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…