Data from the British financial research company Boring Money notes that Britain’s gender investment gap stands at £567 billion ($723 billion) — an increase of £54 billion ($69 billion) between January 2023 and January 2024. Men have £1.01 trillion ($1.2 trillion) invested compared with £450 billion ($574 billion) for women, according to the data.
Also, data from Prospect, one of Britain’s largest unions, found that the gender pensions gap stood at 37.9% between 2021 and 2022. These figures stunned Ayesha Ofori, who quit her well-paid executive role at Goldman in 2018 to start a female-focused financial investment platform, Propelle.
Prior to leaving Goldman, she handled over $600 million in client money during her six years there. She worked generally with entrepreneurs and first-time founders who established successful businesses and sold them for a lot of money.
Despite her personal success, she wasn’t satisfied with the progress Black women were making. She realized that the investment world usually benefited wealthy men.
“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.”
“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 noted.
“I found that across the board, women, overwhelmingly, were not investing anywhere near the levels men were,” she further added.
These factors inspired Ofori to start one of the UK’s first investment platforms for women.
The 40-year-old’s platform offers various investment options like funds from Vanguard, Blackrock, and HSBC. Since its launch in September this year, it 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.
Other investors include Stefan Bollinger, Julius Baer CEO and former Goldman executive, and Lucy Demery, managing director of fintech investments at Barclays, CNBC Make It noted.
Ofori said that investment platforms are typically designed for men, making her own platform a trailblazer. According to her, multiple factors are excluding women from the investment environment, including 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 the majority men,” Ofori said.
Built on these pillars — community, education, and investment — Propelle supports women with tools like goal setting, financial planning, and risk assessment to make it easier for them to invest and to do so with confidence.
