Entrepreneur · Author · Building wealth infrastructure for the overlooked
Yemi
Rose
I came here from Jamaica at seventeen and spent twenty years inside American finance. Now I build the tools it never built for the people it left out.
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The book
What Color Is Your Money?
My book, out January 27, 2027 from Wiley. It is about money and race, and what it costs the country to pretend they are unrelated.
Read more and preorder →This powerful memoir is an important reminder that policy must meet people's actual needs. I first met Yemi when he was thinking about how to address the retirement system's inequalities. That's a hard task, and it was inspiring to watch him go from concept to delivery. This book is required reading for anyone who wants to better understand the immigrant experience, how systems work, and how to improve financial outcomes.
Who I am
I came to the United States from Jamaica at seventeen and spent nearly two decades inside financial services, at BlackRock, KPMG, and Prudential. I had come from public relations, where the work was shaping what a company appeared to be worth. I stayed curious about the same question in a new setting: how value gets communicated and acted on, whether the thing being valued is an asset or a person.
I was also learning how to be a Black man in America, and navigating family trauma, and both changed what I could see. Money, like race, is a fiction held up by what we believe about value. The industry I worked in ignored that connection, which failed the people it meant to serve and cost the industry the chance to reach them.
Then I founded OfColor, an enterprise financial health platform built unapologetically for workers of color. We worked with thousands of employees at large retailers and companies including CVS, Verizon, and DaVita. That work taught me how complicated the relationship becomes when a person of color sets out to build wealth in America. Financial Finesse acquired the company in 2024.
WeGood Equity
I run WeGood Equity, where I'm bringing together two theories of Black economic development long treated as rivals. Du Bois's Talented Tenth: train and work with gifted graduates to build the tools that scale equity. Booker T. Washington's skilled labor: back the businesses and workers building wealth on the ground. The argument was always a false choice, and so WeGood is doing both: building the fintech tools our community should have been sold, and backing the people who build wealth where they live.
