‘Not just Sallie’s view’: How Sallie Krawcheck sets Ellevest apart

Ellevest’s brand has something no other digital investment startup has: Sallie Krawcheck.

If you’re a customer of Ellevest, you get targeted Instagram advice in the form of short “Ask Sallie” questions, answers and video clips, interspersed with quotes from iconic women. You’re also receiving weekly newsletters from Krawcheck called “What the Elle,” in which she provides her thoughts and advice. And sometimes you’re getting emails from Krawcheck with quick reactions to current events to let clients know where Ellevest stands. The company has been developing its brand without a big marketing or creative team, Krawcheck said. It launched in May 2016. Last month it hired its first chief marketing officer.

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Ellevest has 24,300 followers on Instagram, whereas Betterment’s following stops at 2,419. Wealthfront’s account isn’t active. Krawcheck, once a Wall Street heavy hitter and now Ellevest CEO, said she’s used her own brand to get Ellevest going.

“You do it from a standing start at Ellevest, with one Twitter follower, and it’s hard to make a lot of impact there. But given that I’ve got a substantial following, beginning the conversation there and also bringing it to Ellevest made a lot of sense.”

“It’s really important to get this message out,” Krawcheck said. “We talk a lot about equality and empowerment and the positive impact of women moving ahead, but the truth is money is at the bottom of so much power in a capitalist society. But it’s sort of viewed as tacky to talk about.”

But Krawcheck has been building her own personal brand since before the launch. If you’ve seen her in the news for the past two years, you’ve probably seen her talk about how women’s careers are different from men’s — so their retirement planning should be too; how women control over $5 trillion in investable assets; or why men and women won’t be equal until they’re financially equal.

The timing couldn’t be better. Krawcheck’s vision for Ellevest extends back long before the 2016 U.S. presidential election, but she said the business began seeing significant momentum this spring — shortly after Donald Trump moved into the White House, inciting the Year of the Woman and the movement to make women’s voices heard better now than ever. It’s a very good time for Krawcheck, who’s already so outspoken, well known and politically “on,” to tie her own brand into Ellevest’s.

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Krawcheck does not hesitate to talk about her own experiences — failures, specifically.

“On the messaging branding side it really came from putting our heads together,” Krawcheck said. “From spending time with and understanding Elle.” “Elle” is the name Ellevest employees use to personify their typical customer.

But there’s a level of Inception-like marketing-speak. “But it came from us too because we are, to some extent, Elle.”

Today, 40 percent of Ellevest engineers are female; women comprise 47 percent of its product engineering organizations. Its executive leadership is 70 percent female.

Again and again Krawcheck tells stories during media appearances of the two times she was publicly fired when she was at the top of her game (in her last career) first as CFO of Citigroup and then as president of Bank of America’s global wealth and investment management division; about how much the timing of her outings sucked since her children were hospitalized shortly after that; why she thinks she was fired because she was a woman (since women tend to be more focused on client relationships and long-term outcomes than men); or when she learned of her ex-husband’s affair with a friend.

And she makes fun of herself, noting how “after drinking all the wine” she picked herself up, or quipping: “I’ve got nothing against middle-age white guys. I’ve been married to a couple of them.” Of course, she’s always selling Ellevest to readers and viewers. But Krawcheck’s cult of personality is so strong, maybe the ones that can tell don’t mind.

“We are looking to build a company for the long term,” Krawcheck said. “That said, what we hear from Elle is she wants to know us, know who’s behind the company and she wants to take her measure of them. Naturally that means it’s me.”

It’s not just the fintech companies whose products are starting to look the same. Just as they’re adding human advice, legacy firms whose value proposition have always centered around human advice are adding the digital feature. The growing competition doesn’t phase Krawcheck, who believes multiple firms can meet the array of different client needs. It’s harder for legacy firms though, who may not fully understand their clients, she said.

“Everybody is kind of borderline offering the same thing,” she said. “I will argue until the end of today with you that ours is better in X number of ways, that there are a number of things we do that are technologically more advanced than others and I expect that people will catch up with that at some point… but I think the truly great, iconic companies are ones that had great brands and really understand their client base.”

Last week Ellevest raised $34.6 million in fresh funding. Its lead investors — Rethink Impact, a new U.S. venture capital impact fund with a gender lens, and PSP Growth and Salesforce Ventures — are pretty on-brand for Ellevest. At the head of PSP Capital is Penny Pritzker, the former U.S. Secretary of Commerce.

“I went to sleep one night and thought to myself, if I could have any investor who would it be? And I woke up at 3:30 in the morning and thought: Penny Pritzker. Because of the work she had done at the Commerce Department for advancing women and because of their reputation for building long-term successful companies.”

Krawcheck maintains that despite how well her own brand has translated to the Ellevest brand, there’s an important distinction between the two, noting that Ellevest isn’t about “just Sallie’s view for what women want.” The company has clients in the office frequently to hear about their needs and what they want to see in the service.

“Everybody told me not to [start Ellevest]. ‘Women don’t wanna invest, their husbands do it for them, they’re risk averse’ — I’ve heard it all. But so be it… if I want to make an impact in this life, in this world, and given my background, this is really the way to do it.”

Photo: Getty Images

Why robo-advisers are looking to former magazine editors for the human touch

Robo-advisers Wealthsimple and Ellevest believe in the human touch after all.

Both have plucked editors from top publications in order to personalize the often-dry world of investment advice by focusing on lifestyle matters. Ellevest hired chief design officer Melissa Cullens, who was an independent design strategist that Vogue.com recruited to lead the re-design of its website. Canada-based Wealthsimple, which expanded to the U.S. last week, hired Devin Friedman, a former GQ editorial director, as brand editor to lead its section that features interviews with people about the role money has played in their lives.

“The human side is something I don’t think a lot of people in our space have done a great job of, and it’s one where we excel,” said Wealthsimple chief product officer Rudy Adler. “It’s easier to do when you have a great voice; you’re coming at them with humor and not boring them with dull finance articles. We’re trying to find an emotional way in.”

At Ellevest, the investment platform for women launched by Wall Street vet Sallie Krawcheck, Cullens focused on the role money plays in helping people feel safe and express their values, like having control over their lives. That thinking was expressed in the design of the platform but also the user experience, including how many steps users have to take in the on-boarding process, what information they hand over and what the form field experience is like.

For example, similar services often ask questions about a user’s investment experience and risk preferences, and they’re usually laden with jargon and can take at least 10 minutes. Cullens designed the Ellevest on-boarding experience to include the client’s life goals, not just financial goals, and streamlined the process.

“We wanted to try to create an interface and experience that gave her the reins she was already taking and make investing work for her instead of making her learn more, work harder or be better to fit into the mold of a system that ultimately has excluded women,” Cullens said.

Robo-advisers, which dole out artificial intelligence-driven investment advice through a website or app, have been one of the fastest-growing parts of the U.S. fintech market. But that growth has leveled off as banks and other traditional financial institutions have piled into the space, creating new competition for customers.

Traditional financial services have mostly targeted high-net-worth individuals. But fintech depends on being able to relate to young people who are new to investing and may have lived through the last recession and distrust traditional finance. That’s where people with luxury brand experience can help robo-advisers differentiate.

“In the early days, no one thought about client experience; they just thought that if you log in, then you can make a transfer,” said April Rudin, chief executive of wealth management marketing firm The Rudin Group. “By bringing talent that has experience in creating a luxury experience, the idea is [fintechs] will take their functionality and give it client experience.”