Katherine Salisbury, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Qapital — Automating Healthy Saving Habits
In today’s episode, I’m joined by Katherine Salisbury of Qapital, an app that empowers users by supercharging savings, investing, and budgeting goals.
Katherine and I cover a range of topics, including:
Katherine’s Background:
After graduating from Cornell Law School, Katherine worked as a bank finance attorney at White & Case and at Simpson Thacher. After that, she became VP and Counsel at Jefferies Finance. Starting in 2009, she also ran a sports agency, Friedman & Salisbury Sports Management LLC, with her partner George Friedman. Despite this career success, Katherine and George found that they weren’t meeting savings goals they had set out for themselves. While attempting to solve this problem, Qapital was born. Since then, Qapital has helped users save almost $3B collectively for their personal goals.
Qapital:
Katherine found that naming savings goals, such as “Piano” or “Trip to Kenya” helped her save money more effectively. This realization was the first idea behind Qapital. The team has since expanded from the Nordics to the U.S. market. While scaling, Katherine also worked closely with a behavioral economist, building healthy savings habits directly into the application. The product now detects when users’ paychecks hit their account, helps automate savings, and keeps track of weekly discretionary spending. Furthermore, the app consolidates information across other banking and wealth management accounts.
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Katherine Salisbury:
Ten years ago, Katherine set out to find a solution to her family’s money management headaches — one that actually aligned with their motivations, goals and lifestyle. A few years later, Qapital was born. Today, Katherine serves as co-founder and co-CEO of Qapital — an app that empowers users by putting their personal goals at the core of the product, and then supercharging their savings, investing, and budgeting efforts with clever tips and tools rooted in behavioral psychology. Katherine brings 20 years of finance, legal, and business experience to Qapital. She graduated from the University of Chicago with honors, studied international business law at Bucerius Law School in Hamburg, and graduated from Cornell Law School. She began her career as a bank finance attorney at the top-tier international law firms White & Case and Simpson Thacher. From there, she was tapped to serve as VP and Counsel at Jefferies Finance, steering Jefferies Finance through the early days of the joint venture between Jefferies and MassMutual. She then founded an international full-service sports management agency based in Stockholm & New York City, where she specialized in brokering international transfers. In her current role at Qapital, Katherine focuses on product, growth, and business strategy. Under her leadership, Qapital has helped users save almost $3 billion collectively for their goals. Currently, Katherine lives in Stockholm with her partner, co-founder, and co-CEO, George Friedman, and their four daughters.
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About the Author:
Anirudh Singh is a second-year MBA Candidate at The Wharton School, where he is part of the Wharton FinTech Podcast team. He has a passion for economic development, venture capital, financial services, and all things FinTech. Don’t hesitate to reach out with questions, comments, feedback, and opportunities at singhan@wharton.upenn.edu.
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