The Purse Podcast

Ann Badillo is a leading business strategist and advisor to executives, entrepreneurs and organizations. She incubates and accelerates startup ventures and ecosystems around the world. Her expertise helps leaders understand new innovative design and leadership frameworks for the 21st century. 

Ann is an investor in Portfolia (US based) which designs investment funds for women to invest in the innovative companies they want to see in the world through returns and impact.

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Angela Atherton (CFA, FRM) is the Co-founder and Principal of Parallelle Finance. Her commitment to financial inclusion and impact investing began at the start of her career when she managed screening and performance analysis for two ESG indexes. 

She structured private equity deals at American Capital Strategies. She led risk analysis and management functions at Fannie Mae and Calvert Impact Capital, a non-profit investment firm.  

As the Chief Operating and Financial Officer at The Global Good Fund, a social enterprise, she ran day-to-day operations and led commercial expansion.

Angela is an experienced entrepreneur, she co-founded a female-led fintech, Capital Market Exchange, and launched an independent consulting practice with a global reach, including emerging and developed markets in North America, Europe, Australia, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.

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Shaun Richards is an independent economist who specialises in inflation measurement and monetary economics. This follows a career in the City of London where he specialised in derivatives (mainly options) on interest-rates and bonds. 

Shaun has also worked in Tokyo. He is a Bank of England watcher which covers the issues of monetary policy and money printing or quantitative easing (QE). Shaun also traded as a local on the London International Financial Futures Exchange where he mostly traded futures and options on future and present UK interest rates.

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Shelly Porges is Co-Founder and Managing Partner of The Billion Dollar Fund for Women, a global consortium of venture funds pledged to invest in female-founded firms and Beyond the Billion, mobilising LP investors into TBDF funds. She is also a Board Member of the Financial Alliance for Women and on the Advisory Board for Mindshift Capital, Different Funds and Global Invest Her.

Shelly is a globally recognised expert on gender-lens venture investing and a leader in fostering global entrepreneurship. She was honoured as one of the Inaugural Forbes 50 Over 50 in Investment in 2021.

She served as President of the North American Jury for Cartier Women’s Initiative for over a decade and as the former Senior Advisor, Global Entrepreneurship Program (GEP) at the U.S. State Department, a program she expanded to almost 150 countries, under Secretary Hillary Clinton.

Prior to that, she had a distinguished career in the private sector, including both corporate and entrepreneurial ventures.

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Fiona O'Donnell McCarthy is a Principal at True Ventures. For more than a decade, she has partnered with founders to drive product innovation and help them to create the futures they envision. Her experience spans product management, strategy, and business development for both consumer and B2B companies.

Most recently, Fiona was the VP of product for direct-to-consumer food company Daily Harvest, where she built and led teams responsible for the digital customer experience, data products, and internal business systems.

Fiona studied human biology and published research on cognitive development at Stanford University, which influenced her distinct perspective on how technology shapes human behavior and vice versa. She accredits her competitive swimming career, which led her to Olympic Trials in 2008, for igniting her curiosity around breakthroughs in human performance — and how innovation can bolster wellness.

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Dr. Kate Levinson, PhD, licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (MFT), is the author of Emotional Currency: A Women’s Guide to Building a Healthy Relationship with Money, published by Random House. Her work focuses on the emotional, psychological and symbolic nature of money. 

She assists others in making connections between their money behaviors and the meanings money holds for them, including the generational money beliefs, habits and racism they have inherited.

Kate consults with individuals, families with adult children, and couples on money issues. In addition to her work with clients she most recently was the co-owner of Point Reyes Books, an independent community serving bookstore in Northern California. 

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Cathy Curtis, CFP® is the founder and CEO of Curtis Financial Planning, a full-service financial planning firm based in the San Francisco Bay Area serving clients in the US. Cathy’s mission is to be a fiduciary financial partner for independent women, so they can feel confident about their finances while pursuing what they love and do best.

As a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ and member of CNBC’s Financial Advisor Council, Cathy is a frequently sought-after author and contributor. For more than a decade, she’s shared her unique financial planning insights via her award-winning blog, Of Independent Means, and widely followed Twitter feed (@CathyCurtis). In 2020, Cathy launched the Financial Finesse podcast to showcase successful, interesting women and provide actionable advice for her listeners.

For the last five years, Cathy has been named an Investopedia 100 Top Financial Advisors. Investment News also recognized Cathy as one of its 2020 Women to Watch for her contributions to the profession and financial literacy, and support of women inside and outside the industry.

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Christina (CJ) Juhasz is the Chief Investment Officer of WWB Asset Management (WAM,) a subsidiary of Women’s World Banking, responsible for raising and investing private equity funds with a gender lens.

Prior to joining Women's World Banking, CJ served in increasing positions of responsibility in Deutsche Bank’s fixed income group in New York and London and Merrill Lynch’s capital markets group in New York. CJ began her career as a military police platoon leader in the United States Army, serving in Germany and the US.

CJ holds a BS from the United States Military Academy at West Point and an MBA from Stanford University. She is a 2013 Eisenhower Fellow.

To date, WAM has $125M in asset under management through two private equity funds -WWB Capital Partners, LP and WWB Capital Partners II, LP –that provide growth capital, and research-driven market and organizational solutions to guide portfolio companies in reaching more women as customers and workforce assets.  

WAM leverages its influence as an investor to encourage its portfolio companies to increase women’s access to financial services and to increase the recruitment, advancement and equal pay of women as staff and leaders of those companies. These are winning strategies for gaining market share and the upper hand in the war for talent.  

The funds have invested in 13 portfolio companies covering Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, South-and South-east Asia. The companies offer financial products and services to under-served populations, especially women, including micro-enterprise, small business, agriculture and affordable housing loans; savings and payments services and micro-insurance products.  

Women’s World Banking

Women’s World Banking designs and invests in the financial solutions, institutions, and policy environments in emerging markets to create greater economic stability and prosperity for women, their families and their communities.  They work with 56 institutions in 31 countries to reach more low-income women with financial services.

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Helene Guillaume is the founder and CEO of WILD.AI. She studied mathematics and financial risks, she was a quant in a hedge fund and management consultant to Fortune500 companies in AI. 

She's an ultra-marathon runner, a triathlete, and a surfer. Her favourite combined skillset is vitality+brains.

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Isabel Oriol Bastos is the Chief Operating Officer (COO) and Head of Business Development at ADA Impacto, a female-founded fintech startup.

At ADA Impacto, women at the bottom of the pyramid get control over their microcredit. They do this through an AI Chatbot via WhatsApp, where women apply, receive and repay their loan, while partaking in a mentorship program for their business. 

ADA launched in Mexico this year and aims to expand across Latin America.

They have recently won the Fintech Innovation Challenge Female Founder Award from the Women's World Banking Organisation.

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