You don?t have to be part of the 1 percent to have trouble understanding the full range of your investments.
With more Americans opening up an IRA, 401(k) and college savings accounts for their children, keeping track of your ?net worth hasn?t been getting any easier.
Personal Capital's new free iPad app.
Personal Capital, a Redwood City startup, looks at the current crop of investment tools and sees a big opportunity. Today the company released a free iPad app designed to give investors an at-a-glance look at their net worth, updated in real time across a wide range of financial products.
?The problem that affluent Americans, or any household with complex finances faces is that they?re not in control,? said Personal Capital founder Bill Harris, former CEO of Intuit and PayPal. ?The decision-making about their financial life is fragmented and discombobulated. What we?re trying to do is pull all of these things together.?
The company?s approach has been to develop an app that, once connected to a user?s financial accounts, presents a variety of financial information in attractive charts and graphs. The design ?mimics the clean look of Mint, the financial management tool now owned by Intuit.
But it tries to go further than Mint by offering tools aimed at more sophisticated investors. One example that could help the app gain traction in Silicon Valley: Personal Capital will track the value of stock options over time, which startup employees may have trouble doing by themselves.
The goal is to get users of the free service to hire Personal Capital to manage their assets. For a fee of less than 1 percent, the company offers to help clients with complex issues like tax optimization. It?s aimed at what Harris calls ?the mass affluent,? with assets of at least $100,000.
So far the company has signed up 10,000 clients with assets of more than $2 billion. Harris says services like Personal Capital will only become more common as affluent people become tired of an older, paternalistic breed of wealth managers who meet with their clients rarely and send them information about their accounts once a quarter.
The Internet will prove just as disruptive in the financial industry as it has elsewhere, Harris said.
?In the financial world, it?s still a bunch of dinosaurs lumbering around,? he said. ?Over the next decade, maybe two, what you?ll find is the major financial institutions engaged in a process of deconstruction. They?re going to have to change everything about what they do.?
Source: http://blog.seattlepi.com/techchron/2012/03/14/personal-capital-offers-a-mint-for-investments/
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