"There is a financial literacy gap": Financielle co-founders and CEO of LifeSearch on new strategic partnership

"Take back control of your money."

This is the first thing that you’ll see when visiting the website of financial advice company Financielle.

You may think you’ve been sold this dream before, but very rarely has it appeared in pale pink, above a photo of a young woman sticking her tongue out as she holds scissors to a credit card.  The message is clear: Financielle offers something new for women seeking financial advice.

Co-founded by BBC Morning Live Finance Expert Laura Pomfret, described as "the female Martin Lewis", and Community FinTech Entrepreneur Holly Holland, Financielle aims to help its customers "ditch debt, build savings and be financially well."

Since its humble beginnings as an Instagram page, the platform has grown into a 200,000 strong global community engaging with blogs and videos on everything from budgeting to investing, home buying to protection. Their app has also received over a quarter of a million downloads and is accessed by approximately 30,000 people every month.

"Financielle was a personal project and was never meant to be a business," Laura said, "it was an online community, and we just started to spot patterns specifically around women facing so many gaps - whether it be the pay gap, the pension gap, or the life insurance gap.

"We went on a bit of a journey, realising that all these things stack up. In general, women are overwhelmed with a number of different things that they have to handle on a day-to-day basis, all with one arm tied behind their backs effectively, and I think that supercharged our mission to be female focussed." 

The aim of Financielle is not to "dumb things down", but simply to make financial advice "relatable" and "less overwhelming." 

"There is a financial literacy gap," Laura explained, "women have been left out of the conversation for a very long time because they typically weren’t the main earners or didn’t have a salary to protect as such. Their unpaid labour around the home wasn’t valued." 

"When we speak to women, we definitely get the vibe that there’s just too much all at once. It’s literally the motherload."

Holly added: "Financial advice has always been specific to men, so we saw a gap where banks and personal finance plans couldn’t speak to women very well. Whereas we do customer interviews, find out exactly what the problem is and then speak to them a way in which they like to be spoken to."

In March 2025, Financielle announced its partnership with insurance broker LifeSearch, providing Financielle’s community with access to female advisers in a bid to help highlight and combat the protection gap in the UK. In the same month, Laura and Holly shared their story on stage at the LifeSearch awards.

Debbie Kennedy, CEO of LifeSearch, described the company as being founded with the aim of making quality advice accessible "by giving customers great advice over the phone."

"Back in its day, it was almost revolutionary that you could do that. It hadn’t been done before. Then as it grew, it became about how we can reach more customers and trigger conversations about protecting what matters most to them. So I think both LifeSearch and Financielle have been driven by the question of how you reach people and talk to them in a better way," she said.

Having been in Financial Services "for decades," Debbie noted the "processes and policies" that used to "frustrate" her: "It was always assumed that in a joint policy, life number one was the man and life number two was the woman. It just felt like at that time equality or parity wasn’t even envisaged.

"It’s certainly improved, but there’s so much more we can do. There are assumptions made about what will be important for a woman and what they’re doing in their role, and those assumptions are very misguided," she said. 

In late 2024, the Personal Finance Society (PFS) found that only 16% of financial advisers in the UK are women, highlighting the extent to which it is still a male-dominated industry.

"If more than 80% of the broker industry are men and projecting male problems, male issues, male interests, then what you put out is what you attract. You’ve got to speak to your customer," said Laura.

"What we’ve always tried to do at LifeSearch is to ask our customers ‘what brought you here today?’ and for some women it’s so difficult," Debbie added, "because they are earning, but they’re still probably a prime carer for children, and a lot of them are now becoming carers for elderly parents as well. So a lot of that conversation can be quite nuanced and complex."

Holly continued: "The way that a lot of podcasts and journalists talk about money is still very much directed to that male persona, so we started the Vault podcast to help break down those barriers and speak to women about money in a way that is enjoyable, so that people can see themselves in the people that are writing in and can hear what we’ve got to say."

"It’s still the same product at the end of the day, but the way that you bring people in is very different." 

Laura also explained how this lack of financial advice platforms for women inspired their choice to make Financielle’s branding "very pink," which received "amazing" feedback from both women and men within its community.

"Even something as simple as it being a feminine colour made it more acceptable, appealing, and obvious. We’re all different and it’s not for everyone but is it very clear that it’s feminine in a world where finance is very blue."

Debbie also noted the importance of "using the right language and triggers" when discussing protection products with women customers.  

"There is that ‘bro culture,’ I think there’s still this feeling that ‘sales is male’ and yet some of our top performing advisers are women. We know that girls are leaving school in a much better position than boys at the moment, but as they move on through their careers and everything else that they’re grappling with, they just fall away from insurance and we’re not speaking to them.

"The motherhood penalty is a thing - reducing down to part time, thinking that life insurance can’t fit in their budget because they’ve got to pay for school shoes and elderly parent’s care and holidays. In a list of priorities, it goes right down to the bottom." 

The scale of such issues is shown by Financielle’s global audience, which includes a large following in the US, as well as Australia, Canada, and Ireland. 

"We never expected anyone from the US to come anywhere near Financielle and then a couple of years ago, some Tik Toks went viral and we were like, 'oh, my, we’ve not even got a dollar sign in the app. Like, what?'" Laura said. 

"There are some nuances that we’ve found, for example our US customers have massive issues with health insurance or student loans which operate very, very differently over there. But other than that, they want to pay off the debt, they want to buy homes, they want to have children in a way that doesn’t hold them back financially, or they want to not have children and know what that life should look like financially."

"We’re also speaking to people in France and Sweden," Holly continued, "and English isn’t their first language, but the concept, the content, and the community are a magnet for women no matter where they are in the world. We’ve got people in Nairobi and Indonesia using the app, and they’ve all got the same problems."

Debbie noted how these similarities can also act as a "lesson" to the industry about the importance of telling stories instead of focussing solely on products.

"I think what Laura and Holly have shown is that when you talk in stories, you cover so much common ground with people," she said. 

"Talk in stories, talk about real life. As an industry, we’ve been so product driven for far too long." 

Holly added: "If you work in marketing or on the sales team, you’re super focussed on segmentation because you think 'this product will fit this person.' But actually, it’s much more nuanced than that and it’s around those life triggers. 

"If they themselves have not experienced a death or serious illness in the family, a friend will have done, and they will empathise with that friend and think, 'I don’t want that to happen to me.' So you can actually hit a lot of people just with a few core themes." 

Debbie also explained how the partnership was helping to tackle the protection gap by ensuring they "show up in conversations" with customers in today’s market, where "life insurance is often not considered relevant." 

"I think that as an industry, we have been reliant on mortgage advisors saying, 'Oh, maybe you need to think about life insurance as well.' What we see happening now though is that even this decision about mortgages is coming much later in life, people are renting for much longer. 

"There’s a danger that those traditional triggers that we’ve relied on just become even less relevant as well. We’ve got to go to where our customers are thinking about this so that they can enact it. I think we’ve rested too long on very traditional routes of customers thinking about life insurance and coming to us," she said. 

Laura continued: "We have a big section of our community that are child free, either by choice or not. So they’re single homeowners, independent from family and they have a really good life, and their biggest fear is illness taking them away from that life.  

"So for the cost that they’re spending in nice gyms, hair extensions or nice travel weekends, they could also, for much less money, also factor in a Critical Illness Cover (CI) policy that will protect their lifestyle.  

"Instead of positioning life insurance as though it were a vitamin, which is nice to have, position it as a painkiller."

"The industry is not thinking about how they can present this solution to that problem because we’re not connecting the customer stories with the product. But I think that’s where the industry’s got a lot of opportunity, instead of sitting there hoping people still turn up for the mortgage department and will be up for the protection department as well," she said. 

Holly also underlined how the partnership is helping both Financielle and LifeSearch to provide more for their customers and community. 

"We offer good content and tools and the community. But the product is the glaringly obvious missing piece to the Financielle puzzle," she said, "LifeSearch opened the doors, we were able to go and sit with two female advisers and listen to them on calls, and I don’t think a lot of brands would be comfortable doing that.  

"It’s really exciting that we can close the gap on product for a lot of our community members but also change the industry with LifeSearch. If we can do it with LifeSearch and protection, what other areas of personal finance can we do it with?" she continued. 

"From a LifeSearch perspective, we want to help people get protected and help that community be successful in what they’re trying to achieve. But I don’t think I realised until recently that this is exactly what we needed in our industry," said Debbie. 

"The feedback after the LifeSearch awards has been so positive, it's really got a lot of companies thinking, and it’s been interesting that it’s taken Financielle to do that." 

"I just wonder if the usual way to tackle protection is quite grey, and we should have been a bit pink all along."