Mical Jeanlys-White’s grandmother was the family’s financial planner. She didn’t have any formal planning education, but she knew enough to understand the importance of saving. The matriarch taught her Haitian-American granddaughter to live below her means and would often tell her adages like, spend money as slowly as you make it.
Sage counsel, but, according to Jeanlys-White, that wasn’t nearly enough of the financial information her grandmother deserved to know, particularly when it came to wealth-building.
That’s exactly what drove Jeanlys-White to pursue a career in finance helping people navigate retirement planning and other forms of investing. After working in financial services for more than 20 years and holding positions at American Express, Nestle Accenture, and JPMorgan Chase, she took what she learned and launched her own company that’d poised to disrupt the cycle of financial inequity for all: WealthMore. And it was mostly inspired by her personal experiences.
“I was a managing director at JPMorgan,” Jeanlys-White tells Forbes. “I led a $22 billion credit card business, had always been in the consumer credit space, but was realizing that, ‘hey, we’ve made so much progress in getting people to understand their credit scores, understand how to manage that, so that they get good sort of when they’re in the need for a lending product, they can sort of have their best foot forward.’ But I felt like we were overly focused there and not focused on this whole other space of investing, doing it early, sticking with it, having access to great advice so that you can navigate things like, ‘hey, do you have a Roth? Are you using an HSA? How are you doing the college planning?’ And I just felt like no one was talking to folks unless they were already wealthy. And that sort of drove the whole interest and focus around wealth and making access to great advice just more accessible to folks who are not walking in the door with half a million dollars.”
Her company is a new premium wealth advisor-led, tech-enabled investing and planning service and community without the barriers to entry, according to her. She, along with her small team of advising experts aim to narrow the wealth gap by making investing and building generational wealth easier to reach.
Although it’s a valiant effort, it’s not entirely unoriginal. But Jeanlys-White explains that the true differentiator between WealthMore and other financial planning democratization apps lie with one factor: humanized tech.
“We’ve really made a difference using technology and I like to think of the work we’re doing as tech for social good,” Jeanlys-White tells Forbes. “Not only are we hyper-focused on delivering advice, but we figured out a way to do it at scale using technology. We also have sort of redesigned how you think about building a financial plan using our interactive financial planning tool in our mobile app.”
She also explains that WealthMore has included an AI-powered scoring platform that enables users to see how they’re doing in different dimensions so they “know where to take action versus taking a passive approach to wealth-building.” This, coupled with the real-time support of dedicated certified financial planners truly set users up for success.
Jacob Stewart, a financial planner that joined the WealthMore team ahead of its official August 2023 launch says the company has humanized investing.
“Having grown up in kind of a working class family with parents that didn’t invest and lived paycheck to paycheck, I knew I wanted something different for others,” Stewart tells Forbes. “WealthMore sees the person first, not their money.”
The app comes at a time when economic demographics are rapidly changing. For example, a McKinsey report shows that by 2030, American women will control much of the $30 trillion in financial assets that Baby Boomers will possess. Jeanlys-White says she wants position Black women and others of color at the forefront of that shift.
“My main focus here is about access and representation,” Jeanlys tells Forbes. “If you’re Black, Latino, first generation women, something like this just hasn’t been something that’s been, one, readily available, and two, a conversation that we’ve even tried to have with communities around this,” she explains referring to investment planning. “Our communities get inundated with ways to spend. We don’t get inundated with ways to build wealth. So, just having the conversation, being sort the destination for it, and having our planners represent the communities we serve, it creates an avenue for people to feel like, ‘hey, I can be part of this. And when they’re speaking about wealth, they’re speaking to me too.’
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