Michelle Pearce-Burke has been praised for helping families to feel safe taking their children out this Halloween, through the Trick or Treat interactive map she designed in 2024. It highlights the properties that will welcome trick or treaters. Over 120,000 houses across the UK – and beyond – registered to use the site this spooky season.
It was not the first time that one of Michelle’s innovative ideas took off.
After studying medicine in Edinburgh, Michelle returned home to Guernsey, ready to change career paths, and found her passion in financial services. Beginning at a small, boutique stockbrokers, she progressed to Brooks Macdonald, and developed her skills through qualifications and local experience. After finding fault with the system, she decided to quit the firm and build a more approachable option for customers – a revolutionary website, named Wealthify.
‘By nature, I always look for problems to solutions that I think others don’t always see,’ she said.
‘And I felt the traditional world of asset management at the time was very paper-based and clunky. The technology that the rest of the world was adopting was just very slow to come to wealth management. That was coupled with the feeling that the industry was seen as “for the preserve of the elite and wealthy” – when actually, there were people like me and my friends who could have really benefited from that kind of help with our money.’
At the time, she said the only solutions she could find for those without thousands of pounds to invest, was DIY investing – which requires significant knowledge on stocks and shares.
‘Investing is not as hard as people make out,’ she said.
‘I think the industry uses a lot of jargon and smoke and mirrors to protect itself – so they can charge these high fees. But if you actually strip it back, stick to some basic principles, it doesn’t have to be difficult.’
Wealthify was designed to be a user-friendly and simple service – ‘for the many, not the few’ – teaching safe, sensible, low-cost investing. It was the first asset manager to let people invest from just one pound, and its percentage-based fees ensured no hefty, surprise bills down the line. Michelle realised she would have to digitise the site, to make it cost-effective and streamlined for the mass market. Using technology, she was also able to deliver a smarter system, that people could access from their phone.
It remains the only digital service that Channel Islanders can access.
‘We’re not trying to pull the wool over your eyes,’ she said.
‘We explain investing – educate you, rather than parent you. A lot of the relationships people have with wealth management is that parent/child dynamic. I wanted Wealthify to be more like a guidance, with you in control. If a customer then felt confident enough to try some DIY investing, we would see that as an evolution of the company – a sign that we had done a good job.’
Wealthify was second of its kind to market in the UK, with Nutmeg – which will soon lose its name to JP Morgan Personal Investing – as the first.
‘I always looked at Nutmeg and thought “It’s not as good as it could be”,’ said Michelle.
‘It still felt quite inaccessible. I wanted to take it to another level and offer a very simple solution. I’m not technical, but I’m good at piecing things together, and I loved that early stage of the company, building it. When it’s a small team working together, it’s exciting and you’re able to get things done really quickly. I also think it was a big advantage being so young – I didn’t have much to lose, I was super flexible going on business trips and working all hours, it was the perfect time to take on that risk. Although maybe I lacked some experience – and there was definitely judgment around that – I think I proved people wrong.’
Michelle said the biggest questions she would get asked at the time were concerning her experience as a woman in the industry. But she found it was ageism, not sexism, that posed more of an issue.
‘I would go into meetings and before making introductions, the body language spoke – people would position themselves to speak to the “adults” in the room,’ she said.
‘But I kind of liked it. It motivated me. When you’re young, you’re more likely to challenge things and want to shake things up.’
After going live in 2016, the following five years saw a wave of copycat models launch. Michelle said that most, eventually, died away – but Wealthify still remains, now under the ownership of the UK’s leading diversified insurer – Aviva.
Aviva first invested just two years after it launched, taking a majority stake.
‘That was huge for us,’ said Michelle.
‘It gave us funding that we desperately needed, access to their customer base and credibility. With that big backing, it unlocked the next stage of growth.’
Word soon spread and Michelle said the positive feedback came flooding in.
‘We talk a lot about mental health, but financial health is huge,’ she said.
‘When you feel confident in your finances, it can enormously help your mental health and your life in general. I heard multiple stories from people who just didn’t have a clue what to do with their money, who’d spent a lot of their life getting ripped off by IFAs and their money was in a mess – in all different places. Helping them to bring it all together under one roof and feel in control of it again definitely makes a huge difference. I think money can buy you happiness – you can’t say that, right? – but it does. It also buys you your time back, and that definitely brings happiness. One of my biggest joys is hearing how I’ve helped people to do that.’
Aviva acquired Wealthify fully in 2020, a week before Michelle gave birth to her first baby.
‘It was a weird time for the world, because it was right in the middle of Covid, and for me personally,’ she said.
‘I moved back to Guernsey and was on maternity leave. I’ve now been on and off maternity leave with subsequently another two babies. So I went from being super hands-on in the company, to doing much more contained roles.’
Now with Trick or Treat, and three girls aged five and under, Michelle has her hands full and is no longer a part of Wealthify, but said she keeps an eye on the company’s performance and is pleased to see it doing well.
‘My money is still all in Wealthify,’ she said.
‘I’m happy with the direction, though I think it’s gone in a different direction than it would have if I was still there. I probably would’ve been steering it towards my crazy ideas – with new directions and experimentation – but now it’s more focused on maturing as an organisation and becoming a stable part of the Aviva group.’
Michelle said she has considered getting back into finance, potentially by helping start-ups.
When asked what message she would give to young islanders looking to break the mould with their bright ideas, she said ‘just do it’.
‘And my advice, financially, would always be to save,’ she said.
‘Invest it. Put it aside. Build a safety net. In the world we live in, I know that’s hard to do – everyone’s trying to steal a bit with pointless products constantly advertised on our phones. It’s so easy to get sucked into that pit, but try and build healthy habits. Even £5 a month can start to accrue quickly. You never know what life might throw at you, so having that emergency savings pot is crucial. The great thing about a phone is, there’s always ways to earn money. Think outside the box and use technology positively. Maximise your time, to earn efficiently. Even at a young age, I’d be encouraging people to build a passive income – you don’t have to be physically at your job to be making money.’
Looking to the future, Michelle said she is curious to see how AI might play a role in the finance industry.
‘People are having deeply personal conversations with AI that they wouldn’t have with even their friends or family,’ she said.
‘It seems logical to me, then, that they would trust it with their money. I think it’s bubbling under the surface and it’s going be huge in the next decade – that intersection between AI and advice.’
Michelle added that she would also like to see financial literacy and education taught in school.
‘I’ve realised how poor that knowledge is in society and I think that’s something in Guernsey, that maybe we’ve got room to change,’ she said.
‘As a financial services hub, with so much talent on the island, I guess that’s an opportunity I would call out. There could be a great pioneering programme in Guernsey that could then roll out to the wider society.’
