The newest guest in our #BlackWealthMatters series is entrepreneur Yemi Rose. He is the founder of OfColor, a digital financial wellness platform focused on providing content and banking tools built around how people of color save, spend, and build our legacies differently.

• We discuss the role financial services has played and continues to play in widening the racial wealth gap.
• Growing up in Jamaica and the differences of “being Black” there versus here in the United States.
• Why we may want to rethink the expression “racial wealth gap.” Does it deserve a renaming?
• How his startup OfColor will provide better access to financial tools and education to an underserved community.

Yemi has spent almost two decades at the intersection of financial services and communications/marketing focused on financial wellness, most recently as the Vice President of Financial Wellness Enterprise Initiatives with Prudential Financials’ Global Communications Group.

In this most recent role, he led the development of Prudential’s Financial Wellness Census research project, as well as “The Cut,” which focused on underserved consumers. He writes and speaks extensively on the racial wealth gap, and his writings on the subject have been published in Black Enterprise, The Root, Blavity, and Money.com.

After beginning his career as a Capital Markets Intelligence Associate for Thomson Financial, he served as an Investor Relations Director for several top-tier financial communications agencies, before moving to in-house roles. He has served as a senior executive at KPMG and BlackRock Inc., where he worked on helping them to maximize the value of their acquisitions and fintech ventures.

He holds both a bachelor’s and a Master’s degree from Cornell University. Yemi was born and raised in Jamaica, and now lives with his wife and two daughters in New Jersey.