Sallie Krawcheck is the Chief Executive Officer and Founder of Ellevest, a digital investment and financial advisor platform built by women for women.
“This isn’t ‘for women,’ (so) ‘pink it and shrink it,’ ‘make it smaller.' We’re going to forecast out your life so that you can achieve your goals. And then we’ll put a bespoke investment portfolio against each goal to help…achieve them,” Krawcheck said to TechCrunch in 2016 when Ellevest launched.
Krawcheck received her education through a Morehead Scholarship to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she received a Bachelor of Arts in journalism, followed by a Master of Business Administration from Columbia Business School. She then went to work as an Equity Analyst on Wall Street.
Krawcheck rose steadily through the ranks, becoming Director of Research and then Chair and Chief Executive Officer of sell-side research firm Sanford C. Bernstein & Company. From there, she was named CEO of Citigroup's newly-created Smith Barney unit, for which she was named to Time's 2002 list of Global Influentials and Fortune's Most Influential Person Under the Age of 40. In 2004, she became Chief Financial Officer for Citigroup Incorporated. In 2007, she was appointed CEO of Citi's wealth management business, and in 2009, after leaving Citigroup, she ran Bank of America's Global Wealth and Investment Management division. The Financial Post dubbed her the “most powerful woman on Wall Street.”
In 2013, she purchased and became Chair of Ellevate Network, a 135,000-strong global professional women’s network, and founded Ellevest.
“At its core, we all know that money is power, and that if we don’t have as much money as the guys do, we’re not going to be fully equal with them,” Krawcheck said in an interview with Girlboss.
Krawcheck’s mission is paying off in big ways for her company and her clients. By March of 2021, Krawcheck had guided Ellevest to $1 billion in assets under management. She has been recognized by Inc. as a Top Female Founder, named the seventh most powerful woman in the world by Forbes, and has been recognized by the World Economic Forum as one of its Young Global Leaders.