She was named regional CEO of a financial and technology company at age 29, when she was five months pregnant. Of course, she was predestined and a precocious talent. And today Tali Solomon, who is now 34 years old, is still at the forefront of the management company eToro, as head of business in Spain, Portugal and Latin America.
It has been a long journey, dating back to World War II, when his Jewish ancestors from Poland and the Czech Republic emigrated to Argentina. Daughter of a carpenter father and a mother who worked in the artistic world, Tali Solomon was fascinated by economics and finance from a young age.
While studying economics at the National University of Rosario in Argentina, he went to see how the stock market worked thanks to the help of some family friends who operated in the sector: the Rosenthals.
But he soon understood that this way of working did not fit too well with his way of being. “It was like being in a black box.” And so, from Forex (operating in the sale and purchase of currencies) she embarked on an alternative path and made the leap towards Israel, attracted by the country’s thriving startup fabric.
From there he climbed the ranks of eToro, a company still with Israeli capital, founded and directed by investor Yoni Assia. In his professional career, Tali Solomon has followed the evolution of the stock markets in recent years. “Markets have never been as efficient as they are now in history. Information flows in real time and they have become very resilient. With the pandemic we believed that the world would end and it didn’t. Today external factors, such as geopolitics, have less influence than in the past, the market discounts negative events much earlier and monetary policy weighs more,” he comments, while the stock markets are at historic highs.
The eToro platform has more than 35 million users and operates in more than 100 countries. Its business model is focused on the retail investor, where the community exchanges information, shares content, learns from each other and copies other successful models. A form that today we would call “social investment” that aims to “democratize finance” and bring it closer to people who do not initially have high levels of financial education and as an alternative to more traditional banking services.
Spain is the largest market in the area she manages and Tali Solomon assures that Spaniards are very focused on stocks, including international ones. eToro has also specialized in investments in cryptocurrencies (one in three users in Spain do so). “Bitcoin is just a door to a larger technological development, in particular blockchain,” he says. “There is a whole world behind it.”
He prefers not to comment on political issues in Argentina after the arrival of Javier Milei (“what I am in favor of is financial freedom”). And, contrary to the perception that Tel Aviv is an unstable and dangerous place, he considers that it is a very safe place, “where six-year-old children can walk to school alone” and where the nightlife lasts until dawn, According to what seems like business as usual.
On the other hand, she claims to be concerned about the low levels of financial culture, especially in Spain. In fact, the firm published a study in 2020 according to which 78.8% of Spaniards considered that they did not have the knowledge to invest and up to 70% of those surveyed saw this as a barrier to improving their standard of living.
Living in a somewhat peripheral place in the Mediterranean, managing a company that has markets on the other side of your place of residence can be tiring. “I travel a lot,” admits Tali Solomon, as she is just finishing a meeting with businesswomen in a restaurant on Diagonal. You see it: Rosario, Tel Aviv, Barcelona.