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Former Intuit and PayPal CEO Launches New Wealth Management Site

Posted By Joshua Condon On September 20, 2011 @ 5:23 pm In Apps,Business Accounting Software,Business Software,E-Commerce,Innovation,Internet and Online Business,Smartphones and PDAs | No Comments

If you’ve got a few hundred thousand to a few million dollars of investable assets, you’re probably in need of some help with your finances. That’s according to the creators of Personal Capital, a new wealth management site targeting the lower end of the high-net-worth client base, who say that such a financial threshold is under-served by mutual funds and self-directed brokerages but too low to warrant the attention or expense of private money managers.

But don’t make the mistake of dismissing Personal Capital as Mint for rich folk: the site (and attendant mobile apps) offers some pretty amazing aggregation and data-crunching functionalities, and the free dashboard organizer will be useful to anyone looking to not only organize their disparate accounts–banking, credit card, mortgage, 401K, loans, stock portfolio, etc.–but take advantage of advanced analytics that provide a detailed, sophisticated financial overview and advice engine.

Personal Capital was founded by Bill Harris, no stranger to the intersection of the tech and financial worlds as former chief executive of both Intuit and PayPal. The new product aims to provide the best of both worlds, offering the transparency of an online broker with the advice and insight of a wealth management professional. (And there are professionals involved: on the money-making side of things, the Personal Capital’s free dashboard organizer is a way to onboard customers with $100,000 or more of investable assets to their fee-based personal financial adviser service; the advisers work on a non-commission-based fee structure to eliminate the conflict of interest inherent in many money-management services.) In fact, the company’s internal mantra has been “Completeness, Awareness, Insight and Action,” the idea that sound financial decision-making comes from a complete 360-degree view of one’s financial situation, an understanding of how one’s money is invested and where, and “the type of information and advice your bank or broker can’t tell you, or won’t” according to Personal Capital co-founder and chief strategy officer Rob Forreger.

To that end, the service allows you to track income, spending, expenses, investment allocation across accounts, cash positions, account balances and upcoming bills, and thanks to the aggregation software clients can upload accounts in a matter of minutes. But moving beyond the idea of an advanced budget planner, Personal Capital can also tell you how much you’re paying in mutual fund and other fees (and how much you’ll pay over the next 20 years), build a green business-heavy portfolio and eliminate “sin stocks” for the conscientious capitalist (or whatever other type of portfolio suits you), make allocation recommendations, generate a daily monitor email alert to show the client what’s in motion and even generate a client’s net worth–a simple-sounding idea that in reality requires a holistic construction of financial information both online (all one’s aforementioned accounts) and offline (the value of a home and other assets).

“This is a full financial service built specifically around every customer, as opposed to a top-down dumping of general product to every customer” says Foregger. “It’s wealth management for the internet era: don’t just sell me more products–give me a solution.”


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