Zainab Williams, a certified financial planner in Canada, told a Toronto festival audience in October 2026 that the women who come to her for help are not overspending, they are underpaid.
“Sometimes it’s not even a spending problem, it’s an income problem,” she said.
That sentence is the argument underneath FundEvolve, the company she founded. She had the idea in 2020 and launched it in 2024 as a budgeting and debt repayment web app. Her own site puts it plainly: a financial system built for professional women, so that every decision feels confident rather than guessed at. The target she has set herself is 100,000 plans for 100,000 women.
The newest piece of it is a tool she calls the AI-BS Detector. It reads the video content financial influencers post and assigns an Influencer Advice Safety Score, on a scale running from safe to caution to high risk. The reason it exists is the gap she describes: the people who most need advice are the ones the advice industry will not sit down with.
“They don’t have $500,000 to qualify to see an advisor,” she said, giving that figure as the threshold that keeps ordinary earners out of a planner’s office.
So they go where the advice is free. “It’s very hard for you to be able to get good financial advice that is unbiased,” she said.
Williams is specific about what she thinks artificial intelligence is good for, and it is not answers. “AI has really given people access to information, but what we are building is the decision framework of it,” she said.
The system she built sorts spending into categories rather than totals, and that is where her argument lands. “Even with the way I built this spending plan, we have different categories,” she said. A woman who can see that almost everything she earns goes on the basics is not looking at a discipline problem. She is looking at a pay problem, and a pay problem does not get fixed at the grocery store.
FundEvolve has raised more than $50,000 in grant funding and Williams has self-funded the rest. She studied at York University in Toronto. She is now looking to partner with small businesses of fewer than 800 employees, which is a route to women who have never had a planner and were never going to pay for one.
The threshold and the figures she cites are hers, and they describe the Canadian market she works in.
