Why Most Financial Education Doesn't Actually Work, with Stephanie Pow - Ways to Wealth EP146

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Stephanie Pow, founder of Crayon and former equity derivatives trader at UBS. She studied at Wharton and Harvard, spent years on one of the largest trading floors in the southern hemisphere, and then spotted a gap in financial support that almost nobody was solving. When her first child arrived, she saw firsthand how life transitions change the way people engage with money, and she set out to build something around it.Stephanie started her finance career at 18 through a co-op program that landed her internships at UBS, Goldman Sachs, and Commonwealth Bank of Australia. She joined UBS full-time after graduating and spent four years on the equity derivatives desk, finishing up running the hybrids book as one of five women on a floor of over a hundred.Before Crayon, she founded Capital W, Australia's first organisation for women studying undergraduate business, won a General Sir John Monash Scholarship, and joined Kiwi SaaS startup Vend as Chief of Staff. Then she had her first child, and everything changed.Her first attempt at a startup was a robo-investing platform. She got an FMA license, built wireframes, and tested with users for two years before looking at the unit economics and realising the model wouldn't work in New Zealand. She binned it all and started over.What came next was Crayon, a bootstrapped and completely independent financial coaching company that works through employers to support people during the transitions that forces them to engage with money, whether that's having a baby, losing a job, or starting a new career.In this conversation, Stephanie explains why she chose not to raise VC, how she navigated the trade-offs with her partner, and what she learned from burning out while pushing a startup forward as a new mum. She also gets into why most financial education fails and what she is doing differently.Watch all episodes of the Ways to Wealth Podcast here: Check-out Stephanie’s Company, Crayon here: #waystowealth #crayon #financialwellbeing #parentalleave #fintech #entrepreneurship #womeninfinance #nzbusiness #startup #financialcoaching #bootstrapped #wealthbuilding #personalfinance #tradingfloor