Investing Shouldn't Be a Secret: On Financial Inclusion and the Wealth We're Missing.

Published: 2024  |  Perspective updated: 2025

At 21, fresh out of university, I started a job in financial services. And for the first time in my life, I was surrounded by people who talked casually about index funds, compound interest, tax wrappers, and long-term returns.

My first reaction was confusion. My second was something closer to anger.

Why had no one told me this before? Not at school. Not at university. Not when I opened my first bank account. These were not complicated secrets. They were foundational principles of financial life — the difference between money sitting in a current account losing value to inflation and money working for you over time. And they had been entirely absent from my education.

That experience has shaped a lot of how I think about financial inclusion ever since.

The scale of the exclusion

Over 1.7 billion adults globally remain unbanked — nearly a quarter of the world's population without access to basic financial services. Beyond the unbanked, millions more are underserved — they have accounts, but lack access to credit at fair rates, insurance products that reflect their actual lives, or investment tools that could help them build wealth over time.

In the UK specifically, the gender investment gap stands at £574 billion — men have £1.01 trillion invested versus £450 billion for women. Young men are investing at double the rate of young women. The gap widened again in 2024. The figures do not include workplace pensions — which means the real wealth gap is considerably larger than even these numbers suggest.

This is not primarily a problem of capability or interest. It is a problem of access, education, and design. And it has a particularly acute dimension for women, whose lower average earnings, career breaks, and longer life expectancy combine to make investment not just desirable but genuinely necessary for long-term financial security.

The investment performance paradox

Here is the thing that makes the gender investment gap particularly frustrating: when women do invest, they tend to outperform men.

A Warwick Business School study tracking 2,800 investors over three years found that female investors outperformed the FTSE 100 by 1.94%, compared to 0.14% for men — a difference of 1.8 percentage points. Fidelity Investments analysis of 5 million customer accounts over 11 years found women's holdings outperformed men's by 0.4 percentage points annually on average. The reasons are consistent across studies: women trade less frequently, hold more diversified portfolios, and are less prone to the “lottery style” risk-taking that reduces men's net returns.

Women are not worse investors. They are under-represented investors. The gap is one of access and initiation, not ability.

Why the design of financial services matters

I spent over seven years working on financial education and inclusion in the pensions industry. The thing I kept coming back to is that the problem is not primarily one of customer behaviour. It is one of product design, communication design, and the assumptions baked into both.

Most financial products were designed for a default user who was not a woman, did not have career breaks, did not have variable income, and did not have to weigh up investment decisions against the cost of childcare or eldercare. The products work reasonably well for that user. They work less well for the majority of actual customers.

Customer strategy and proposition design is where this gets fixed — or does not. The question every team building financial products should be asking is: who are we designing for? Whose life experience shaped this journey? And who did we leave out?

Budgeting tools and nudges are useful. They are not sufficient. What financial inclusion actually requires is products that are genuinely built around the real circumstances of the people who most need access to financial resilience — including the 1.7 billion people who currently have none at all.

Investing should not be a secret. It should not require the luck of stumbling into a job that happens to involve people who talk about it. It should be designed into the experience of every person who interacts with the financial system — from the first bank account to the last pension decision.

That is a design problem. And design problems have design solutions.