With over 18 years of industry experience, Nisary M is the founder of 2 ventures: Hubwords Media and HerMoneyTalks and is an inspiration to many.
Nisary had always been passionate about empowering women financially and maybe this is why today she stands tall as a mentor for various women and startup platforms. In addition to this, she also helps budding writers to write with flair.
Her two initiatives, one being ‘Hubwords Media’, a content services and online branding firm and the other being ‘HerMoneyTalks’, India’s first one-stop financial platform for women, are living examples of her independent vision.
She says, “As part of my career and interactions with women, I came across many, who had little or no control of their finances and faced different problems because of that. Many of these problems aroused due to the typical approach of women when it comes to handling money. HerMoneyTalks was born as a result of this- to help women in their financial wellness and thereby, financially empowering them”.
At present, around 300 million women have not adopted basic financial products like small investments, health insurance, savings accounts or even micro-credit loans. As per a survey conducted by her organisation, around 45% of women quoted lack of confidence as a reason, which prevented them from investing independently, while 24% quoted a fear of being duped. Around 64% found the concept of money hard to understand.
Owing to the paucity of relevant information among these women, Nisary felt that it was important to address such issues in our country and this idea gave birth to HerMoneyTalks. It is a one-stop digital financial platform that helps women to independently and confidently purchase any financial product, through a unique 3-pronged ecosystem (advisory services, actionable knowledge, and female icons of financial empowerment) that guides them through the whole purchasing process. Till now, it is the only platform in India which offers solutions for the financial growth of women.
Within the first 10 months of its inception, the organisation had around 25,000 women joining in from different walks of life, which was an overwhelming response. However, not everything that appears shiny is gold. One of the biggest challenges that HerMoneyTalks faces is the amount of time women take to make a financial decision without any hassle. To curb this problem, the organisation is doing its best to provide quality education, confidence-building and hand-holding sessions for all its members to make them understand the need for financial and decision-making independence. Even during the COVID-19 pandemic, her team has undertaken focused measures to provide more value to their customers in the post-COVID world:
- Financial awareness workshop series converted to online webinar series
- Products being carefully curated so as to deliver maximum value and conserve cash
- Products and advisories being tailored to ensure long term security of clients
Currently HerMoneyTalks is looking for funding for their tech platform and scale up.
“What sets our organisation apart from banks, insurers, AMCs, Fintechs and other women-centric financial platforms is our ‘service component’, where we bring together a vast ecosystem of personal finance experts, mentors, advisors, counsellors and women icons to handhold each woman in the purchase cycle and help them build confidence. This one-to-one approach has helped me a lot to understand the specific problems women have,” says Nisary.
