Ex-PayPal, Intuit CEO raises $25M to tackle $32 trillion opportunity

Spencer Brown

Personal Capital, led by former Intuit and PayPal CEO Bill Harris, just raised $25 million to beef up its army of financial advisers.

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Cromwell Schubarth: Senior Technology Reporter- Silicon Valley Business Journal; Email | Twitter | Google+

The former CEO of Intuit and PayPal says he is ready to beef up his team of financial advisers at digital wealth manager Personal Capital to tackle the biggest business opportunity of his career.
Bill Harris just raised $25 million in Series C funding that he plans to use to establish a Denver office with 100 financial advisers.
The latest funding was led by Jim Feuille of Crosslink Capital, who has joined the company’s board. Crosslink and private equity firm BlackRock are new investors, joining existing backers Institutional Venture Partners and Venrock.
Until now all of two-year-old Personal Capital's 70 employees have been based in Redwood City and San Francisco. Most of them have been building the free online dashboard where users can view all their investment accounts in one place.
But Harris told me this week he is now ready to beef up the revenue-producing side of the business, the financial advisers that charge a fee of 1 percent per year to manage the investments of clients.
"That fee is far lower than than traditional wealth managers charge," Harris told me. "By automating much of what they do, we believe we have created a service for what I call the forgotten middle who have assets to invest of between a couple hundred thousand and a couple million dollars."
Personal Capital tackles the "fragmentation" that Harris calls the biggest financial problem facing most Americans. The market for that service is huge, he says, estimating the amount of individual investable assets held in the U.S. at $32.2 trillion.
"Those assets are just scattered," he told me. "Most people have different financial accounts at different financial institutions, different kinds of money. That means they have different branches to keep track of, different phones numbers, different passwords and now different mobile apps."