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Ellevest's Investing Platform Knows How to Speak to Women Founded by Sallie Krawcheck, a Wall Street vet, the platform understands women's way of investing their money is different than how men do it.

By Amy Wilkinson

This story appears in the June 2017 issue of Entrepreneur. Subscribe »

Brian Stauffer

Who runs the investing world? Not women. A staggering number of financial advisers -- 86 percent, in fact -- are male, most of them older than 50. "If we set out to build a business perfectly targeted toward men, we would build the investment industry as it exists today," says Sallie Krawcheck, a Wall Street vet and founder and CEO of Ellevest, a female-focused digital investment platform.

Related: How to Start Saving Money Today

To target women, Ellevest operates rather differently. It uses simple information about a woman's life, career and assets to produce a custom investment plan, and addresses the unique concerns facing women. On a practical level, women live longer, so their nest egg -- which is already smaller thanks to the wage gap -- has to stretch further. Traditional models target a return of 75 to 80 percent of one's pre-retirement earnings, but Ellevest aims for 90. "Better to
have a badass retirement -- or if she lives even longer than expected, a cushion," Krawcheck says.