Ex-Goldman director quit to solve UK’s gender investment gap

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.

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.

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.