How This 80-Year-Old Female Banking Pioneer Built A Fortune On Fintech SPACsBetsy Cohen, a lawyer, financier and entrepreneur, has been smashing glass ceilings since Richard Nixon was president — and she’s not slowing down.
After starting her own law firm, Cohen
founded a bank in 1974, ran it for a quarter century, then sold it for over $330 million. She then
started another bank, The Bancorp, focused on providing white-label banking and payment services to non-bank companies like PayPal, which she ran until the end of 2014.
In recent years, Cohen has emerged as a prolific dealmaker in the wild world of
special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs). She was early to the reverse merger craze, closing her first deal in March 2016. Since then, Cohen and partners, which include her son Daniel, have raised over
$4.2 billion across 13 SPAC listings, with six mergers completed to date.
Cohen’s independent thinking has netted her a fortune that Forbes estimates at
$230 million.
