The numbers are not abstract. Over the next decade, $100 trillion in wealth will move to the next generation — and $30 trillion of that will land in the hands of women. Within five years, women will control close to half of all global wealth.
That is not a projection about a distant future. It is a description of the present tense.
At InCharge, The WIE Suite and DVF's gathering of more than 150 women leaders, founders, and cultural changemakers, this reality set the terms for one of the afternoon's most galvanizing conversations. Moderated by Alyse Nelson, CEO of Vital Voices, the session brought together Ida Liu — two months into her tenure as CEO of HSBC and formerly the head of Citi Private Bank — and Ita Ekpoudom, partner at Allraise, the community-driven organization working to move more capital into the hands of women founders and fund managers. Together, they made the case that the great wealth transfer is not simply a financial event. It is a structural shift in who holds power — and what they choose to do with it.
Liu opened with a clarity that cut through the noise. "Women are going to control close to 50% of global wealth in the next five years," she said. "Let me repeat that." In two decades of working with the world's most sophisticated families, she had watched this moment building. What makes it significant, she argued, is not the scale alone — it is what women tend to do with capital once they hold it. "Women and the next generation invest with purpose. They care deeply about how they're investing, and so we're going to see some serious seismic shifts in investment behaviors around the world."
The reasons women are inheriting so much, so quickly, are not incidental. Women outlive their spouses. They are now the majority of graduates from medical, law, and business schools. They have been accumulating professional and financial power for decades — even as political and institutional power has lagged behind. The wealth transfer, Liu suggested, is in many ways an overdue reckoning.
Ekpoudom grounded the conversation in what that reckoning looks like at the investment level. Allraise, the fund started by Theresia Gouw and Lili Balfour, is entirely focused on putting capital behind women-led companies and funds — and on changing who writes the checks. "Less than 2% of venture capital goes to women founders," she noted. "And if you're not sitting across the table from someone who understands your lived experience and your product, getting that capital is hard." The solution, she argued, is not charity. It is upstream intervention — getting more women into decision-making seats so that capital flows differently downstream.
The conversation turned from the movement of capital to the shape of leadership — and both women were candid about what it has cost them, and what it has required, to lead in spaces not built for them.
Liu introduced a concept she has carried throughout her career: DQ, or Decency Quotient. "It's how we show up, how we treat each other, how we lift each other up, and how we work collaboratively toward the same goals." In finance, where she operates between what she described as the glass ceiling and the bamboo ceiling — only 3% of Fortune 500 CEOs are of Asian descent — DQ has been both a personal philosophy and a strategic tool. "My leadership has never been just about delivering results, which is a given," she said. "It's about how many more seats I can pull up to the table. How many more opportunities I can create for the women in my organization."
Her approach to building those cultures has been, by finance's standards, unconventional. She brought Buddhist monks to leadership meetings to guide meditation. She brought in nutritionists, fitness experts, conversations about sleep. "You are only as good as the people you are with," she said, "and for them to be their best selves, you have to support their health and wellness first."
Ekpoudom echoed the importance of community as infrastructure — not just for individual leaders, but for the broader movement of capital. "It's very lonely to be a founder or a fund manager who is betting on herself," she said. Research supports what Vital Voices has seen across 192 countries and 49,000 women leaders: when women are part of non-hierarchical, non-competitive networks, they take bolder risks. The community is not incidental to the outcome. It is the mechanism.
Alyse Nelson pressed both women toward the concrete. If this moment is real — if the transfer is already underway — what can the women in the room actually do with it?
Ekpoudom's answer was immediate and tactical. Start with your own financial picture. Use AI tools to take stock of where you are, what your goals are, and what the gap looks like. "Put in all of your financial information and ask: what is the state of my finances? What would you suggest? Have it explain things to you until you can explain them to your child or your best friend." And then, critically: look at who is managing your money. "If your financial advisor dismisses you, makes you feel belittled, makes you scared to ask questions — 90% of women change their wealth managers. You need to sit in front of someone who listens."
Liu pointed to the investment opportunity embedded in this moment for those with capital to deploy. She described Allraise's recent investment in a founder whose platform brings AI-powered personalized learning to community colleges — a woman whose path included an undiagnosed learning difference, an early failure, and a father who told her the problem was not with her, but with the system that had failed to see her. The California community college system is now her first major customer. "When you intervene in that one moment," Ekpoudom said, "what do you do with it? That's what her father understood."
As a coda, the conversation turned to women's sports — and the velocity of what is happening there. Ekpoudom, an angel investor in Unrivaled, the three-on-three women's basketball league co-founded by Breanna Stewart and Napheesa Collier, described how the league sold out Barclays Arena in three weeks. "They made $45 million in two years," she said. "And the WNBA just signed new collective bargaining numbers because women are about to get paid."
Liu closed on the note she'd opened with — but with more urgency behind it. "Those who lean in and embrace this shift are going to be the winners. It is not just a moment in time. It is happening at full force."
This session was part of InCharge: A Gathering for Women Shaping What's Next, hosted by The WIE Suite and Diane von Furstenberg at DVF headquarters in New York on March 18, 2026.
