Rukayyat Kolawole

CEO/FOUNDER

I am Nigerian by birth with a lineage of strong entrepreneurial women who controlled and invested their money. My passion and reason for going into investment banking were a result of learning how my grandmother empowered women in her community. She was a gold trader who travelled to Ghana to buy gold and sold it in Nigeria. She taught me the basics of empowering women via money to build wealth in addition to the power of communities. I watched her do this seamlessly when I was growing up in Nigeria. Real wealth to her was about freedom.

My culture is Yoruba culture. A study by the University of California looked into female power in Yorubaland. Yoruba culture of present-day Southwest Nigeria and the Southeast Republic of Benin has received much attention from academics over time. In part, this is due to the culturally ingrained female power that has existed and persisted over time in Yorubaland. The goddess Aje, as the deity of the marketplace, provides an example of the importance of womanhood in Yoruba culture. The expressions of culturally grounded female power within Yorubaland are exemplary of the dynamic gender structure in Yoruba culture. Yoruba women have been able to harness female power to their advantage throughout Yorubaland over time. Seeing the gender pay gap, gender pension gap, racial pay gap, and racial wealth gap I decided to found my company to be more inclusive in tackling issues that can be controlled - unfortunately, most female-focused companies in that sector are not inclusive when it comes to race and other intersectionalities.
With my experience in the financial industry not only as a woman but also from an underrepresented community and of being denied a mortgage and being told I am high risk by a bank financial advisor due to my gender and race, I am well equipped to help women and underrepresented groups live self-determined lives and manage their finances independently.

I speak to a lot of women and underrepresented groups in Germany who do not feel they are included and do not know where and how to invest. This is part of the reason why I started PaceUP Invest under 3 years in living in Germany and we have impacted a lot of women of different backgrounds to start investing by being inclusive. I would like to see more women and underrepresented groups investing and taking generational wealth very seriously. Money is power. We need to understand how money can add value and be used to create value. We need more people in the Financial industry for representation. I am a financial expert who is a female, black, financial expert with a CFA and MBA. I am sharing my stories and helping as a black person, as a woman, as a migrant, and as someone from an underrepresented community, to create opportunities for other marginalised and disadvantaged people to build and access wealth. It is important to be a role model to others to see that they can also do this, dare to do this, and should do this! 
We need more women and underrepresented people to start taking control of their finance and start investing and building sustainable and generational wealth! 
This empowers women who educate further generations to deal with their financial issues in a self-reliant manner. 

With PaceUP Invest, I promote the natural approach to money as I learned it from my grandmother. And this is exactly what I transfer into everyday business life in line with today's Zeitgeist.