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Marla Sofer, Creator of the New Free App that Helps Women Achieve Financial Freedom

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By Martha Vera, HC of Spain in El Paso

Marla Sofer is the CEO of a financial wellness app called KNOMEE. The App is the first of its kind to help women find financial confidence and understand enough about themselves so they can make better financial choices. The App is free and helps them find a financial planner or advisor that is perfectly suited to their needs and their goals.

“Women can create their own profile called a Financial Identity where they can list their goals, their values, their attitudes about money, how they think about money, and what they want to do in their future.” Marla explained.

Marla was born and raised in El Paso with a deep desire for impact and purpose from a very young age. She is the child and grandchild of immigrants to America that were moved by the American dream. “I was very idealistic in a lot of ways, so I studied sociology at UT Austin. I did a program as a junior in college as part of the American University in conjunction with UT Austin focused on peace and conflict resolution and it took me to the Middle East. Back then there was a very active belief in peace in Israel and its neighboring territories, “ said Marla. Her dream of becoming a diplomat and negotiating for peace took her to Israel where she got a master’s degree at the Hebrew University where she met her husband. They moved back to El Paso due to uncertainty in world economy and security threat.

Her resume is incredible, a combination of being at the right place at the right time with her laser sharp focus on helping women achieve financial freedom. She got a job with Merrill Lynch. Feeling that she couldn’t change the world, she got a job in a non-profit in New Jersey. Now she was raising money from people in financial services in Wall Street and real estate. She learned more about the industry and decided to get and MBA. She then got a job at a private bank for the sole reason that she spoke both Spanish and Hebrew. This took her back to the financial services sector. Her clients were very high net worth from South America. She even sold kidnapping insurance.

She had her first baby and became bitter about the maternity policy and decided to look for another job with better benefits for moms. She was quickly hired by J.P. Morgan with an incredible return to work benefit as a new mom. Her experience with the private bank was what landed her the job. Her knowledge of white-glove service to the ultra-rich and knowing how to listen to their needs helped her create a process of good service for the client now serving institutional clients such as Capital Group, PIMCO, Black Rock, and Franklin Templeton. She noticed that the groups that worked with them did not talk to each other. This led her to create a forum for everyone to share what worked well and fix what was broken in the system. After a couple of months, her work went viral. She drove meaningful change. She became pregnant again and talked to her employer about leaving New York. J.P. Morgan asked her where she would like to go and gave her a few options. She and her husband decided to go to San Francisco. Her job was to work on a sale with BGI, the largest asset manager. Shortly thereafter the financial crisis of 2008 happened. BGI sold to Black Rock, Black Rock bought PG and became the biggest asset manager in the world. She and a couple of co-workers with J.P. Morgan came up with the strategic decisions on how to best represent each asset class and region of the world that took the new venture to new heights. Their creation had IT support their clients through Black Rock technology that was centered on data and innovation to drive trade settlement, accounting and administration processes. At the same time, she got involved with non-profits and women’s groups in using tech power for good and how to solve people’s real problems to use financial services as a solution. This was the beginning of her interest in fintech to be part of the new generation of financial services powered by technology.

After the 2008 financial crisis, banks tightened up their credit. It was very difficult to get credit. One of the leading fintech innovations was peer-to-peer lending and Lending Club was a big company at the time with the objective of democratizing credit.   She joined Lending Club. The company failed due to bad behavior and fabricated documents with one of its lenders. She decided to leave.

She worked for Xignite, an ingredient post financial crisis for fintech to get the data it needs to create innovation. She later went to Gemstep which was about bringing wealth management and financial advice to the masses and bringing the minimum investment down from $250,000 to $5000 to hundreds of dollars. It was a white label digital advisor the distributed through Citibank and State Farm through their retail branches. Wealth management was evolving and needed to continue to evolve to include financial planning. She learned that most wealth management services don’t know their customers.

She took a job at Microsoft working on financial services strategy and data interoperability. Marla shared, “I got to build all kinds of demos using incredible technology focused on impact. I built demos to say, ‘how do you find the’, using AI tools, Azure and dynamics from their CRM and Teams. In terms of communication, find the right client who should probably have everything she needs on paper to rent a house but maybe has never been modeled. Ownership is kind of a key to wealth accumulation. Does she have enough money to buy a house, and does she have steady income? How do you find her? How do you coach her? How do you help her understand that when you buy the house, you have an asset that will accumulate over time. Maybe, you can evolve from being a renter to being an owner. I built this store using all kinds of technology and then we sold it to the banks and said here’s how you can help people get into wealth accumulation and economic mobility using the power of tech.

She took one more job in fintech with Jakarta democratizing private equity but all along she developed the idea for KNOMEE. “It was this reaction to the industry that has so many tools out there to help people. It can personalize but it doesn’t know you. It’s never actually cared about you because the industry only knows how to push products at you. It doesn’t know how to ask the questions to give you solutions. That was the seedling of ‘how do I fix that’. What we’re building at KNOMEE is a tool that helps you understand yourself and what you need to do in the future to then connect better with an industry that can help you. They’ve got the tools to personalize. The key to KNOMEE is you control it. Nobody sees your data without your permission. It is your financial identity that you use to help you achieve your goals.” Marla said.

KNOMEE is a tool that has the power to empower people to know themselves and have the confidence to make decisions based on their answers with the goal to help them decide who else gets to know them. It answers the question, “is this financial product right for me?”   It assesses your values, goals, attitudes, and how you envision the future. Do you have enough money now to make that financial choice? KNOMEE becomes your guide. There is nothing like the KNOMEE App. KNOMEE allows you to be the driver of your financial choices.

To access the app, go to www.knowmee.com or go to the App Store or Google Play Store and download Knomee, self-tracking with sense. Do it today!

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