A former Bank of America employee has developed an app tailored to women after recognizing gender disparities in investing regardless of education or financial literacy levels.

Feli Oikonomopoulou, founder and CEO of WealthMeUp, was a legal counsel and vice president at Bank of America in London for four years before moving to the U.S. to study at the Yale School of Management last year.

While working in the financial industry for more than eight years in the U.K., Luxembourg, France, Greece, Singapore and the U.S., Oikonomopoulou encountered gender inequality as an international issue when she noticed her female colleagues were less likely to invest than men. In diving into the issue, she said she realized financial services firms don’t do much to cater to women when they structure their products.

WealthMeUp, a free tool aimed at revolutionizing how women approach investing, is designed with a woman’s lifestyle and spending habits in mind, Oikonomopoulou told Banking Dive. The beta version of the app, launched Tuesday, is for everyone to use but is built specifically for women, she said.

“The company is about financial literacy and investing, and our vision is to revolutionize the way that women engage with their investments and simply turn purchases into investment opportunities,” she said.

Women drive 80% of consumer spending but have often been underrepresented in the investment space, she pointed out. A recent study from the World Economic Forum highlights that if women invested more, it could initiate an additional $3 trillion in global investment capital.

Oikonomopoulou, originally from Greece, said she left the country because of the financial crisis. Her experience in Greece made her realize that when an imbalance happens, those without knowledge of financial management are disproportionately affected.

WealthMeUp, developed while Oikonomopoulou was completing her MBA at Yale, has a core team of three members, including the founder as well as a team of advisers, interns and external contractors. The interns are mainly from the northern New York area, belonging to New York University, Cornell and Columbia University.

The app focuses on financial education for Gen Z and millennial women and has most users from these schools or the area. This has paved the way for Oikonomopoulou to discuss introducing the product to the schools.

Investing in literacy

The app aims to present users with steps to make it easier for them to gain knowledge and invest.

The first is the financial education tool — the one currently being launched — to clear up misconceptions around investing, Oikonomopoulou said. There are 140 short courses that take roughly five minutes to complete, covering seven financial topics designed to help women learn the basics of stocks, bonds, mutual funds and other investment options. After the user engages with a tool, she is rewarded with points, which can be redeemed through products or services offered at no cost through the app’s partnering firms.

“Therefore, you associate financial learning to begin with a positive habit and with something that rewards you with something that you need,” she said.

The next step: guide the user through investment options available on the platform with the help of financial coaches and financial advisers who work with the firm. That feature is currently in the pilot stage.

Oikonomopoulou also plans to implement a revenue-sharing model in which the firm partners with a bank or a credit card company that offers cash back on a user’s spending and redirects that to her investment account. 

“Turning your spending habits into investment opportunities in a very safe way, given the cashback that you receive on your spending, is essentially free money that you were not expecting to come,” she said.

While building the app, Oikonomopoulou sought feedback from men and women to assess their preferences regarding investing. While women expressed a preference for goal-oriented self-development, men preferred monetary value, which could be even less than $1, she noted.

Structure and rewards

Financial services apps like Acorns have a similar model of investing spare change, but WealthMeUp's mission is female-focused. The company partners with female-led companies for cash back rewards, using those rewards to invest rather than accumulate spare change, Oikonomopoulou said.

Oikonomopoulou views Ellevest, a robo-adviser investment platform and financial literacy program, as the biggest competitor in the female investor and female-focused financial services space, but she doesn't see it as a direct rival. She instead considers Ellevest a partner in working toward the shared vision of promoting female investing and putting more money into the hands of women.

WealthMeUp also works with the fitness franchise Orangetheory and financial coaching service FemFinancial. While explaining how the rewards system works, Oikonomopoulou said that when app users accumulate 3,000 points, they can redeem those for two one-hour sessions at Orangetheory and some merchandise.

Oikonomopoulou said she thinks the next phase of the fintech revolution is here, and women can play a fundamental role in it because this stage involves “financial products to be more personalized and more integrated into our very personal needs and habits.”