Alice Rodriguez:
Thank you for being here with us today. My name is Alice Rodriguez and I am Head of Community Impact, and I am thrilled to be here with a dear friend of mine. Beatriz Acevedo who is the co-founder and CEO of Suma Wealth. Beatriz thank you so much for being here today.
Beatriz Acevedo:
Thank you for having me, Alice, always great to see you.
Alice Rodriguez:
Beatriz, you preferred yourself as a border girl. You know, having grown up on the border myself. I understand what that means, but it'd be great if you just started there, you know, just what it was like growing up, both being, you know, one foot in Mexico, one foot in the United States, you know, how did that really impact you overall?
Beatriz Acevedo:
Yes. Well, I am a very proud border girl, an immigrant entrepreneur and I always say I'm an immigrant entrepreneur by default because my father was a very proud Mexicana, who lived in San Diego with my mother when she was pregnant. But when my mom went into labor, he decided to rush her to the other side of the border, which is something very few people do. So I could be born in Mexico and one day have the privilege to be president of my country. I don't know why he didn't think the U.S. could be my country and I could be president here. But anyway, they say you only need one person in life that fully believes in you to make it in life, and that certainly was my dad. But certainly being born in the border, made me who I am today. You know, having one foot, as you know Alice yourself, one foot in one country and another one in another, really shapes you. And as a hybrid of the best of both cultures. So I grew up being incredibly proud of my Latino and my Mexican heritage, but also growing up with all the American pop culture influence that I had from the U.S. So I am incredibly grateful to have had those two experiences simultaneously, cause I lived in Mexico and I went to school in San Diego. So my day was bicultural, binational every single day of my young life.
Alice Rodriguez:
So Beatriz, you're a founder, you're a mobilizer, you're a board member. You're very active in the community. Why don't you share with us just what motivated you to start this company?
Beatriz Acevedo:
I've always felt like I am one of those Latinas outliers that was able to have opportunities from a young age. Doesn't mean I didn't work hard for them, but we know in our community there's so many deserving Latinos and Latinas that works so hard and are still not given the opportunities, whether it's capital, whether it's boards, whether it's advancement on a job, doesn't matter. So for me being that outlier, I want to spend as much time as I possibly can every day opening as many doors as I possibly can for my community. And particularly for Latinas, I have a very soft spot for Latinas in my heart because there are just incredibly, as you know, incredibly hardworking, launching more companies than anybody, but yet with the least amount of capital, the least amount of resources, at the very bottom of the pay gap. So I feel like Latinas will succeed no matter what, but what if, you know, what, if we help them accelerate that success that they deserve? And I want to be able to do that in any, in any work that I do. Obviously the new startup that I'm leading now (Suma Wealth) has the mission and vision to help close the Latino wealth gap that we know we are still very, very far from, from real equity, but it can be done.
Alice Rodriguez:
So, Beatriz as a Latina who has three daughters, herself, you know, everything you just said is just so inspiring to me. And let's just go there, let's go to Suma Wealth, you know, you, you started Suma Wealth, as you just mentioned, but why? Why was this so important to you?
Beatriz Acevedo:
I started Suma in the middle of a pandemic, right? So people said, "How can you start up company in the middle of a pandemic, an economic downturn? There's so much uncertainty at this point." And I think that was the right time to really do it. Why I started it is by looking at the, at the numbers. And my co-founder Javier Gutierrez, who you know well too kept sending me all these articles, showing me, you know, how Latinos were not just only being hit the hardest when it came to debts unfortunately, but also in their finances, how we had the least amount of emergency savings, how we were not equipped for something like this to happen in our families, but thinking about what do I really, what did I really want it to do next in my career? I thought if I could really help in any way or form make financial education accessible, pop culture easy to understand, community-driven, and to make feel community that they belong in the money conversation. That felt like the right thing to do at the exact right time. And yes, in the middle of a pandemic and an economic downturn, there was no other time to do this. As you know, with so much data, we are the demo that spends the most, but saves the least or, and also invest the least. So we need to change that.
Alice Rodriguez:
So Beatriz can you talk a little bit about the contents that are involved in Suma Wealth and what you really want the key takeaways to be for the audience?
Beatriz Acevedo:
Our goal is to make financial education in general, very accessible and very fun and actually pop culture in a way. So anything that is trending, we utilize that topic and we think, "Okay, how could this be finance friendly," for example? So let's talk about credit card debt, or crypto, or investing or emergency savings accounts, any topic that is financial heavy for maybe our youth and making it very, very accessible with a pop cultural trending topics. So that is a lot of the content that we put out. And I think that is key also into why our content is so engaging to our audience.
Alice Rodriguez:
I thought it might be important for the audience for you to say more about why the Latino segment the youth, as you just mentioned and maybe a little context around the key drivers in our economy, as we think about Latinos.
Beatriz Acevedo:
Absolutely. Well, as we know, and we just saw from the census numbers that that came out, this is the demo that is driving population growth. We would have negative growth in our country without the Latino cohort. And, you know, you need a thriving young demographic in any country to really drive GDP growth. And that is a key metric. So why we need to support Latinos, is so America in general, not just Latinos can continue to thrive. These kids who are U.S born these Latinos are 19 years on average. That is incredible, right? When you think about everyone else who is in their 40's and their 50's, in their 60's, all other cohorts. So Latinos are very, very young entering the workforce at the highest rate than anyone else, enrolled in college. So this is the cohort that we need to support because they are going to be responsible for carrying the economy forward for all Americans. This is a very important distinction to make: we need Latinos to do well so America can do well.
Alice Rodriguez:
You know, just knowing a little bit about your background after you said, knowing that you've had a very successful career in media, you know, co-founder of another great venture called MITU, I was like very impressed with how you took these cultural experiences in a very witty way, you know, to be able to cover topics that maybe are, we try to make them seem very complex when they're not. How did that influence you with Suma Wealth?
Beatriz Acevedo:
It influenced me 100%. I mean, I really, you know, when talking to Javier Gutierrez, my co-founder, I kept telling him, I don't know that I'm the right CEO for this company. My background is not in finance. My background is in media and entertainment and in marketing. And he was like, "That's exactly why you need to do it. You fully understand how to build rents at scale and how to build a community and how to make any topic fun." So we had a hypothesis of saying, okay, if we bring the fun and the pop culture aspect and the ink culture aspect to finance, will this work? Will this resonate? And so we started experimenting with a few posts and we saw that the engagement was off the charts. It was about a 10x of any other, you know, fintech brand at the moment and it continues to be. And it was just really, you know, making sure that our community, when they saw something or read a blog or whatever it was, even used a tool, it would scream at them. It wasn't subtle. It was very unapologetic. This was made for you by people like you. That's how we wanted to really bring down that barrier. And that anxiety of finance is not for me, or it's too hard to understand, particularly for Latinas. Cause we did a lot of research before launching the company and it was mostly Latina saying I'm incredibly overwhelmed with this information and I want to learn more and I want to do more, but I'm just too overwhelmed. And so we thought, okay, well if we do it in culture, will this work? If we explain a soft versus a hard credit inquiry, with a Taco right? With a softer tortilla or a hard tortilla and then we use all the analogies. And we posted on a taco Tuesday trending day, Will this work? And then when we saw that it was Latinos and even non Latinos saying, "Oh my God, like, this is exactly the explanation I've been waiting for. How do you make finance accessible and easy to understand and something that it's not for me?" So, you know, everything that I did in my previous venture at MITU as far as what is pop culture? What will an image tell you, right? What will a sound, what will a color, what will something a saying from your abuelita, from your grandmother, that we can relate to finance? Then I think we have something very, very different than if you look at our posts on our feeds and our website, nothing really says we're a financial brand. Although every single content that we have is vetted by, you know, financial experts and coaches and analysts. But we also use a lot of stand-up Latino comedians to work with these financial advisors to come up with this very fun and campy content. So we have the best of both worlds with very traditional advisers, along with very young kids who are doing standup comedy in our community. And we have very intersectional group. We have Afro-Latinos, gay-Tino's, Jew-Tino's everything you can imagine from every nationality working on our content to be as inclusive as we can.
Alice Rodriguez:
You know, it's so interesting because as you said earlier, you know, money, especially in the Latino culture tends to be a very taboo topic. And I've always said, you know, like, okay, this is not rocket science, but unfortunately, sometimes back to your point about trust, you know, we can come across as kind of stuffy bankers. And this is just such a creative way to touch people in a way that says, "Oh, that's like what we say in my family. (speaking Spanish) Right? So you will [inaudible] to those sayings that your grandmother is saying, so I think that's great. So what financial lesson, Beatriz, would you want the young Latinos out there to really learn?
Beatriz Acevedo:
For young and for every generation, I think the most important message we want to convey is it's never too late to start or never too early to start as well. Right? So no matter at what part of your financial journey you are. You could be a college student; we have a program that we're running now, [indistinct] boot camp in the summer for kids who are going to college or just started college. How do you do a budget, learning about student debt, credit card debt, all the things that as they leave their home for the first time they're going to be bombarded with. And we want to equip them early on to learn. But we also want to teach somebody like my mom in her 80's about investing, which she is incredibly excited to learn about. So it's never too early to start if you're young and it's never too late to start if you're a bit older, there's always room to learn, to grow, to start building your wealth, no matter who you are or what part of your financial journey you are.
Alice Rodriguez:
Now virtually I would to say that there are lots of parents out in the audience with us today. Any tips that you would offer to these parents on how to talk to their children about money at any age?
Beatriz Acevedo:
I think just start early and be very honest. I think we have to really change that narrative that we all grew up with where money was a taboo, and we just never spoke about it in our families. I think, you know, for young children, you are a model. So what best way to start having those early conversations and get them involved, you know, get them involved even in family decisions, of making a budget, of giving them a small allowance that they're responsible for, picking things in the supermarket, comparing prices, values. There's so much fun that you can have doing activities with your own kids and having these conversations early on that we didn't get to do when we were growing up. Also there's so many now, so many apps, so many companies now where kids are able to invest and start learning about companies that they love. I say to parents all the time, maybe consider one less gift during the holidays or one less gift during a child's birthday and maybe give them some stock or maybe give them the option to learn about companies that they love and where they want to start investing. So just like my advice that I give to older people: it's never too late, in this case, it's never too early to get your kids involved. And I think that's how we'll be able to really, really change the narrative. And we can do it in one generation if we really start with our youth.
Alice Rodriguez:
So what do you hope the impact of Suma Wealth will be on our communities? And what do you want your personal legacy to be?
Beatriz Acevedo:
My personal goal would be that I get to see in my lifetime with Suma, how we contributed to close the wealth gap in our community. And I would love to see that growth in our community of feeling comfortable, not just being the biggest spenders. I would love to change that data from the biggest spenders to the biggest savers and investors and that I get to see before I die, that, you know, we were an active part of changing that narrative and of helping to close that wealth gap. I would feel incredibly satisfied with that as part of, of my legacy. I mean, on a personal level, of course I want to be a good human. I want to inspire other generations. I want to open as many doors as I possibly can for other Latinos in my community. And I want to be a good mom, a good wife, a good daughter, sister, a good human in, in my community. I aspire to be that as well. Not just professionally.
Alice Rodriguez:
Thank you Beatriz I really appreciate you, and everything that you doing.
Beatriz Acevedo:
Oh, thank you so much, Alice. It's always amazing to see you and thank you for this opportunity.
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