Good morning, Broadsheet readers! Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo talks Olympics, Adidas appoints former WNBA player Candace Parker as president of its women's basketball business, and a new fintech platform wants to make it easier for couples to combine finances—and put more women in the driver's seat. Have a thoughtful Thursday!
- Financial planning. When Emily Luk and Channing Allen started talking about getting engaged, they took early steps toward combining their finances. They asked each other questions on a list of topics to discuss with your partner before getting married. The couple—who met while working at the fintech startup Even, later acquired by Walmart—went from sending Venmo requests to split the costs of big trips to figuring out how they would buy a house or raise kids.
Throughout the process, they realized that combining finances for people in their demographic—millennials marrying in their 30s—wasn't simple. Everyone they knew was getting married after at least a decade in the workforce and was accustomed to managing their money independently. And their friends relied on a laundry list of apps, from budgeting apps to investment roboadvisors to their regular bank. Those apps were designed for one user; while many platforms allow for a secondary user who can view accounts, most do not allow two users to deposit and withdraw funds. "Existing institutions made this very patriarchal assumption that only one person in the relationship is ever really involved in managing the money," Luk says.
