Women’s wealth fintech Super Fierce raises $1.5 million seed round

Female-founded fintech Super Fierce has raised $1.5 million in a seed capital to help women build better financial security.

The round was led by angel investor Raymond Spencer, supported by Seed Space Venture Capital, Andrew Hamilton, Chapman Capital Partners, and Southern Angels members.

Super Fierce founder Trenna Probert said that a majority of her backers were women, however, their cheque size was an average 24% smaller than her male investors, which highlights the problem she’s looking to solve.

The funds will be used to scale up operations and marketing, build out the proprietary technology, and launch a number of new products on the superannuation comparison platform.

The super advice startup has build several distribution partnerships with companies such as MyRewards, while in beta mode, and Probert has set herself the goal of helping women save $100 million in lifetime superannuation fees by the end of this financial year. She’s already a quarter of the way to that goal.

For Probert, Super Fierce is personal. She recounts being 34, with an 18-month-old son, when she had to borrow $3000 from her parents to leave a relationship and start again. Despite a prior high-flying career, she recalls nights where she couldn’t afford to feed her child.

The fintech veteran rebuilt her finances, including time as Head of Strategy at Macquarie Bank, and emerged determined to change the experience for women who follow. She founded Super Fierce with Keith Moore and her husband, Craig Swanger, Macquarie’s and former chief investment officer in 2019.

Probert said multiple studies on the superannuation retirement gap between men and women ranged between 34-67%.

“Many of these studies, however, incorrectly exclude the huge number of people that retire with no super at all, and the vast majority of those are women. So these numbers are much lower than reality,” she said.

“Our calculations suggest the median super balance at retirement for women is 50% lower than for men, and we believe this is unacceptable.”

Probert says mothers pay an even higher cost.

“The average penalty is $280,000 for a woman with two children who takes an average six years out of paid work and then returns to part time work,” she said.

“Super Fierce helps women to minimise this penalty through a number of scalable wealth advice strategies, beginning with removing unnecessary fees.”

A Super Fierce analysis led Probert to conclude that the average Australian woman could save $102,000 in super fees in her lifetime by switching to a lower-cost fund.

She’s also established the Fierce Impact foundation, with the goal of donating $100 million to disenfranchised Australian women. To do that, Probert has pledged to contribute $100 to the foundation for every person who switches funds, with a target of one million women making the change.