Our task was to help people invest more confidently, intelligently and effectively by amplifying the knowledge gap.

BREAKTHROUGH THINKING In the financial world, numbers don’t lie. And soon, we found that the gap we set out to amplify wasn’t the most critical gap to solve. Research shows that companies with female leaders tend to be more profitable. Despite this, just 7% of CEOs of publicly listed companies are women. To make matters worse, when companies actually appoint a female CEO, their share price can drop by 2 to 3% as biased investors sell their shares upon hearing of their appointment.

Our Insight: Bias against female leaders isn’t just bad for society, it’s bad for bottom lines.

There was a huge opportunity for DEGIRO to turn the cause of a problem into the solution itself, helping raise awareness and potential gains at the same time.

CREATIVE IDEA Pink Chip is the first live index to track the performance of women-led businesses and reframe market bias as a missed investment opportunity.

For the first time, investors could see for themselves how investing in women is better for their bottom line and, through DEGIRO’s platform, choose to directly buy shares in women-led companies — boosting their returns while also supporting female leaders.

EXECUTION Pink Chip used AI and name recognition software to trawl through an extensive data-set of corporate structure filings and create a list of women-led companies, a list that didn’t exist before.

In addition to requiring a female leader (Pink Chip is inclusive of all female-identifying people), the index had criteria based on market capital and consistent revenue growth to rule out “caretaker CEOs” and the glass cliff effect. DEGIRO then enlisted Thematic, an AI-powered investment research platform, to collect the back-end data on which Pink Chip is built and refresh the list of companies on a daily basis.

The index, the companies featured, and the methodology used to create Pink Chip are all freely available on PinkChip.org. Pink Chip is also on DEGIRO where investors can compare its success to other indices and choose to invest in women-led businesses that attract their attention. DEGIRO also maintains a Pink Chip Top List that highlights Pink Chip’s top performing companies.

Pink Chip was launched on International Women’s Day at Amsterdam’s Euronext, the oldest stock exchange in the world - a fitting location for the start of an investment revolution.?The initiative, however, isn’t just for the benefit of investors.

By promoting the power of female leadership, it contributes to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 5.5: Ensure women’s equal opportunities for leadership in political, economic and public life - because of this, UN Women NL joined as a launch partner to offer guidance during development and amplify Pink Chip’s message.

RESULTS PinkChip.org attracted 70,000 visitors within its first week. Within the first three weeks, over 14,500 DEGIRO users invested over $6.2 billion in Pink Chip companies. The stock price of Pink Chip companies increased by 6.7%, while the index as a whole increased by 9.48%. The initiative has also been championed by academics who now, for the first time, have an open data-set of female-led companies to use across their research. On top of all this, thanks to the support of UN Women NL and grassroots activists, Pink Chip made over 58m online impressions and reached over 85m people.

IMPACT With minimal media support, Pink Chip continues to outperform market benchmarks and create change where real change starts: the bottom line.

- Advisory board of entrepreneurs established across 5 countries - Pink Chip ticker added to Bloomberg - Open data-set leveraged for academic research - Development of more indices across global stock exchanges has begun - Talks underway for index integration in EU, UK, Canada and more

Pink Chip outperforms benchmarks by +80% across four years and continues to rise.