Financial wellness is more than just a trendy buzzword to Ennie Lim. It’s a hard-to-reach goal that’s consumed and defined her entire life.
Today, Lim is the co-founder and CEO of financial solution platform HoneyBee, which offers 0% APR loans of up to a thousand dollars to employees in need as well as personalized financial coaching. But her path to the C-suite was hard-won.
At age nine, Lim and her family immigrated to Montreal, Canada, from Malaysia. When an unexpected medical condition left Lim’s father unable to work, her mother was forced to assume the role of sole breadwinner for a family of four. Lim watched her struggle to make ends meet, living paycheck to paycheck and relying on last-minute loans from employers when money got tight.
“It was really intimidating,” says Lim, who developed a warped perception of financial stability. “All I knew about my finances was to save every dollar and not to look at my bank account.”
That mentality followed Lim well into adulthood. After moving to the United States in 2011 at the age of 26, Lim was what is known as “credit invisible,” a term coined to describe individuals who have no credit history with any of the three major credit bureaus — Experian, Equifax or TransUnion — and is therefore unable to prove any creditworthiness.
She didn’t begin building credit until after she got married — when she only did so using her husband’s line of credit. “We never even thought twice about what would happen if we got divorced,” says Lim, who’s now 38. “Never wanted to put our mind in that state.”
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But after seven years, she and her husband did divorce, an event that proved to be much more fiscally devastating for Lim. On top of the reality of a plummeting credit score, Lim was faced with expensive attorney fees and nowhere to go to help her pay them.
Suddenly, things she had previously considered attainable — a loan, an apartment, a car and even a job — fell out of reach. Forced to restart her financial journey from scratch, Lim moved into her parent’s basement back in Montreal.
“It was a really humbling experience,” she says. “[I felt like I] hit rock bottom. But when you hit rock bottom, there's nowhere to go but up from there.”
As a woman and a person of color, Lim’s experience is hardly unique. The lending space has always disproportionately affected minorities: Lenders deny mortgages for Black applicants at a rate 80% higher than that of white applicants, according to 2020 data from the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act. And when women are tested on their personal finance knowledge, just 38% answered questions correctly, according to the Personal Finance Index.
The statistics surrounding financial literacy — and the significant gap for women — hit home for Lim, who knows how much misinformation can impact a woman in a situation like hers.
“I speak to so many women,” she says. “And finance is the main reason why they're not getting divorced — because they’re afraid of what will happen to them after.”
It was there in her parent’s basement, still reeling from the events that landed her in that position and without any job prospects, that Lim realized she wanted to create the solution to her very own problem.
“Not everyone has faced financial challenges,” Lim says. “But everyone has a story.”
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Keeping her own in mind, Lim knew the importance of accessible
Together, the trio created and launched HoneyBee in 2016, the first service of its kind that charges companies a premium and provides loans directly to employees at 0% APR. That way, those in need can avoid the use of more traditional banks, which often penalize BIPOC borrowers through high interest rates and the inability to bolster their credit score.
“Employers should play a much bigger part in making sure that they can provide equitable and inclusive solutions,” Lim says. “People come from different socioeconomic backgrounds and they're not going to talk about it at work, but that's the reality.”
In the beginning, Lim and her co-founders bootstrapped HoneyBee before raising pre-seed capital in 2017. The process was brutal, Lim recalls: they pitched more than 100 VCs and were down to $200 in their bank account when they finally got their first check from investors.
After having led HoneyBee’s sales team for the company’s earliest formative years, Lim was elevated to the role of CEO in July of 2019, a transition she didn’t take lightly.
“Silicon Valley and FinTech especially is mostly male dominated,” she says. “It's important for women to keep taking down those barriers and obstacles, and it's important to have men as our allies. My two co-founders have been my number one support in all of this.”
Walter Balmas, head of consumer success at HoneyBee, was the first colleague to suggest Lim take on a bigger leadership role, largely because of her dedication to promoting clients’ stories, as well as her own.
“As a startup, you need to be really good at telling a story,” Balmas says. “Our storyteller is Ennie. At the end of the day, she is a person who inspires and lives what she believes.”
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Those stories have helped HoneyBee attract top talent like Balmas, who previously worked in the student loan sector for nearly three decades. HoneyBee's mission, Balmas says, would allow him to redefine diversity, equity and inclusion at other companies — it’s not enough for HR departments to understand that there are financial discrepancies between demographics if they don’t implement the tools to create change and
At the end of the day, Balmas says he feels like his work is contributing to something great. His previous work felt very transactional; at HoneyBee an approval of a $400 loan for an employee matters.
“We're on to something,” he says. “We can help [employers] make sure that a diverse workforce has the tools they need so that they feel they belong.”
That commitment to closing the diversity gap drew Lisa Sordilla, VP of HR at HR technology solution platform Energage, to roll out HoneyBee within her own department.
“Given the events of last year, it's time for [HR] to do more and not just say they support equity in the workplace,” Sordilla says. “What are some things you could be doing? Are your benefits equitable? That's important to me.”
Because Energage is a software company with comparatively high wages, many of its employees don’t need to utilize HoneyBee’s loaning services, according to Sordilla. The real value of HoneyBee at Energage instead lies in its coaching opportunities — because “financially stable” doesn’t always mean “financially knowledgeable.”
“I use financial coaching myself,” Sordilla says. “I set out with three financial goals for 2020 and I met all three of them. I’ve benefited so much from just having an accountability partner in my coach and having someone to help me think about things differently.”
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That kind of feedback is music to Lim’s ears, and proves her long-ago hunch to be right: That plenty of people from plenty of socioeconomic backgrounds are craving a reliable and emotionally safe space to prioritize their personal finances. It’s the kind of space Lim wanted, but never found.
“I just wished that I’d had the ability to ask for help,” she says, reminiscing on the events that led her to where she is today. “And when I think of my mom growing up, I wish she’d had somebody to rely on as well.”
Despite making big strides towards that very vision, one where no one finds themselves in the same position as she did, Lim says HoneyBee — which now has 20 employees — is far from finished working towards its goals.
“We will continue to grow,” she says. “Even as we close our next round of funding and our team doubles [in size], it's important to me to always maintain our culture and our core values and make sure that everyone embodies that as we grow.”
