Most Influential Women in Fintech

Tanya Van Court, CEO of Goalsetter, learned the hard way how important a good financial education can be.

Van Court, who holds a master’s degree in industrial engineering from Stanford University, served as an executive at Covad Communications, a fast-growing high-speed Internet provider that went public in January 2000, raising more than $140 million. The shares she received from Covad’s initial public offering made Van Court a millionaire, but she failed to take an elementary step that might have protected some of her hard-earned dot-com wealth.

Van Court never diversified. She held onto all her shares and stock options. For a time it seemed like a wise decision as Covad shares, valued at $18 in the January 22, 2000 IPO, rose to nearly $21 a few months later. However, in February 2001, Covad disclosed weaknesses in its internal controls that would cause it to delay filing its annual 10-K and other financial reports with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In July 2001, Covad shares traded at 33 cents. The company filed for bankruptcy in August, wiping out what little was left of Van Court’s nest egg.

The daughter of an elementary school teacher in East Oakland, California, Van Court grew up in a family that valued education, but the curriculum never extended to financial literacy.

To her credit, Van Court bounced back from her stock market disaster. Over the next 13 years, Van Court would hold senior management positions at Cablevision, ESPN, Nickelodeon and Discovery. At the same time, Van Court vowed to provide the children with a high-quality financial education. She knew she had succeeded when her daughter, Gabrielle, asked for enough money to fund an investment account along with a bicycle as an eighth birthday present.

Van Court’s vision expanded to educate children around the country. In 2016, Van Court launched Goalsetter, a platform that helps young people and families save and invest while teaching them the finer points of money management. While Goalsetter offers a savings account and debit card for younger users, it puts a premium on financial literacy. It contains hundreds of financial literacy quizzes that parents can require their children to take. Under the optional “learn before you burn” rule, goal-setter debit cards will freeze on Sunday morning if kids haven’t completed those tasks, according to Van Court.

“We felt strongly that people needed to build a foundation that would allow them to have a better relationship with the economy, and that can only be done by teaching them the language of money,” Van Court said. Kids who save regularly are more likely to go to college and invest in stocks as young adults, Van Court added.

The Goalsetter platform offers marketing and educational content. Behind the scenes, bank and credit union partners provide the infrastructure for financial services. In 2021, for example, Montebello, New York-based Sterling Bancorp (which has since merged with Stamford, Connecticut-based Webster Financial) pledged to kickstart Goalsetter savings accounts for 1000 students by depositing $40 for them.

In 2022, US Bancorp conducted a pilot program, where more than 200 employees were asked to register their families in Goalsetter. Nearly three-quarters of participants said they planned to continue using Goalsetter after the eight-week pilot ended.

For Van Court, her efforts to raise investor money to fuel Goalsetter’s expansion have added another chapter to her own financial education. Goalsetter received $19 million from two oversubscribed investor rounds in 2021, but Van Court, one of the few Black CEOs and founders in the fintech space, found the process difficult.

“It was a female-led venture capital fund that gave me my seed round and a black-led fund that made my Series A round possible,” Van Court said. “Even with that, we collected a fraction of what our counterparts were.”

“While there is definitely more awareness of the need for diversification in the tech industry, highly qualified female entrepreneurs still face a very high rate of rejection due to the persistent bias in venture capital,” Van Court added. – John Reosti