Hey, fintech fam! 💜

Day one of FTW:SF is in the books (how?!), and the Fintech Summit was electric from the opening session to the night's final conversations.

The speakers brought real substance to the stage, and the attendees brought the same energy to every hallway and coffee line.

I'm so, so grateful to everyone who came out and made today what it was.

We're back tomorrow for the Leadership Summit, and the Security Summit closes out the week on Thursday.

If you haven't joined us yet, there's still time to get your tickets for Days 2 and 3!

And with the Leadership Summit on deck, today I'm revisiting a story I reported for Forbes back in March.

HSBC, in partnership with Ipsos, surveyed more than 1,000 affluent U.S. women and found that fewer than half feel supported by their financial advisor or institution, at the same moment women are expected to control more than 40% of global wealth by 2030, according to McKinsey research cited in the report.

Racquel Oden, Head of International Wealth Management and Private Banking, U.S. at HSBC, told me the problem comes down to fluency:

"Fluency is knowing what to do, when to do it, and how to prioritize competing financial goals."

Let’s get into it. ✨

By 2030, roughly $113 trillion in assets — nearly half of global wealth — will shift into women’s hands.

The question for fintech and wealth management is whether industry infrastructure is ready for that reality.

Research released by HSBC in March in partnership with Ipsos suggests the industry may not be as prepared as it thinks.

Among affluent women surveyed, fewer than one-third said they feel prepared for the costs of aging or long-term care needs. Fewer than half said they feel supported by their financial institution or advisor.

HSBC is calling the issue a “fluency gap,” not a confidence gap, and that distinction reframes the opportunity entirely.

“Confidence comes with knowledge,” Racquel Oden, Head of International Wealth Management and Private Banking, U.S. at HSBC, told me in an interview.

“With the democratization of information, women have the knowledge. Fluency is knowing what to do, when to do it, and how to prioritize competing financial goals.”

That is not a call for more apps. It’s a call for more precision.

P.S. — Racquel is speaking on stage TOMORROW at FTW:SF. Because you’re a newsletter subscriber, you get 20% off using code FTWPARTNER26. Get your tickets now and join Racquel’s session in person!

For years, fintech and wealthtech platforms have promised personalization at scale — robo-advisors, dynamic dashboards, AI copilots, and behavioral nudges.

But HSBC’s data suggests personalization still isn’t translating into applied decision-making for many women.

Seventy percent of women surveyed said life-stage-specific financial education would improve the quality of their decisions.

Nearly two-thirds said they plan financially for others — children, aging parents, partners — underscoring that women’s financial lives are often interdependent, not individual.

“We’re not one monolithic group,” Oden said. “Women in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s — their priorities shift dramatically. Advice has to reflect that complexity.”

That complexity has structural implications.

Traditional wealth management was largely built around a linear model: accumulate, grow, retire.

But many women’s financial realities include caregiving interruptions, longevity planning, philanthropic priorities, and multi-generational decision-making layered simultaneously.

If 70% of women want stage-aware planning and fewer than half feel supported, that starts to look less like a literacy issue and more like a product design failure.

Fintech excels at user experience. Private banking excels at relationships. The fluency gap suggests neither has fully solved adaptive planning.

The natural next question is whether AI can close that gap.

Oden’s answer was measured.

“The answer should be hybrid from the beginning,” she said.

AI, she argued, can dramatically improve productivity — aggregating data, running portfolio analytics, surfacing scenarios. But that doesn’t replace the relational and interpretive work of advice.

“AI gives us knowledge,” she said. “But how you apply it, that’s human.”

It’s a point worth sitting with in a fintech market currently obsessed with agentic automation.

Over the past year, AI has moved from novelty to infrastructure across finance — in payments, lending, shopping, and investment workflows. Wealthtech is no exception.

But the HSBC findings make it clear that intelligence without contextual judgment may not be enough.

The fluency gap isn’t about access to data. It’s about translating that data into next-best action during complex life transitions.

The headline number isn’t just big; it’s clarifying.

As women move toward controlling roughly 40–45% of global investable wealth — this becomes less a demographic trend and more a systems test.

One of the largest wealth shifts in modern history doesn’t just create opportunity. It exposes whether financial infrastructure is calibrated for the people increasingly driving capital flows.

“This is a historic moment,” Oden told me. “Women should not be entering it feeling unprepared. This is the financial glow-up.”

Her framing is intentionally optimistic.

The report’s message is not that women are behind. It’s that financial systems — the advisory models, the digital platforms, the AI tools — must evolve as women’s financial influence expands.

There’s another layer here that fintech investors are increasingly forced to confront. Women control an estimated $31.8 trillion in consumer spending and are poised to command a growing share of global wealth.

Yet female-led fintech startups continue to receive only a fraction of venture capital funding — despite broader data showing they generate 35% higher returns on investment, operate with 15% lower burn rates, and often reach exit faster than their male-led peers.

Kay Koplovitz, founder of Springboard Enterprises, has spent 25 years backing women building companies in undercapitalized sectors, including fintech.

Springboard reports its portfolio companies have generated more than $76 billion in value. The thesis is simple: markets underestimate women — both as founders and as financial decision-makers — at their own peril.

That mispricing is as relevant in fintech infrastructure as it is in venture allocation.

The deeper signal in HSBC’s research isn’t about education. It’s about architecture.

If the issue is fluency — knowing what to do, when to do it, and how to prioritize — then the next wave of fintech innovation in wealth won’t be about more dashboards or louder empowerment campaigns.

It will be about adaptive systems: tools that integrate life-stage modeling, caregiving economics, longevity forecasting, philanthropic planning and interdependent family wealth structures into coherent advice.

That requires both technology and human judgment.

“We have to recognize the uniqueness of women’s lives,” Oden said. “Advice has to evolve with that.”

The $113 trillion wealth shift is coming regardless. The open question for fintech and wealth management is whether their products, platforms, and advisory models are sophisticated enough to translate knowledge into action at scale.

Because the fintech and wealth management firms that win won’t be the ones that talk about empowering women. They’ll be the ones that build infrastructure precise enough to serve their complexity — and powerful enough to match their influence.

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Thanks for spending time with me today! See you tomorrow and Thursday!

Love,

Nicole 💜