‘Fintech’ founded by women are better investment
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A study by the KPMG audit firm concluded that women give considerably greater dividends to their investors
In the world of finance, women face a considerable participation gap. As investors, according to Business Insider, they only represent 9% of the staff dedicated to risk investment, and as recipients of investment, their startups only captured 2.2% of all the risk capital invested during 2018.
Leer en español: Las ‘fintech’ fundadas por mujeres son mejor inversión
A new study by the audit firm KPMG, one of the 'big four' in the field with Deloitte, Ernst & Young and PricewaterhouseCoopers, suggests that this may be a big mistake. At least in the world of 'fintech', companies that provide services and technological solutions for banking and finance, investing in companies that have at least one woman among its founders brings much greater returns.
KMPG studied 91 companies in this sector, where at least nine of them had a woman among its founders. Their analysis found that they granted returns on investment up to 113% higher compared to those that only included men among their founders. Considering the risk associated with investing in technology startups, these results demonstrate an interesting trend in which it is worth deepening.
Read also: Venture capital: the biggest gender gap in business
This means that those who invested early in fintech with founding women received an average return of 112%, while those who invested in these companies during the same stage of their development, but who only had male founders, received returns of only 48%.
"Although the number of female co-founders is low, the fact that they tend to achieve higher rates of return is a clear vote to achieve greater diversity in the industry", said KPMG Fintech co-director Anton Ruddenklau.
Other studies support it
Although according to KPMG this study showed promising results for the promotion of female inclusion in the world that makes up the intersection between technology and finance, the same firm recognized its limitations. Particularly the fact that a single company, the London firm Starling Bank Ltd., raised $ 303 million dollars, a considerable amount that could have dragged the results in favor of the firms with women founders.
However, there are other studies that support what the latter found, and that shows that greater participation of women in startups is always beneficial.
This is the case of a study carried out by the US accelerator MassChallenge, which together with the consultancy Boston Consulting Group analyzed the performance of 350 companies that passed through its program during the last year.
MassChallenge found that every dollar that entered a company with at least one woman in a managerial position generated a return on investment of 78 cents, while firms that only had men in their management positions yielded only 31 cents.
The result of this study is very similar to that of KPMG, which suggests that there are indeed very positive effects in closing the gender gap that exists both in the world of technology and in finance.
According to Forbes, the disparity shown by studies between the performance of companies with women co-founders and those that only have male co-founders is due to the gender gap itself. They argue that, because women should try harder to get the same funding, their founders often have to answer more difficult questions and with greater forcefulness, resulting in a more detailed vision of their project. Being subjected to greater scrutiny, they show better results.
LatinAmerican Post | Pedro Bernal
Translated from "Las 'fintech' fundadas por mujeres son mejor inversión"
