Meet the entrepreneur on a mission to give women more control of their money – and make a difference
Female Invest is on a mission to educate women on securing their financial independence. Co-founder Anna-Sophie Hartvigsen tells Andy Silvester that it’s not just making money that their members want – they want to change the world one krone, pound and dollar at a time
“It’s hard to watch a lot of what’s going on in the world, and feel like you can’t do anything about it,” Anna-Sophie Hartvigsen tells me from Female Invest’s office in London.
We speak on a day when the news bulletins are led by a combination of war, environmental catastrophe and political paralysis, so she certainly has a point.
But rather than wallowing, Hartvigsen and her two co-founders at Female Invest are doing their bit. The Danish trio founded the education platform in 2019, driven by a mission to guide women through their own investment journey, and are now publishing their second book, a how-to guide to impact investing.
Girls Just Wanna Have Impact Funds is a follow-up to their successful first book – Girls Just Wanna Have Funds – and comes from the same place: a desire to educate their peers not just to secure their own financial future, but to do something positive whilst doing so.
“The first book, we wanted to teach women how to manage their money, and create more financial power for themselves.
“But we also knew that money is not just about buying things, or having fun. Ultimately, it comes down to power. It comes down to freedom, to independence, and this is especially important for women,” she says.
Frustrated though she is by the slow pace of change at the top of global governments and businesses, Hartvigsen thinks women can take back some of that power in the world at large by investing.
“We don’t really have a say in the big things in the world. But we do have unprecedented financial power, and we are educated like never before, and we are ready to use our money like never before. So in the new book we teach women how to make an impact with their money – and make money.
“Women are more likely to donate money, or their time, and that’s nice, but you can only do it once. We want to teach women how to have that impact, make it a bigger impact, and hopefully make it a good investment too.”
Bottom-up
Female Invest’s heartbeat is its community – in September, the platform crossed the hundred-country milestone, with the UK the fastest growing. The idea for the book came in part from meeting people who showed an appetite for more sustainable investing.
“We knew that people in our community care about making more than just money. But we experienced a knowledge gap, because people didn’t know where to go or start.
“There’s something very powerful in saying that almost every problem, every injustice in the world, can be impacted by money,” she says.
The rise of sustainable investing has not come without a backlash. Pushback against the three letters ‘ESG’ has grown in the financial community in recent months, and some have become disillusioned with the amount of impact impact investing actually has.
Hartvigsen is clear: even the smallest investment does make a difference, and the research suggests that women are more likely to want to make that impact.
“In the book we go through a host of different asset types, all of which have a unique chance of making a difference. Take angel investing: we see today that female entrepreneurs receive less than 2 per cent of funding, and that has devastating consequences – not just because women can’t scale a company, but because entrepreneurs tend to develop solutions to problems they experience themselves.
“That means today women’s problems, or black people’s problems, just don’t get the solutions developed. That can be solved very easily: it doesn’t take that much money, that many people coming together, to fund seed businesses.”
Next steps
One could forgive Hartvigsen and her co-founders Emma Bitz and Camilla Falkenberg for taking a deep breath having finished their second book, and scaled their platform in just six years. But it doesn’t sound like there’s any desire to rest on their laurels. Much of that is driven by the passion that brought them together in the first place – to give women the ability to live their own lives.
That’s a full-life exercise – from women wanting to start a business or wanting the ability to start afresh outside of a marriage, to women preparing for retirement – and there is much work to do. Take pensions: the average UK woman’s pension pot is about 40 per cent smaller than that of a man of the same age.
But with platforms like Female Invest scaling at breakneck speed, is Hartvigsen optimistic?
“Sadly, the more I learn, the deeper I get, the longer I work in the field, the less optimistic I am about structural change. Change has been painfully slow: the issues we’re talking about today (in terms of a seat at the table) were the issues twenty years ago.
“But I am very optimistic about women taking charge themselves. Modern women are ready to take charge of their own future, and of our collective future.”