Finance, Investing & Wealth

A network for African and African-diaspora women working across investment banking, asset management, venture capital, private equity, fintech, hedge funds, and personal-wealth strategy. The room for operators, investors, and the women writing the cheques.

Membership includes managing directors at investment banks, general partners at VC and PE funds, portfolio managers at asset managers, fintech founders and operators, CFOs across industries, treasurers, family-office principals, hedge-fund analysts and portfolio managers, and women in personal-wealth management for high-net-worth clients. Across major financial centers — London, New York, Lagos, Johannesburg, Nairobi, Singapore, Hong Kong, Dubai, Toronto, the Bay Area.

What we talk about. Deal flow. The deals we are seeing and the patterns across our markets. The investment theses we are working through. The portfolio decisions we are making. The exits we are managing. The fundraising work for the funds members are running.

Compensation. Senior-finance compensation structures — base, bonus, carried interest, deferred compensation, equity. The negotiation conversations at the partner-track and partner level. The specific compensation-transparency work some members have done in their firms. The honest acknowledgement that compensation in our industry is high and that we are negotiating for our parity in that high-compensation context.

Promotion politics. The make-it-or-quit moments. The decision to leave a firm where promotion was unlikely. The decision to stay through a hard year. The partner-vote dynamics. The senior-banker and senior-investor trajectories.

Africa-focused investing. The members investing on the continent and the specific market dynamics. The regulatory environment in specific countries. The fintech landscape across mobile money, payments, lending, and adjacent fields. The agritech, healthtech, edtech, and climate-tech sectors. The way international capital has and has not engaged with continental founders effectively.

VC and growth equity. The fundraising stages and the decisions about lead positions. The term sheets and the long negotiation of them. The board work. The value-add work post-investment. The portfolio company support. The exit strategy.

Founder-side conversations. Members who are funding and members who are running fintech and finance-adjacent companies. The capital-raising conversations between the two sides. The way honest peer dialogue across the table has helped both sides make better decisions.

Personal wealth. The financial-planning work for our own balance sheets. The investment-allocation decisions. The tax-planning. The estate-planning. The philanthropic decisions for members whose wealth has reached the threshold where structured giving is part of their work.

The structural conversation. The Black-woman-led fund data — the small percentage of total assets under management captured by Black-woman-led firms. The specific structural barriers in our industry. The slow shifts. The advocacy organizations working on it. The way our work is itself part of the change.

Mentorship across stages. The senior members mentoring associates and VPs. The structured pairing. The recruiting-pipeline work for early-career Black women in finance.

Cadence: a weekly thread for current market questions and specific deal conversations. A monthly long-form thread. A quarterly virtual session. An annual in-person closed-door retreat on macro and portfolio strategy.

Rules. Confidentiality on deal details, portfolio company information, and member compensation. No insider trading and no MNPI sharing. No deal solicitation across regulatory lines.

What we are: the senior peer group African and African-diaspora women in finance and investing have not historically had. We share deal flow. We share patterns. We negotiate at parity, together. We support each other through the long arc of senior-finance careers.

The subgroups inside the network. Investment banking, with separate channels for M&A, capital markets, leveraged finance, structured products, and the sector groups members lead. Public equities, with separate channels for long-only, hedge-fund, and sector-specific portfolio managers. Private markets, with separate channels for venture, growth equity, buy-out, infrastructure, and credit. Fintech, with separate channels for payments, lending, wealth-tech, and crypto-and-digital-assets where members operate. Each subgroup has rotating member-facilitators responsible for the conversation cadence and the guest-speaker schedule.

The investment-club track. A subset of members have built an internal investment club for personal-account investing. The club operates under SEC qualified-purchaser and accredited-investor rules. Members contribute to a pooled vehicle that invests alongside their professional positions. The club has had its own learning curve and members talk frankly about what has and has not worked.

The board-readiness track. Members preparing for first independent board seats and members currently serving on boards. The committee work — audit, comp, nominating-and-governance. The fiduciary duties. The specific dynamics for Black women board directors, where research has documented that we are often asked to do more committee work than peers with comparable backgrounds. The slow building of board portfolios across public, private, and nonprofit boards.

The continental track. African-continent finance is developing in specific directions — the rise of private credit, the build-out of pan-African banking, the African Continental Free Trade Area implementation for cross-border finance, the local-currency bond markets, and the gradual deepening of secondary trading. Members operating on the continent share intelligence on regulatory changes, transaction structures, and counterparty risk. Members in the diaspora investing into African opportunities benefit from this intelligence; continental members benefit from access to diaspora capital pools.

The philanthropic-finance track. Members whose wealth has reached the threshold for structured giving. The donor-advised funds. The private foundations. The mission-related investing within foundation portfolios. The specific organizations supporting African and African-diaspora founders, scholars, and movement builders that members have supported strategically.

Cadence inside the digital network: each subgroup has its own daily channel for market questions and deal questions. A weekly cross-subgroup long-form thread on a structural topic. A monthly virtual senior-circle for partner-level members. A quarterly in-person senior session in a major financial center rotating between London, New York, Lagos, and Johannesburg. An annual convening with full membership.