal, establish that the gender pension gap was 37.9% in 2021-2022 — more than double the gender pay gap, which was reported to be 14.9% in 2022.
The gender pension gap refers to the difference in retirement income or retirement assets between men and women.
Ofori said she was so shocked by the statistics she found that it led her to quit her high-paying executive role at Goldman in 2018 and embark on a mission to empower women financially.
‘Women tend to be more frugal’
Ofori said the women she spoke to tended to save more and mistakenly thought that putting money into an Individual Savings Account (ISA) in cash was a form of investment.
An ISA is a tax-free, high-interest personal savings account in the UK with an annual limit of £20,000.
“Saving and investing are not the same thing, and the two words are often used interchangeably. That bothers me, because they are not the same, and women tend to save and they save thinking they are investing,” Ofori said.
“With all the goodwill in the world, you might think you’ve been successful investing because you’ve put money into an ISA, but you’re not going to hit your target,” she added.
Research shows that women are more hesitant to invest. Nearly half of women globally feel that invest in stock market Investing in an individual stock or fund is too risky, according to a 2022 report by BNY Mellon Investment Management that surveyed 8,000 men and women across 16 countries. And only 28% of women feel confident investing their own money.
The way platforms deliver information and the way investing is structured is irrelevant to how women think about investing and building wealth.
Ayesha Ofori
Propelle Founder
According to Ofori, there are two main reasons why women are left out of the investment bubble: lack of time and confidence.
“The first thing is that a lot of women tell us they don’t know where to start. There’s too much information. It’s overwhelming and they don’t have time to sit there and learn,” she says. “So instead of making mistakes, they just do nothing.”
Before leaving Goldman, Ofori began hosting women’s events in London to share her story of building wealth for herself and her clients — and within months, 2,000 women had signed up.
“I realized I was right,” she said. “Just because women don’t invest doesn’t mean they don’t want to invest. They clearly do.”
Ofori noticed that her event attendees were uninterested in conventional investment platforms and didn’t know where to start.
“The way platforms deliver information and the way investing is structured is not relevant to how women think about investing and building wealth,” Ofori said.
That’s when she decided she wanted to build an FCA-regulated multi-asset investment platform for women. “I knew my purpose now was to help women build wealth,” Ofori says.
Investment platform designed for men
Women who talk to Ofori about their investing journeys often complain that conventional investing platforms are typically male-centric.
Factors that discourage women from investing include the language used, lack of transparency about different levels of investment risk, and funds that are not relevant to their personal goals.
“Most, if not all of those platforms are run by men and their teams are predominantly male, so when you think about product design teams, there’s something inherently in them that they build products for men… the data speaks for itself, if you look at the customers of these companies, they’re predominantly male,” Ofori said.
Propelle is designed for women at every step.
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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 measures a user’s personal risk tolerance. Propelle’s smart goal setting feature will allow users to invest in funds with different risk levels based on whether their goals are long-term or short-term.
Propelle also has investment options based on users’ personal values, from sustainability to Shariah-compliant funds. Eventually, Propelle plans to add alternative investments like fractional real estate, startup investing, and investing in wine and art.
“I didn’t want to build a platform where women just invested in things because they were available and didn’t work for them. We really worked to make sure that the platform was relevant to women based on whatever circumstances they were in,” Ofori said.
“Just because you may have less money, why should you be excluded from the asset classes that rich people have invested in for years and made a lot of money in? It’s obvious why the rich are getting richer.”
