Welcome to LinkedIn Live with Publicis Sapient.
Hello, everybody. Thank you for joining us today at Money Live. Welcome. My name is Fifi Ahmed. I'm a director within our financial services vertical for Publicis Sapient. And today I'll be joined by guests, Saira Khan, who is in the studio with me, head of partnerships and innovation at First Direct HSBC, Alicia Sandberg, who's joining us from North America, president and digital brokerage and head of Plink at Plink Services, and my colleague Priya Bajaria, who heads up our financial services vertical for North America. I'm going to start on a slightly funny note. I would like to tell you all a joke. A woman walks into a bar and orders gender equality. Coming right up, says the bartender, and he disappears. He comes back after 208 years and apologizes. Sorry for the delay. I had to go down to the basement and change the global paradigm. Now, obviously, that's not funny. Some things have to be changed. Women have been at forefront of technology advancement and computing from early days. What we would like to do is change this paradigm to the next stage. 208 years is a huge gap. Things haven't changed progressively as they should have done. We're still facing a lot of gender bias. There was a study done of 133 AI systems, and it proved that it came up with 44% of gender bias still. What can we do to change that? There's some things we can do. People like Saira, Alicia, and Priya are at forefront of implementing this change by creating solutions that can keep women at the center stage. Let's get into it. So, Alicia, first question to you. Thank you for joining us, by the way, and happy International Women's Day.
No, thank you, and you as well. Thank you. When thinking about the wealth management and banking industry are changing, I would like to explore how design solutions with women at the forefront. So my question to you is, how are you seeing the investor landscape change? Is it leading with digital at the industry addressing the needs of women investors? So thank you for that question, and thank you for having me. I would say on a positive note, things are getting better. You know, I was looking up some recent statistics, and depending on which survey you read, we moved from 44% of women being invested in the stock market outside their retirement accounts to 67%. The most recent LinkedIn survey actually said only 15 to 25% of women are invested in the stock market. And quite frankly, we know that the greatest wealth accumulation can come from being invested over time. And so I've been in the industry for 33 years. I've been very fortunate to have good mentors. But when my 25-year-old daughter said, Mom, I'm saving my money for a house, and it's all in my savings account, I was shocked that she herself wasn't invested in the stock market. And I asked her why. And she said, it's too hard. It's too complicated. I don't know where to start. And it's like gambling, Mom. And so the perception really needed to be changed. And I was inspired by that. And really, we developed an app that was designed for women. And they say if you design for a man, you might disenfranchise a woman. But if you design for a woman, you'll welcome everybody. And so we've really designed it with a very different leading with learning, leading with behaviors, and trying to give people confidence, not just women, but people who just know they should but don't know where to start. And so it is with a diverse group of people that we've designed something very different that invites you in to just start and give you the confidence to keep going. So things are headed in a better direction, but we have a long way to go.
Thank you for sharing that, Alicia. Actually, I was having a chat with my sister the other day. And my two very young nieces, they're both in their 20s. One just started her role within tech. And we were discussing how financial education should be part of our syllabus. Within high school in US and what we say middle school GCSEs here. So that kind of proves to your point of education around financial independence so important for women. Saira, coming to you. Turning to you, did you see the theme of women being the rising financial decision maker in other parts of the world as well as UK? And do you incorporate this into your partnerships and innovation at First Direct HSBC?
I think not only First Direct, I'll talk about the industry as part of us and HSBC. But me working with other women in tech like yourself and others. I think we're starting to really see the paradigm shift happen. And I think before, whilst it wasn't something we discussed, it was something that it was not prevalent in any gender. It was just a skill that was needed to be had. I think now it's becoming very, very important that we need to start looking at female talent in particular. And there's a reason for that. And I mentor a number of individuals, male and female. One of the things that I find is, and Fifi, you and I have had a lot of conversations about this in the past. It's my male counterparts tend to come to me and say, what do I need to do? And how and what do I need to, what skills do we need to develop? And the females tend to just go away and do a lot of research or they'll be reading into things. I think one of the things that we really need to start doing is encouraging people to just really take a step forward. And that's something that I do, something we do in HSBC. Now, STEM is something that's becoming very, very kind of important and top of mind for everyone. And that STEM topic as a whole, I think there's a lot to be done. There's a lot of people that probably listening into this and not tech skills as per se. I think what I'd like to say is don't think that you can't do something. Whatever role you play, I'm a strategic person, I'm a business person, but I make sure that I voice my opinions on tech, make it aware and talk about it. It's an influencer. So start driving that influencing tool. So I think it's more conversation, Fifi, than anything. That's what I would say. Like you said, I would like to sort of take a lead on the STEM program. They started like 10 years ago and I didn't feel like in terms of like the birth of STEM was for the right reason. It was a DNA tick and we need more women in tech industry. But I think what would be really good, great to see if we can actually change the needle in the next five to six years and make it that women are in charge of technology. We can produce solutions and provide products built for women. And there's a huge market gap. I'll take my example. I don't have children. I'm in my 40s. Yeah, I'm doing quite well. I have like art collection. I'm going to have a wine collection. Oh, I want to see that. What do I do with this legacy? Where do I leave this? Any kind of solutions, a legacy base, investment or anything like that. People aren't thinking about that. And I feel like our industry, financial services industry, there's a huge opportunity for people to step up and create solutions. And hopefully I'll be at the forefront of it with Publisys Sapien. You're well. Can I just add something else on there? I think what you've just said is very important. But the shift is changing even so. We were talking about digital adoption just a few years ago, but now we are feeling the effects of it. We're starting to talk about AI, chat GBT, et cetera, and things like that. So I say if you are on the other side of this, just start reading up on it. Look at things that are of interest to you and start talking to the younger generation. I have a lot of people teaching me through my mentees about stuff. I only learn how to use chat GBT the other day, and that was somebody teaching me. So I was like, great. But anyway, good point. I don't want to leave handbags behind. I want to leave tokens and Bitcoins behind. Good point. I like.
So I'm just going to turn and pose a question to Priya, my colleague in North America. Priya, if you could give a shed of light on what is Publisys Sapien doing within DBT, or Digital Business Transformation, to address some of these challenges with some of our clients that we're currently working with?
Thank you, Piti. Very interesting discussion so far. At Publisys Sapient, we thrive on the use of technology and using it for the good that it brings. And I think one of the more exciting things coming out, as we are seeing right now, is leveraging digital to democratize wealth management. And traditionally, a conversation about wealth has been a taboo topic in housing. So the idea is, how do you leverage digital? How do you break that down into bite-sized components and make this accessible on a mobile app for somebody to use? Alicia, you mentioned people are afraid about topics in finance. So how do we make it more digestible? And I think that's something that we are making possible today with music business. I strongly believe that financial literacy is one step in the right direction towards financial independence, which eventually will bring gender equity. And as you also said earlier in the conversation, there is a lot of focus on designing solutions for clients. And I think we are partnering with our clients in designing something that is at the forefront of this. How do you attract more women as clients? How do you personalize their experiences leveraging AI and data? And then how do you keep them as clients so that you keep innovating