“Obviously, investments and investing are gender agnostic,” Smith says. “Women regularly complain about the lack of clarity and the use of too much jargon in financial information and advice. We have to provide advice that meets women where they are and talks to them and specifically to their needs.”
Together, Steinberg and Smith have established Worth Financial Management to provide advice through the new platform, and have raised over $2 million in venture capital for WorthFM’s development and launch.
Steinberg is editor of Daily Worth, an online financial magazine for women with over 1.2 million subscribers.
The inspiration for WorthFM came from discussions with Daily Worth subscribers over the past seven years, Steinberg says.
“Being a media company, I could see firsthand where some of the disconnects were between women and their financial service providers,” Steinberg says. “I spent a few years talking to some senior folks at the traditional brokerages, but nobody was making the changes to their overall packages that I thought would resonate with women. Given the size of the opportunity, there was no way for me to fulfill DailyWorth’s mission to provide women with the best personal financial information without launching a robo-advisor.”
Daily Worth readers are young, averaging 38 years old, and middle earners, averaging around $78,000 in annual income — and 85 percent of them are interested in the new robo-advisor, Steinberg says.
WorthFM’s opportunity is clear — not only are many of Steinberg’s subscribers interested in the new practice, but women as a group are becoming financial decision-makers in a greater percentage of households. According to a 2015 study by Hemington Wealth Management, women are now the primary breadwinner in 40 percent of families, and in 95 percent of those families, a woman is also the lead financial decision-maker.
WorthFM is powered by highly customizable programming on Vanare’s digital wealth management platform.
“What Amanda and Michelle are doing really resonates with me,” said Vanare CEO Rich Cancro. “It’s not just about disrupting Wall Street, which is what we usually hear from robo-advisors, but a passion and energy towards serving this market segment... and that will resonate with the clients WorthFM is designed to serve. We believe in what they're doing”
After signing up for WorthFM, women will complete a 40-question survey to find their "money type" to describe their behavioral relationship with money, organizing them into five archetypes: the producer, the visionary, the nurturer, the epicure and the independent. Each client is a blend of the five archetypes.