Meet Sylvia Kwan, Ellevest’s chief investment officer. She’s “the brain” behind Ellevest’s investment strategy and works closely with our Private Wealth Management team. As part of our Why We Work Here video series, she talks about why she got started in financial services and why it was easy for CEO Sallie Krawcheck to recruit her to Ellevest.

Sylvia Kwan, chief investment officer

My father was a mechanical engineer who hated his job, and he took his hobby of trading stocks and made it into a full-time job, much to my mother’s dismay.

And in fact, she cautioned my brother and I, and admonished us, we could choose any career we wanted, but please don’t follow in your father’s footsteps. But here I am — spent my entire life in financial services.

So Sallie Krawcheck, our fearless CEO and founder, reached out to me on LinkedIn. Told me she was working on this new project, and she wanted to create an investment platform to help women. I was like, “Oh, my God.”

Knowing that somebody wanted to actually start a firm to help women was just something that I knew I wanted to do from the start.

One of the key differentiators that we have at Ellevest is in this area of impact investing. And so we actively seek investments that not only offer financial return, but also social impact return. Really around the things that our clients care most about.

It’s incredibly rewarding at Ellevest to create the investment solutions that women want and haven’t been able to find elsewhere.

I’m Sylvia Kwan, and this is why I work here.

Click here to contact an Ellevest financial advisor in your area.