We're excited to announce the second episode release of our new podcast, Beyond Two Percent!

Beyond Two Percent: Episode Two - Closing the investing gap

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Beyond Two Percent analyzes the critical questions, issues, and dynamics that affect people differently by gender - and the intersection of those dynamics with finance. This week's roundtable focuses on investing, and we're lucky to be joined by Katie Perry, General Manager at Public, and Margot de Broglie, Co-Founder of Your Juno

As always, our guests join our two fabulous hosts, Julie VerHage-Greenberg and Helen Femi Williams. We'll publish Beyond Two Percent monthly - if you'd be interested in joining an upcoming episode, let us know! Reach out to sponsor@thisweekinfintech.com.

SPEAKERS

• Margot de Broglie, Co-Founder of Your Juno
• Katie Perry, General Manager at Public
• Julie VerHage-Greenberg, Head of Content and Community at Orum
• Helen Femi Williams, Fintech Journalist

Helen 00:14

This is the Beyond Two Percent podcast and I'm your host Helen Femi Williams.

Julie 00:18

And I'm your second host, Julie VerHage-Greenberg, this podcast is brought to you by this week in FinTech, which is the front page of global FinTech news, fostering the largest FinTech community through newsletters, thought leadership and events, and

Helen 00:31

of course, podcasting. And you might have listened to our other podcast. Hey, Fin tech friends. Well, this podcast series is all about women exploring everything from investing to motherhood, to intersectionality, and so much more.

Julie 00:45

And we encourage you to give us feedback on the topics you think we should be discussing and asking and future panels.

Helen 00:51

I think Julie and I and the way that this week in FinTech team recognized that ensuring women are well represented in any industry is always going to be beneficial. Gender Diversity has shown to spot better problem-solving, superior performance, innovation, so much more I could go on.

Julie 01:06

You're right, Helen. And if we were specifically talking about FinTech, the industry could benefit for more women at any level because women in general, have not typically been in the spotlight as a target audience for financial products and services. They're an underserved customer segment with a massive unmet need.

Helen 01:24

And beyond that female founders and executives have personal experience understanding how to generate an ally new ideas and solutions in this field.

Julie 01:32

And that's why this podcast is called Beyond 2%.

Helen 01:35

There is a world of tech-driven financial products and services that is yet to be discovered because of the lack of women leaders in this space

Julie 01:42

and through group discussions with leaders in these spaces. This is what we want to explore

Helen 01:47

this week. It's all about investing.

Julie 01:53

And thank you to our sponsors in New York City FinTech women, FinTech women's mission is to connect, promote, and empower women to advance their careers. They need help from everyone if we're going to make a real change, encouraging male allies to become members and come to our events. Membership is free. And you can sign up at NYC FinTech women.com and follow them on LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram. Laura speaker men are recognized by Crain's New York and 2021 as a notable woman on Wall Street is a co founder and chief revenue officer at alloy. Prior to alloy Laura led business development and partnerships at an ACH payments startup and was on the research and investment team at imprint Capital Advisors, which was acquired by Goldman Sachs. Laura is a proud Barnard College alumna and lives in Berkeley, California.

Julie 02:22

Katy Perry is a general manager@publix.com an investing platform that helps people be better investors. As Publix dot coms general manager of investor relation innovation, Katie oversees b2b partnerships and editorial providing new pathways for asset providers to ensure that investor information reaches retail shareholders. Katie is a frequent thought leader and mentor on the topics of retail investing trends, financial equity, and marketing. She has spoken at events with NASDAQ ladies get paid General Assembly and Adweek and was selected to the World Economic Forum Working Committee on the Future of capital markets. She has provided mentorship to emerging talent via organizations.

Helen 03:08

Margot is the co-founder of Your Juno, a financial education app for young women and nonbinary people. Dubbed the Duolingo of money. Users can learn about any financial topic via its app, including negotiating a pay rise, buying a property, and becoming an investor started one year ago by Margot and her sister Alexia, your junior has raised a total of $2.5 million and reached over 25,000 users with a mission to close the gender wealth gap. I hope you enjoyed this episode.

Helen 03:49
Thank you so much for coming on our podcast. I'm Helen, and that's the lovely Julie over there.

And we should address the elephant in the room.

When I first read that, I was interviewing Katy Perry was like, wow, I didn't know she did so much in the investment space.

Katie

I was on an email the other day with an Alex Rodriguez, and we laughed. So lots of celebs and fintech, believe it or not multi high finance. Yeah, I mean, we've all got a pivot, you know, if the music's not working out, got to change careers.

Helen 04:21

But yeah, I think, a really good place to start, like, obviously, we're focused kind of on gender and the gap between men and women. And I think that's something that you both are quite knowledgeable about. So I guess, on a very basic level, like why is this important? So is there a gender gap when it comes to like investing between men and women? And why is this something that, you know, we should be focusing on?

Margot 05:00

I'm happy to start. There's definitely a gender investment gap all around the world. We're seeing it in almost every country in the world, and why does it matter? Well, everyone speaks about the gender pay gap, which is obviously a big problem that we should be addressing. But if we don't look at the gender wealth gaps holistically, then we're not actually looking at the full picture. Because yes, women tend to earn less than men. But then what they do with that money is also very different. And if you're not investing your money, if you're not making that money work for you, then you're missing out on huge potential returns that really compound over a lifetime. So actually, we're looking at wealth here, more specifically, and especially for women, wealth is so important wealth is the ability to leave a situation that doesn't support you. Well, we often call it the eff off find. So it's the ability to say no to things that you know that doesn't work for you, be in a toxic relationship, or a toxic workplace, invest in your business, or just take steps towards having more options. And I think that's why it's so important to speak about the gender investment gap because it really has such a big difference in women's lives worldwide. I totally agree with that. And I wanted Margo to go first because she's building an entire business from expertise here. And this is only part of what I do. So yeah, I think, you know, there's a couple of facets of why people aren't investing, why there's a gap. And obviously, it's not just gender, it's race, and socioeconomic class. And there's, there's like structure, there are real structural and systemic things that are causing this. And those pieces, those are huge problems that involve so many pieces across our day-to-day lives. In addition to that, there is this gap of just access to information and knowledge and overall accessibility of these concepts. I remember growing up and like seeing all the ads for financial platforms like the people in the ads always look the same. And I think if you're not, you know that you look at those, you don't see yourself over time, you just don't feel included. And so one of the reasons kind of public was started was to change that culture around these topics and investing and make them more inclusive, because they are for everybody. And that kind of gap in access to knowledge. Or even just confidence and feel like you can see yourself as an investor, that's like a real blocker for people. So that's the specific thing we're trying to address, acknowledging that there are many other reasons why this is something that needs to be fixed at multiple levels. One interesting thing, just on the confidence front, is I think sometimes, you know, there's a lot of studies, women have more humility, when it comes to their skills and aptitude, oftentimes too much humility, I would say. But on the other hand, there's a lot of times where that humility is, is a benefit, but in the concept text of investing, it can hold you back, if you're, if you're looking at something and thinking, Well, I'm not an expert, so I'm not even going to start that can hold you back in the same way that, you know, there's data that shows women won't even apply for a job unless they feel like they can do every single bullet point. Whereas a man in that situation or, you know, see himself doing 40% of those and throwing his hat in the ring. So I think that's also a little bit of a part of it. So it is about making, making people see themselves as able to do this and giving them access to that information to better themselves as investors.

Julie 08:14

One thing I want to bring up here, too, is just both the points that you guys make really stem back to female-identifying members of our community, like a very early age, this isn't something that like starts when you're 18 or 21, or whatever. Like, this is something that's bred into you when you're like five years old. Right? So I guess, Margot, going back to you, how do you guys think about ways to start instilling this in people and women from a much earlier age, so then it feels like for maybe millennials and Gen Z, it's going to be a little bit harder to do. But if we start thinking about earlier, maybe we can close this gap versus where we stand today completely. I think something we're very interested in is the narrative more holistically around women and money. And most of us grew up watching sex and sex in the city. And what we saw in there was women as excessive spenders who had no control over their budget, we were just spending on shoes. And we really build sudden conditioning around money based on stereotypes. There's a really interesting study by Starling bank called make my money equal, which looks at the language that is used to speak about money in the media, specifically in articles targeted at men versus women. And what that study found was that 93% of finance articles targeted at women focus on clever ways to spend less money, so be your coupons or tips and tricks to rein in your budget this month, whereas 75% Of Finance articles focus on men's focus on growing their wealth. It's this idea of abundance. It's this idea of you have the opportunity to bring more money

Margot 10:00

And you can invest, you can ask for that raise. It's this idea that there's no scarcity of money. And I think that really plays into our financial confidence, like Katie was mentioning, because if we haven't been spoken to in this way where we feel like we're good with money, then that impacts how we think about the stock market, how we think about all these different aspects of the financial world that we simply don't see ourselves reflected in. And in terms of changing that, I think it really starts with how we're taught about money. You're absolutely right in saying that most of our money beliefs are shaped from a very young age. So we look at our mothers and will look at our grandmothers. And that's often the role model that we have when thinking about money. So we think the media has a huge role to play. We're also advocating that financial education should be mandatory in schools at every level, starting with budgeting, it shouldn't be something that you discover once you're 18. And it's almost too late.

But yeah, the earlier you start, the better definitely, and it should be made part of the curriculum.

Julie 11:01

Katie, what are your thoughts on I know Public? Obviously, people are not allowed to invest in stocks until x age which is much farther along than when they're five years old. But I think from a stock trading perspective, for instance, my husband is talking to his dad about stocks, and like trade and everything, like all the time when I call my mom, that's not what I talked to her about, I asked her about like, I don't know, shoes, or like I'm pregnant. So I'll ask her about different like Baby things like, Do I have enough things on my registry? The last thing on my mind is asking my mom or dad for stock trading advice. Right? So how do we think about making sure that women can feel comfortable investing? And, you know, have more of those conversations?

Katie 11:46

I think one aspect is, well, it's been interesting. I've been at Public for three years. And, like, before I started Public, none of my friends at all were talking about this, really, maybe a few. And now it's like, this is like a commonplace conversation. But what's sometimes different in my experience is, you know, a male friend might send a screenshot of some company, I don't know, maybe a small cap, and he's like, Oh, I'm gonna, you know, YOLO, this, like a screenshot? I have a group thread with two women who are in the industry. And we're talking about, like, the business. And I think when women realize that, it's not just depending on the type of investor you are, there's obviously people who do the short term, and they're more technical or the long term. But if you're interested in just businesses, you can start as like yourself as a consumer, one company I had no idea was public until I started working at Publix.com was crocs. I mean, it's fascinating if you're following their collaborations with celebrities, and maybe that's a hook, and you're like, that's interesting, do people really buy a lot of crocs. You're looking at their growth, then you're looking at, you know, their fundamentals. And so the tenor of the conversations I tend to have with my women friends are like, we're into businesses, and we're curious about them. And it's fun to dig in and discover and get that information. And it doesn't have to be the stereotypical two monitors, Ken or Red Bull. And I think that it's that image that you see that's always there when there are other types of investing. And if you think about it more broadly and more inclusively, it's actually more appealing to way more people than you would think. So sometimes, it's just a mindset thing of, of kind of aligning kind of, you're interested in investing with things you care about, things you're curious about, and kind of stepping back from some of the stereotypes again, depending on what your approach is,

Helen 13:37

I think, Katie, I agree with you. But also, I think there's a piece there around like, it's just kind of intimidating. And I think as well, like, it's really interesting what you're saying about your friends. So, for instance, I was with my uni friends yesterday, and we were talking about investing, but it was just very random, actually, it wasn't like, it's not really the type of thing that we sit down and talk about, but equally, it's equally there's this, like, kind of, I don't know what you want to call it, this element where it's like if you know, you know, and if you don't, you don't. And I think there are two pieces there, it can't I do think there's a gender element to it, where I do you think investing and just even this whole topic has a very, like mansplaining sort of vibe to it, just kind of covering it. But equally, I don't think it's out of like all my friends, for instance, yesterday, I don't think even they talk to their parents about investing or stocks or anything like that, because their parents didn't do it. So I think there is a piece there around like, you know, family, and if your family would be doing it, then you will know what to do. And it's not necessarily a thing you need to learn because it was something that people were already talking about in your household. But then I also think if you don't know and you want to learn, it feels like a closed-off industry.

Margot 15:12

I think there was a huge pain point. And I think the industry up until now has been actually doing a really bad job at educating consumers about the different products that are out there. Because I think one of the big issues is that if you google how to invest in the stock market, you'll find pages or pages of stuff. Still, financial providers are always writing blogs for SEO purposes, but they're ultimately trying to sell you their specific product. And so you as a consumer, you I think, especially as women, we're much more aware of this type of stuff. And we're much more, Yeah, much more scared about taking in information when we know that the person has the interest of selling us that product.

And there isn't this possibility of engaging with this topic. And in a fun way, in the same way, that you'd learn about meditating on headspace. And you'd have these, like, 10-minute videos every day. And it's, it's made to, you know, to feel tangible and understandable. And so, hopefully, I think we're now seeing a real desire to lift that money taboo within the younger generation. A recent stat found that more than 65% of Gen Z turned to tik tok for financial information. So there's really this appetite for, speaking about this and engaging with this topic. Now, obviously, tik tok, I don't know if it's the most trusted source of financial education because there are many pump-and-dump kinds of cryptocurrencies, etc. But at least there's this real yearning to feel like they're part of the conversation. And so that's something that we're trying to crack in June. And we often say we're building the Duolingo of money. So seeing how we can take these topics and make them accessible to as many people who might not have had that education from their parents.

Julie 17:12

And I mean, there are stats showing that we've also had progress in this area, right? Like I'm, I'm looking at one from Fidelity right now. We're 67%. So roughly two-thirds of women are now investing outside of just their retirement account, compared to 44%. In 2018, which, you know, I don't know if we can attribute it to one certain thing, I definitely think the pandemic played a big role in that I think apps like public, making it so much easier to invest is something that played a big role in that. And I've also heard from women, like, being able to use something like an app is so much less intimidating than having to go talk to a broker or someone who's going to be like, What, you're just some girl like, I don't, you're not going to trade that much money like you don't know what you're doing. I don't want to talk to you, etc. So I think, you know, there's a number of factors there. But the point is, like, it's not all doom and gloom, I think there is progress being made. Thanks to your Juno, Public and others out there. I just think like, obviously, we're all here, because there, there's so much more that we can do to

Katie 18:13

right. Yeah, I just want to piggyback one thing Margot said because I think it was important in that the context and just explanations is, is kind of what we see people want because women are rightfully skeptical of, you know, the SEO driven Article Five Reasons Why XYZ stock is a buy right now, like, obviously, you know, in those articles to just scare me, because it's like, you don't know the person's financial situation, and you don't know their risk appetite. Like how do you have one article? Clearly, there are goals. But I don't know if it's so much that people want to know exactly what to do, but they just want the concepts broken down. And when you get past all the jargon, and like the insider speak, the concepts are fully graspable for people, they get them. And so sometimes, it's just the breaking things down. And that's what my team does at Public is just trying to break down these things as they happen. So we do like live audio shows, we have different content in the app. And it's never like, hey, go do this. But for example, two weeks ago, when Bed Bath and Beyond was, like, ripping in terms of interest, we had a lot of content, whether it was an audio show or an article of like, what's going on with this stock. Here's what's happening. You know, it's obviously getting beamed. But let's go back to their last quarterly earnings report. This is what they reported this is their actual financials, do with that what you will. And once you break that down, then people feel empowered to make their own decisions. And that's kind of the difference between like, Julie, your example of going to a broker? Are you really learning in that instance, you're kind of just trusting the other person, which that works for a lot of people, but you're not actively understanding for yourself.

So bridging that gap, I think, is really important. And I think people find that when they have that context, whether If the Fed news or inflation numbers or something about stock over time, that's what's giving them more confidence, they feel like this stuff isn't out of reach. And then that also hooks them in more to be more of a student of the space and get better over time. And I think that's kind of what it's about.

Julie 20:18

I think there's something really important in certain what you've shared with Katie, which is about also breaking down the view of investing as this kind of Wolf of Wall Street thing where you have three computers, two spreadsheets. You need to go through financial statements for two hours before making a decision, but actually realising that, for most people investing in ETFs, or in passive index funds, is often the better approach. And we don't need to spend hours understanding the ins and outs of every company that's part of that ETF, but just getting started and letting time do its magic is so important. And I think so far, the financial industry has done also a pretty poor job at showing that there are so many different levels to investing, there's, yes, there's a trading of individual stocks. But if that's not for you, you can literally spend two minutes a month managing your investments, and you're still going to be in the market and benefiting from whatever the market is doing.

Helen 21:18

I think you both make a really good point. And just back to that kind of like learning element. And actually, I think Julie's steps, step. She kind of talked about this as well. I think the NOC having a broker and actually being able to sit home and like educate yourself and kind of take it upon yourself does actually allow more people to get involved. And I think FinTech has basically like allowed people to do that. Because you can sit at home, you can take your time, get something wrong, and someone's not judging you. And so it's created this whole lane of people, or a whole group of people, including myself, where if you are going to invest, you don't necessarily, you don't necessarily need the kind of I to guess you can say that public judgment of what you're doing. Because you might not necessarily know what you're doing. So you just kind of want to be able to kind of take your time and get things wrong, get things right. But to that then if I was, if I'm, you know, a graduate, maybe it's the first time I've kind of got a bit of money, I've got a bit of savings. Maybe I got my bonus. And I'm starting to think, what can I you know, I'm on my first steps to investing. Katie, what would be the first step for someone who's a woman who's just thinking like, I'm young, I don't know what to do. I've got this pot of money. Like where would What should I do with it? What would be the first step?

Katie 22:39

One thing, the interesting thing we see with beginners a lot in our, our platform, as beginners novices, and also people are really like hardcore, sophisticated, but the beginners always kind of jumped to, okay, I'm here. I know, I need to invest, what do I buy? And I'm not a financial advisor. But what I've heard the dozens, and if not more, experts say is there are steps that happened before that. So you know, auditing your financial situation, understanding how you feel about risk, and then knowing your goals. I think sometimes we forget about the goals piece of investing, and we don't like okay, the goal is to make money. Okay, when for what is it five years isn't retirement, there are different strategies based on different goals. So to jump in, without thinking about what you're trying to do, you know, you need those steps first. And then I think it's a matter of I mean, one, one interesting thing about fractional shares, which is the ability to buy, you know, any piece of stock with any amount of money. You own a fraction of a share, I think something that's not talked about is the fact that that also gives you more time to learn with less skin in the game. So we've seen you know, college kids be on our app, and they'll put 20 bucks in, and they can spread that across 1015 things and have that experience of investing but learn along the way. And I think there are learnings that happen, we're seeing a big kind of reckoning in the market, the last few months of all this volatility. And a lot of people myself included, I likened to myself to a genius, and 2021 when really the entire market was just going up. And we actually just finished a study to see like, what are people thinking now who came in when things were kind of on the up and they're hitting their first down cycle, which is a natural part of the market. And what was really interesting is that it was promoting positive behaviours. So people were more interested in diversifying, they were more likely to say they're more focused on looking at fundamental metrics before making a decision. So if you're new have the ability to start small and realise you don't need to kind of throw everything into you know, an app and start get started. You can kind of with the fractional investing, you can start smaller and get that experience which gives you returns over time. In terms of knowledge, so that would be that would be my long winded answer to that one. As a non investment advisor.

Margot 25:07

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I think what we've seen with our audience, we run these 21 days to first investment challenge. So everyday people get a lesson and an action point that they need to do. And what we've seen often is the biggest barrier is making that first investment. So signing up, opening that investment account, and putting the first amount of money in the market. And I couldn't agree more with Katie, I think the most important part is put $10 into the market and then see what happens. Because you're going to overcome that. There's a real identity shift that happens where you go from, I'm bad with money to I'm an investor, no matter what the amount is, it can be an insignificant amount for you. And then once you are in the market, your your your emotions are feel very different. Suddenly, you open the app, and it's like, it's gone down. I've lost 12 P, I wonder why that is, oh, look at this one, I've made 25 P, I wonder what happened. So it doesn't actually matter how much money is in it. But it starts a booking your curiosity and your sense that actually this is fully within your reach. And it's really something that you can understand. And then I think for us, the three checklists that we give people before starting to invest is to get out of high interest, save up for an emergency fund, and take advantage of your employer's pension that matches and max out. So once you have those three things set up, start thinking about your goals and what you will do with that money. But definitely don't start investing before you've done those three things

Julie 26:34
that kind of leads me into one of my other questions, too, is like, what's the biggest mistakeyou see people make when thinking and starting about investing? Margot, you can just continue?

Margot 26:44

I think the biggest one at the moment is I heard from a friend that this specific stock is going to go through the roof or this specific crypto will go and explode. Trusting unreliable sources puts a lot of their savings and money into it. And then realizing one, they're not diversified at all. They haven't thought about their goals or how they will sell it out. And obviously, those kinds of rumors are often very wrong, and people end up losing a lot of money and getting burned. So yeah, that's definitely a huge mistake we're seeing just

Helen 27:17

Where are the places you should be getting this kind of advice from? Or where should you be looking?

Margot 27:34

Yeah, for sure. I mean, Your Juno is one place to start. But what we often tell people who start looking, you know, beginner level one is diversified funds, so not yet looking at picking individual stocks. But seeing how with a fund, you can have a basket of all sorts of stocks. And some of these have been performing historically very well, on average, like the s&p 500. This isn't financial advice to buy the s&p 500. But you can see that historically, it's grown at an average of about 10%. And that's basically in one transaction invested in the 500 largest companies traded on the US stock exchange. So if the US economy grows, you're basically automatically benefiting from that quote. So often, we say, you know, funds are a great place to start, there tend to be quite low fees. One of the famous strategies is the three-fund portfolio strategy, where you invest in three different funds and basically cover all your bases. And so people can look into that it's quite a famous strategy by passive investors.

Julie 28:40
Katie, what mistakes do you guys in Public?

Katie 28:43

I would come at it from a general sense. So I've always been just interested in the media. And I think media literacy right now is just an issue that I don't think gets enough attention. And when we do talk about it, it's usually about, at least in this country, political discourse, understanding what accurate sources look like bias. But when you think about financial media, I mean, that's your money. So I really think one thing is not understanding the nature of certain sources. Is it someone on Twitter with an NF T avatar trying to get you in on that NF T? They probably have a reason to do that. Not all the time? Is it an article that is clearly optimized for SEO? And so we've provided resources to our members in the app of not just these concepts around investing, but understanding how financial news media works, what direct sources look like, what's SEC filings, what are the regulations around those, you know, but also on the same but on the same hand, you know, if you're listening to the earnings call, that's obviously the company trying to send a message. So understanding how information flows in this space is really, really important. If you're going to be an investor that's kind of plugged in and wanting to empower yourself with information. And that's across. That's not just women, obviously, it's across everything. So that's one thing I would just add with the, with all this going mainstream, it's amazing. But I think there's more and more of a responsibility, frankly, on people like us at Publix and other platforms and other people to make sure that as things become easier for people to do, you're having that context, they're in the environment, to provide a little not friction. Still, a little more context and not just, you know, one button that's going to something, let people know the why behind what's going on, or the details of that, so that they can make the best decisions for themselves. And that'll be different for everyone

Julie 30:57

Looking at both the Public app and the Your Juno app, the things that I love is that you're so keyed in on various ways that people can learn, if they want to look at a clip of something, they can look at it that way, if they want to read something, they can look at it that way. If they want to engage with other members, they can do stuff that way. And so I think, you know, something that we've touched on a little bit, but maybe not enough, it's just like that optionality of like how you want to digest information, because everybody's different learners, right? Some people are visual, some people are audio, whatever it might be, I think is super important as well. And you know, that's also something that I think we need to keep improving on, especially not just for us at this age in our 20s, 30s 40s, whatever. But I think for the younger generation as well,

Margot 31:42

I mean, what we're seeing at the moment is that financial education has been completely left out of the conversation for so long, like, Tech has been working tirelessly, tirelessly at helping us learn how to code, learn new languages, and all these different ways. But yet, when it comes to like, the most important language of all the language of money, it affects all of us. There are no resources and education out there. And I think there's a lot to be done to make this financial education more accessible. And I'm really looking forward to the time when there'll be, you know, many more resources, like the language, you can, you know, have a private tutor, you can do all these different things to learn a language. And hopefully, we'll see the same with, with money very soon. But you know, financial advisors benefit a lot from us having no idea what we're doing because you go, you pay a large amount of money for them to manage your portfolio and do things that are actually really, really easy to do. But we're just having a huge information asymmetry. And so they benefit from us not knowing what we're doing and being able to charge really high fees for managing our portfolios. So, yeah, there's a lot. There's a lot that needs to happen there.

Katie 32:52

Yeah, I agree. And in addition, if you just think about all the bureaucracy and hurdles it would it takes to change curriculums in the US at least. I mean, I'm old, but not that old. I had to take a home economics class and learn how to like bake. That's crazy. I mean, baking, if you love it, that's great. I also learned how to operate a jigsaw and like, almost took a finger off. It's like, we can't even agree in this country about what books are okay. And like, it just seems insane. But the change is so slow. And it's such an obvious thing that, yeah, I could say microeconomics or whatever version of it should not be an elective that 25% of people take. But the the effort that goes into changing that system, and the alignment and like a polarised sort of environment is really hard. But I totally agree with Marcos original point that we need it because it is it isn't fair that like I think about all the time, my dad's very savvy with investing was 18, he opened a Vanguard account for me, and I started early. And I learned it early. And there was someone who I respected and trusted in my life telling me, you can do this. And that's just so that not everyone has that. And very few people do. And it's not fair that just because you, you know, didn't look into a moment like that, that now you're going to be behind forever. And now you know, you're going to you're going to just think that you can't do it. And that's not someone's choice that they're in that situation. So it has to be baked in in more places where more people can access it. And that's the only way we'll solve the bigger problems that no one app or platform could fix.

Helen 34:32

I mean, there has to be this level of like, learning not just from school, not just from your friends, not just from your family. It has to be like a whole cultural shift that I guess we're kind of getting on our way there but we're not. But I think there is a sense where women are talking about investing way more than ever before. I haven't I don't really have the stats on it, but it just feels iike a conversation that happens around the dinner table.

Margot 35:10

For sure. I think I think we're definitely seeing I mean, what I was saying about tick tock just like Gen Z, turning to tik tok to speak about money. I think what we're seeing is like a smoked, slow dismantling of taboos. If you think about still 10 years ago, mental health was such a big taboo therapy, no one was speaking about it, and then slowly became into the mainstream, and everyone was like, well, we need to speak about this mental health is important. And then we saw the same with like period care and sexual pleasure. And I think money is like the last piece that is still standing that is still a big taboo, where you ask someone how much do you and they completely freeze. But it's definitely changing. And especially, I think, women and minorities realising the taboo, were the ones losing out from the taboo, we don't know how much our coworkers are earning. And if we're being underpaid, we don't know what people do with their money. And so I think there's a really big wake up call where it's like, we're done having this as a taboo, let's speak about it in the open and actually drive change.

Katie 36:10

I agree with that. And I think it's, it's, it definitely feels like it's getting better. But it's interesting to how perception isn't always necessarily reality. So like in the survey we just ran, we asked people if they're interested in exploring or investing in certain asset types, looking ahead, and we asked about a bunch of things, but that included like NFT's digital assets and alternative investing, whether that's fine wine are things that like usual, if you kind of follow these conversations, very male-dominated, and the women respondents and the men respondents, both responded at the same levels of interests. So just because the loudest or dominant voices are all one thing does not mean it's for that group. And I think you kind of see that a little in crypto where, and it's just interesting, a little long tail of that is a little lagging. But that shocked me, because when I opened my Twitter, if someone's writing about an NF T, I could pretty much guess, you know, what their deal is going to be. But I thought that was encouraging, despite that, and just not looking out to who's talking and thinking that that's the that's who that is for? Because that's really not the case.

Julie 37:27

No, I think that this, this is such a good point to kind of wrap everything up on to because I think like, the issues here are just so wide-ranging, like from starting at an early age to making women of our age feel more comfortable to talking about it more as friends to the media and how they portray investing. I think, you know, it all comes together to show that this is this is not just one thing that's causing this problem. There's so many things and factors involved in it.

Helen 37:55

What would be your sort of long-term vision and dream? Like, if you could wave your magic wand? Katie?

Katie 38:16

Wow, big question. Um, I think it would be continuing to find innovative ways to get people information that helps them empower themselves. The goal is to move them up and along, and so evolve with our customers as they become savvy or what's the new thing that we can give them to keep them progressing? And yeah, in general, the obvious point is like dissolving some of these sorts of barriers or stereotypes around these spaces so that more people feel like they can participate. And we can have more wealth equality across different groups of people.

Julie 39:11

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And I think to your point of FinTech, I think something we haven't spoken about much in this podcast episode is also just how male-dominated the FinTech industry is. And so something that I would love to see is just more female-founded companies. Because if there are more women at the top of the company, you're building products for yourself because that's the experience that you have. And so, yeah, my wish is really that there's more diversity within the FinTech companies themselves so that it can trickle down into the products and the offerings that we're giving out into the world

Julie 39:44

as someone that works for a female-founded company, I fully support that idea and think there should be many more female-founded companies. Well, I do think it's getting better, but there's just better and like, where we need to be is there's a big gap still, so definitely Something that we can work on.

Helen 40:02

Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Katie and Margo, for joining us today. It has been great to just kind of talk about all these things. And I think it's gonna be really useful for people to kind of just know where to start because it can be very confusing and intimidating. I can definitely attest to that myself like I felt that way. So I think it was really nice to be able to just kind of break that down. And yeah, have this conversation. So thank you so much for coming on.

Katie 40:27

Thank you. So fun.

40:29

Thank you so much for making it happen. Such an important topic. Beyond

Julie 40:35

2% Thanks so much for tuning in this month, you guys. In our next episode, we will dive into the life of female venture capitalists. It's a traditionally male-dominated industry, but we've started to see a number of women rise in the ranks. And not only does that open up the door for more women to thrive in this career path, but it has an impact on funding for female-founded startups as well. As seen in our title, beyond 2%. data shows that only about 2% of funding goes to female-founded companies. People like our two guests, Gillian Williams of Cowboy ventures and Ana Cristina Gadala-Maria QED, are working to change that. I can't wait to dive into this topic in a few short weeks. But until then, thank you so much for listening, and I will see you next time.