When Christina Hobbs founded Verve Super, Australia’s first superannuation fund for women, there wasn’t much conversation in the financial world around using superannuation to invest through a gender lens.
Meanwhile, Hobbs was asking herself how super could be invested into gender-focused projects, like social housing for women. Or, how superannuation holders might be able to use their ownership to encourage companies to have better gender equality practices.
“If I look at what’s been achieved in a short period of time, I have real confidence that in the next 5 to 10 years, we can really start to see superannuation money in this country being used for good,” Hobbs tells Angela Priestley on Women’s Agenda‘s new podcast series Spotlight On Women, just weeks after Future Super announced the acquisition of Verve Super.
“I think at a policy level, there’s still this kind of confusion and lack of real clarity about what we want this money to be used for,” Hobbs says. “But I think, increasingly, the government is thinking about it. So I have a huge optimism there as well.”
As founder of Verve, Christina has won a large lineup of awards, including being named Emerging Entrepreneur of the Year at our 2018 Women’s Agenda Leadership Awards.
Before that, she had spent 10 years working for the United Nations across complex humanitarian emergencies, where her work included connecting some of the poorest and most vulnerable people in the world to the financial services system– often to provide life-saving assistance and livelihood support.
Hobbs has designed women-focused microfinance agriculture projects in Gaza. She’s established mobile banking and block chain technology to deliver assistance in a number of conflict zones, and she led programs registering Syrians in Turkey with the social security and banking systems to receive EU humanitarian aid– one of the largest aid projects ever in the world.
It was in 2018, when she then turned her attention to building the financial power of women in Australia and providing an opportunity to invest in money for good.
“What brought me back to super,” says Hobbs, “was that I decided to take a year off and come back to Australia to do climate change campaigning.”
“I’d saved up a lot of money from living in all these wonderful locations and not having anything to spend it on, so I decided to come back and just do a year of unpaid climate activism.”
“I started looking at divestment campaigning– so getting people to take money out of fossil fuels to put pressure on big financial institutions like banks not to invest in fossil fuels.”
That’s when she realised there was no superannuation fund in Australia that wasn’t investing in fossil fuels.
Around that same time, Hobbs also met a few people that were starting Future Super, and says she “suddenly became aware of this enormous challenge around women’s retirement savings and superannuation”.
“So that was then what led me to start thinking about how we build a fund that advocates for this,” she says.
Hobbs co-founded Verve Super in April 2018 and it quickly became known as Australia’s first superannuation fund, specifically tailored for women.
“It was just one of those ideas where I was like why has no one done this. Why doesn’t this exist?” says Hobbs about Verve Super.
“I think if you’ve looked at the last 300 years of the stock market, it has always gone up,” she says, noting that this might not happen every year or every day, but on the whole, this is the case.
“So I think anyone who’s wondering if they should care about it on an individual level– absolutely.”
Looking at the superannuation system as a whole as well, Hobbs feels optimistic that there’s a real opportunity to create positive change through superannuation.
“Whoever owns superannuation money owns half the australian stock exchange,” she says, adding that if we can’t change the way that superannuation money is invested, we simply can’t turn off the tap to new fossil fuel investments and we can’t change our economy because that money is so powerful now.”
Hear more of Christina Hobb’s career journey on episode one of the Spotlight on Women series, where Women’s Agenda examines key industry areas to profile women building game-changing and influential careers with purpose, thanks to our partnership with Grant Thornton Australia.