Featuring

Valerie Mosley

Founder and Chief Visionary Officer, Upward Wealth

Valerie Mosley is passionate about the democratization of wealth in America, the leveling of the playing field for the under-served and teaching the world about how valuing themselves is the key to maximizing their wealth.

Val is the founder of Upward Wealth (DBA, BrightUp https://www.getbrightup.com), a fintech platform that democratizes wealth-building and well-being. Its differentiated underwriting algorithm expands access to Compassionate Capital to help end-users grow their net worth. Its content and coaching help end-users reinforce their self-worth.

A financial mind with humble beginnings, Val was born to a working class Philadelphia-area family and is one of 4 siblings. With a strong maternal support structure, she graduated with a BA from Duke University, and ultimately landed at the Wharton School of Finance, the premier financial University in the United States, where she completed her MBA. After various successful roles in finance, Val found a home at Wellington Management, LLP in Boston, a $1.2 trillion global money management firm. Val thrived while raising her 3 kids and identifying under-valued companies and increasing wealth for her clients in the process. She rose quickly to Partner and Senior Vice President at Wellington, managing billions for clients and charging the firm’s Industry Strategy Group. She sat on investment strategy groups that set key parameters for portfolio managers to follow.

Twenty years into her remarkable career at Wellington, she made a life-altering discovery. She came to realize that the people closest to her were “Un-banked” and living under a cloud of financial shame and guilt. While she had risen to the top of her profession in Finance, those close to her were falling victim to a system that left them without financial resources.

At that point, Val decided to make a shift that would change the lives of herself and her family, and she retired from Wellington and set out to correct the wealth/financial disparities in the US.

Val has become acutely aware of disparities in interest rates and the impact Federal rate hikes have on under served and under represented groups. Through Val’s work at BrightUp, she seeks to increase the financial fluency of those groups and impact individual self-worth, as studies have found links to lower productivity, and self esteem associated with financial debt.

To complement this philanthropic work, Val serves on the public company corporate boards of Envestnet (NYSE: ENV), DraftKings (NASDAQ: DKNG) and Eaton Vance’s family of mutual funds. She also serves on the boards of New Profit, New Commonwealth Fund and Caribou.

Valerie has been recognized as The International Person of the Year by The UK’s Power List, One of the 50 Most Powerful Women in Business and one of the Top 75 African Americans on Wall Street by Black Enterprise Magazine. She was also in the spotlight in 2023, recognized by the Executive Leadership Council (ELC) as one of the 10 Black Leaders in Finance.

Discussion Moderated by

Rebecca Patterson

CEE Board Chair and Former Chief Investment Strategist, Bridgewater Associates

Rebecca Patterson is a globally recognized investor and macro-economic researcher with more than 25 years’ experience studying how politics and policy intersect with economic trends to drive financial markets.

Most recently, Rebecca was Chief Investment Strategist and an executive committee member for Bridgewater Associates, the world’s largest hedge fund. In that role, Rebecca shaped the firm’s research agenda across geographies and asset classes, oversaw development of new strategies to help large institutional clients solve their most pressing challenges, and shared her insights via Bridgewater’s Daily Observations publication.

Previously, Rebecca was Chief Investment Officer of Bessemer Trust, overseeing $85 billion in client assets. During her time there, Rebecca was a member of the firm’s Management Committee and helped launch their Diversity & Inclusion Committee. Before joining Bessemer in 2012, Rebecca spent more than 15 years at JPMorgan. There she worked as a researcher in the firm’s investment bank in Europe, Singapore and the U.S. She also served as Chief Investment Strategist in the asset management arm of the firm and ran the Private Bank’s global currency and commodity trading desk. Rebecca’s transition to finance came after several years working as a journalist, covering financial markets, policy and politics in the U.S. and Europe.

Rebecca is currently a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Economic Club of New York. She has served on the New York Federal Reserve’s Investor Advisory and Foreign Exchange committees. She also serves on the University of Florida’s Investment Corporation Advisory Board and was Chair of the Board for three years. She currently chairs the Council for Economic Education and is a member of the board of the Bretton Woods Committee. Rebecca’s insights are frequently sought after by the media; she co-hosted the first-ever television program dedicated to foreign-exchange markets: CNBC’s “Money in Motion.“

Rebecca holds an M.B.A. from New York University, an M.A. in International Relations from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, and a B.S. in Journalism from the University of Florida. She was included in American Banker’s list of Most Powerful Women in Finance for six consecutive years and was named to Forbes’ 50 over 50 in 2022.