'We're reimagining the world of investing': Former JPMorgan exec's startup seeks to make financial planning more accessible

When Mical Jeanlys-White conceptualized her startup WealthMore after working as an executive at JPMorgan Chase & Co., she envisioned a space that gives the kind of financial advice and opportunity that wasn't available to her parents and grandparents.

A first-generation American whose parents immigrated to the U.S. from Haiti, Jeanlys-White said her goal with the fintech is to bring investing opportunities and advice to places where "the stock market isn't brought up at the dinner table."

Headquartered in Greater Philadelphia but operating on a remote basis, WealthMore is an investment app that looks to cater to underrepresented groups who traditionally don't have easy access to wealth management resources by providing affordable wealth-building advice.

The app is set to launch to beta testers by the end of the year and Jeanlys-White hopes to roll it out to the public next April, coinciding with Financial Literacy Month.

Jeanlys-White is certainly no stranger to finance. The former managing director at the Wilmington office of JPMorgan Chase, over her 10-year tenure Jeanlys-White managed a $22 billion credit card portfolio before leading the buildout of the banking conglomerate's first buy-now, pay-later product, My Chase Plan. Still, she saw an "unaddressed need in the market around making financial advice more affordable," she said.

About 59% of Americans want financial advice but don't know where to get it and another 35% think that it would be too expensive to hire an advisor, according to a recent poll of 2,000 Americans by intelliflo, a cloud-based platform for financial advisors. The Federal Reserve Board also found in 2019 that just 34% of Black American households owned equity investments compared with 61% of white families. Jeanlys-White wants to better even the scales with WealthMore.

Jeanlys-White said she drew inspiration for the app from her workouts with Peloton and modeled her fintech after the workout company in that users will have the ability to be part of a community that is advised and coached by an expert.

Each portfolio that users can invest in will be led and monitored by a certified financial planner or equivalent expert. There will also be groups for different financial goals, like tax optimization, estate planning or college planning.

The goal is make investing and financial advice accessible to people like her grandmother, who she described as a "super saver" that would have been a multimillionaire if she had been advised to invest.

"She would have had the opportunity to create and transfer generational wealth and as I sat in my role at JPMorgan I saw that these problems were still not being solved," said Jeanlys-White, specifically citing racial, gender and generational wealth gaps as issues of focus.

So last year Jeanlys-White left JPMorgan to focus on WealthMore. The startup is currently raising its pre-seed funding for an undisclosed amount, which she hopes to close by the end of the year.

Jeanlys-White has ambitious goals for her fledgling company when it launches. She said it would be "a great win" to have 10,000 to 20,000 users by the end of 2023. In five to seven years, she hopes that WealthMore is synonymous with financial advice and is "a household name."

"We're reimagining the world of investing and growing wealth and making it far more attainable and accessible to more people," Jeanlys-White said. "WealthMore is our private banking solution for investors who don't have $500,000, $1 million, $10 million now."

A Villanova University alum, Jeanlys-White said it was important for WealthMore to be headquartered in Pennsylvania. She has already worked with area colleges and universities to get feedback on the design and usability of the app. WealthMore will continue to eye partnerships to grow the company's reach, especially in underrepresented groups.

"There's so much talent here and it's just really refreshing to be a part of the fintech, the technology, the entrepreneurship, the innovation community in Pennsylvania," Jeanlys-White said.