Angel Rich has created a smartphone app, Credit Stacker, that helps women teach themselves to become more financially savvy. And it has hit a nerve in Latin America, where women are using it to become more independent.
Rich, the founder and CEO of the Wealth Factory, an education-technology startup that uses mobile gaming to make financial literacy available to anyone with a smartphone, discovered that her new app was unusually popular among Latin American women.
Why?
“We basically learned there’s this whole society norm where women have to hand over the paychecks to the men,” says Rich, “where there’s no need for women to learn financial education.”
Rich says women have left comments on Google Play and the App Store saying that they play the game on their phones in secret to learn how to manage their finances, information they could not access without the app.
If given the chance to talk to these women, she would probably tell them the same thing she tells every female entrepreneur she meets: Allow people to underestimate you and use it to your advantage.
“I want you to treat me like a Trojan horse,” she says. “I am going to enter, I am going to climb to the highest ranks of Troy, and then I am going to bring down your walls.”