finmarie
Bringing financial freedom to women
Bringing financial freedom to women
“finmarie wants to redefine the financial industry for women, making access to investment easier and creating transparency in financial markets, tools and processes. IBM helps us to back that up with the reliability and security of the industry's most secure public cloud solution.”
finmarie, a fintech startup based in Germany, embodies the shared vision of three talented and innovative women co-founders to improve the lives of women across Europe by helping them discover their paths to financial freedom and manage their financial well-being. The visionary founder trio joined forces serendipitously. Karolina Decker and Leitha Matz worked in the financial sector when they met, with Karolina in investment banking and Leitha as the co-founder of a start-up focused on consumer data. Almost immediately, the two realized they had a shared passion: helping empower women to take control of their financial futures. That was a mission that Rica Klitzke, a marketer working with large brands like Coca-Cola and Beiersdorf, was passionate about, too. Collectively, Karolina, Leitha and Rica brought decades of experience in digital finance, consumer products and B2C marketing to launch finmarie.
Forty-three percent of women are not happy with the financial advisory support they receive, and half of them are uncomfortable making investment decisions on their own. That translates to a huge investment gap with enormous but underserved potential.
Read moreForty-three percent of women are not happy with the financial advisory support they receive, and half of them are uncomfortable making investment decisions on their own. That translates to a huge investment gap with enormous but underserved potential.
The mission of finmarie is to enable women to achieve both their professional and personal financial goals and bring greater economic independence to women. Statistics show that women are earning and inheriting an increasing share of the world's wealth, but are less likely to take full advantage of their financial power due to their lack of trust or confidence in their financial planning options and limited access to personalized support and resources1. According to McKinsey and Society Generale, there’s almost 8 billion euros of investor holdings in this category waiting for the right advisor—and that’s where finmarie comes in.
finmarie helps women unlock their investing potential by offering user-friendly, personalized software that connects individuals and businesses to financial planning resources. That means helping women to set up pensions, select the optimal asset classes for investment, and diversifying and enhancing the quality of services offered to them. By bringing more education, expertise, and tools to financial planning, Karolina, Leitha, and Rica want to close the investment gap and empower women to work toward financial independence.
finmarie platform innovation: hyper-secure, quantum-safe, AI-driven and multi-cloud friendlyCustomer trust and data protection are at the very heart of their business. Working in fintech demands high levels of security and privacy, which is paramount when handling a customer’s most confidential data. That’s why finmarie partnered with IBM, leveraging confidential computing capabilities from IBM to help protect data during processing. finmarie’s initial interest in IBM Hyper Protect—powered by IBM Z®—was due to its reputation as the most secure environment on the public cloud today, that is also quantum-safe and multi-cloud friendly. Specifically, finmarie wanted to protect against attacks on their applications by running their solutions inside IBM Hyper Protect Virtual Servers which use hardware-backed security, preventing root access to applications for all those except the holder of the Master Key.
Last year, finmarie joined the IBM Hyper Protect Accelerator (HPA) program which has a portfolio of over 100 startups from 23 countries, with 49% of the startups having at least one female founder. Being part of the IBM Hyper Protect Accelerator program provided finmarie with valuable experience in infrastructure architecture, cloud deployment, compliance, and more.
Today, finmarie uses IBM Hyper Protect on IBM Cloud featuring “Keep Your Own Key” encryption capabilities to help them future-proof by keeping data hyper-secure and compliant with regulatory requirements. finmarie’s platform, safely protected by IBM Hyper Protect security, enables the company to use customer data to offer customized financial education workshops and a Financial Wellness Center. The Financial Wellness Center combines digital investment courses with tracking and ROI tools, connections to experts, and AI-driven smart search to deliver reliable financial information around the clock. This system of financial empowerment is built on the bedrock of trust that IBM has created.
Advice to other startups from Karolina, Leitha and RicaAs finmarie continues to help women confidently and securely take control of their financial futures, the three founders suggest other start-ups follow their lead and reach out to industry leading companies like IBM for expertise and tooling. Karolina, Leitha and Rica put data trust and privacy at the very heart of finmarie’s operations, working with IBM’s innovative security capabilities to help safely deliver on their vision of bringing women greater financial freedom and control of their future—which is nothing less than revolutionary.
1 Source: BCG
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