Maria Martinez: Alexia, tell me a little bit about Your Juno. What is your vision?
Alexia de Broglie: With Your Juno, we are on a mission to accelerate the closing of the gender gap in financial literacy. The truth is that nowadays, women and men are very far from being financially equal. And the problem we are seeing in almost every country is that women lack the financial confidence and financial knowledge to make the best decisions for themselves. What we are trying to do with Juno is create a platform where we can teach women everything they need to know about personal finance, but do it in a personalized, engaging, and fun way.
Maria Martinez: That is amazing, and your story is fascinating. Your mother gave you a credit card when you were ten, and told you to manage your own budget, right? So what was your first challenge, do you remember?
Alexia de Broglie: I remember specifically having a discussion with my mom when I was around the age of ten, and she told me, “When you’re older, you’re going to have this budget that you’re going to have to follow.” And I asked her, “Why don’t we start doing that now?” And because she couldn’t come up with a counterargument, she got my sister and I started at a very, very young age.
So we had a budget we had to follow, and it really taught me a couple of very important money lessons. The first one being that any financial decision is a tradeoff. So if I buy a huge set of pink suitcases on eBay, which was my first purchase, it means I don’t have enough money for school supplies, shampoo, and toothpaste.
But I think what it really instilled in me—and to this day it’s the most important financial lesson I could have learned as a young girl—is the confidence to make decisions for myself with a sense of autonomy and responsibility over my own financial decisions.
Maria Martinez: Do you see the younger generation changing their attitudes towards money? If so, how?
Alexia de Broglie: I think finance has become a lot more mainstream than it used to be. The topic of personal finance has been booming on social media amongst the younger generation for a while now. The hashtag “FinTok” on TikTok is one of the most searched ones. This idea of financial well-being as part of general well-being, alongside eating healthy, sleeping well, and exercising, is something that has just recently been anchored. Money isn’t just a financial tool anymore—it’s an agent for change.
Maria Martinez: Very interesting. We at McKinsey are passionate about diversity, equity, and inclusion, and the impact it has on creating a better and more profitable business. Your Juno is built for women and non-binary people, and you’ve placed diversity and inclusion at your core. Has this been good for your business?
Alexia de Broglie: The truth is that money is gendered, and in today’s status quo, women are not the target audience. If you look at the amount of money female founders are raising nowadays, in the best year, which was two years ago, only 2.2 percent of VC funding went towards female founders. So a lot of the fintechs we’re seeing being created at the moment, and a lot of the platforms that are democratizing access to wealth-building opportunities, are being built by men.
And so very subconsciously, there’s also this bias towards building products that speak to men, communicate to men, and solve men’s problems. So women are being completely left out of the equation. There is a huge market opportunity there. If you look at the rate at which women invest, they’re the fastest growing group of investors in most countries worldwide.
Maria Martinez: Great value prop. So, what are your plans for Your Juno? Where are you going next?
Alexia de Broglie: So at the moment, we are working very closely on our personalization tool. One of the biggest problems when it comes to personal finance is this huge amount of information online. But no one really knows whether it’s advice you should be following, if it comes from a reputable source, whether it’s biased, or if it’s just trying to sell you something. Is it a search engine optimization (SEO) tool from an existing fintech? Is it relevant for your current financial situation? Is it something you should be pursuing at all?
And so with Juno, we’re trying to cut through this noise and create our content in-house. But more importantly, making sure you’re matched with the right information at the right time. After this year, we’re really seeing the power of our community as sort of a trampoline for building products they truly need. But step number one is focusing on education and community. The fintech products will come a bit later.
Maria Martinez: So today, October 11, is the International Day of the Girl, and 2022 is the 10th anniversary of the very first one. What advice would you give to young girls and mothers about financial education?
Alexia de Broglie: This is a topic I’m extremely passionate about, as you would have guessed given my own financial education as a little girl. And there are a lot of studies showing how financial habits and how you perceive yourself with money is already established by the age of seven. So the first piece of advice I would give to mothers is start very young. Don’t wait for your children to have an understanding of math and the meaning of money before having those conversations with them.
I read a report by Starling Bank that was called Make Money Equal, which examined the way that the media portrays women and men when it comes to finances. They analyzed the language financial articles use with different target audiences, and found that over 90 percent of the financial articles targeted at women focused on topics like budgeting, saving, and spending less. But in the articles targeting men, over 70 percent of them covered topics like investing, building wealth, and crypto, this idea of wealth creation and abundance.
And that’s one of the biggest legacies of outdated gender norms that we’re still carrying in today’s society, one I would love for everyone to challenge: This idea that the man is the breadwinner and the woman is the spender.
Maria Martinez: Let’s go for a quick summary of everything we’ve discussed. Give us a piece of advice for young women.
Alexia de Broglie: Challenge stereotypes and find room to be yourself.
Maria Martinez: What advice would you give parents looking to teach their kids about money?
Alexia de Broglie: It’s never too early to start the conversation.
Maria Martinez: What do you think about when you decide to invest?
Alexia de Broglie: Does it align with my values, long-term goals, and investor profile?
Maria Martinez: Where would you see Your June in three years’ time?
Alexia de Broglie: Going global.