Photo by Deepti Asthana

When Priti Rathi Gupta (OPM 49, 2017) was 16 years old, her father handed her his investment portfolio and asked her what she could make of it. She was befuddled. "He realized that, although I had schooling in what we call commerce, I didn't really know much about investing and finance—the personal finance piece was completely missing," says Gupta. "So for two years, I went to his office and I worked on our personal portfolios."

As she pursued finance in college and as a profession in India, Gupta realized that inexperience in personal finance was common among her female peers. She soon ran into another obstacle: As Gupta began her career successfully setting up the trading desk for her company Navratan Capital, she found that investors would only speak with her male colleagues.

Gupta persevered, founding Anand Rathi in 1994, which grew to be one of India's leading financial services firms with 1,200 locations and 2,500 employees. And when Gupta saw Indians losing money by trading on futures, she started Anand Rathi's first vertical focused on introducing people to mutual funds, stocks, and long-term investments.

Again, Gupta saw the gender divide at work: Male clients would follow the advice but the women—who saw the positives—still sought advice from their husbands and fathers before making any financial decisions. This meant that men were easier to access and convert, which meant Gupta noticed her staff weren't often approaching women at all.

It was at HBS that all these experiences came together for Gupta. A project for her business strategy class asked her to select a business and create a go-to-market strategy for it. Gupta and her team presented an investment platform for women called LXME (named for Lakshmi, the Hindu goddess of wealth and good fortune). "When I pitched it in class—about 80 percent men and 20 percent women—most of the men asked, ‘Why do you need a separate platform for women?'" recalls Gupta. "The women all said, ‘Wow, can we take it back to our countries? I wish I had something like this.' So that was a huge validation."

First, says Gupta, men and women think about money differently. Men, she observes, want to beat the index return or make more money than their neighbor or colleague. Women are more goal-oriented, say, toward making a purchase or saving for a child's education. The other issue Gupta identified was social conditioning: the idea that men simply manage money better than women. "This is not just an India problem but rather a global problem," she says.

Gupta did, in fact, take the idea back to India, officially launching LXME in 2020 as an online app for managing investments and financial planning. Yet it quickly became clear—through social media channels and focus groups—that women needed more support. So LXME 2.0 launched in 2021 with education at its core. This shift included community-sourced discussions, planning tools, investment products, financial insurance, and learning modules to help answer big-picture questions, as well as the basics, such as, What is a mutual fund? The app also helps women invest to reach specific goals and offers regular content through the LXME blog, hitting on topics like where, and with whom, one should talk about money; how to deal with financial stress; making better use of excess cash; and the veritable dos and don'ts of personal loans. It's an ecosystem, the company says, that cultivates the financially fearless.

"People always tell me women are risk adverse. What I learned was that we are not risk adverse; we're risk aware," says Gupta. "If a woman knows what will happen when she puts her money in a product, she is capable of making an informed choice. If she doesn't understand a product, she will not put money in." And that's what LXME strives to do: inform women of their options and give them the tools to build wealth independently or for their families. "Whether planning savings, investments or retirement, taking out health insurance, or budgeting to invest for a child's education," says Gupta, "the guiding ethos is simple: Knowledge is power."

Today, LXME hosts 50,000 women on the platform, and Gupta and her team hope to reach at least 20 million women in the next three to four years, which would amount to $10 billion in created wealth. "The wealth then goes back into families, because that's where women typically tend to put the money—back into families, children, and community—and that impact can be huge."

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