Sallie Krawcheck has made a career of shaking up Wall Street, working at Sanford C. Bernstein (where Fortune called her the "Last Honest Anyalyst"), CitiGroup, and Merrill Lynch. In 2013, after she was forced from her position at Merrill Lynch, she acquired 85 Broads, a networking platform for professional women, and relaunched it as Ellevate. And this morning, Krawcheck announced that she's received $10 million in funding for a new digital investment platform, Ellevest, that's aimed specifically at women.
Krawcheck has certainly identified a hole in the market. According to a 2015 survey from Fidelity, while 92% of women want to learn more about investing, 33% don't even know their retirement account balance.
“It’s time to turn our attention to another gender gap: The investing gap," Krawcheck said in a statement. "It’s time to give women an investing experience built specifically for them. Ellevest will be unlike anything else out there and will empower women to take financial control of their lives.”
Financial planning can be an overwhelming topic for everyone and there's certainly a need for better resources for women (that's one of our goals here at Refinery29). There are still few details on what we can expect from the Ellevest, but we know what we want: smart information that's easily digestible and catered toward our specific needs. The website, which now only provides a place to share your email address, looks sleek and sophisticated. It would be nice if the slogan (which also appears on the brand's Twitter bio) didn't have a Valley Girl twang. ("We're redefining invest for women, and you're so invited.")
Even so, we'll give Ellevest the benefit of the doubt and eagerly await its launch. Krawcheck has a solid reputation as a disrupter in the male-dominate world of finance and it will be interesting to see how she'll use those skills to help other women thrive.
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