Wealth Management for the Internet Age

The Internet has changed how we pay our bills and apply for loans. What has not evolved as much is the relationship between wealthy individuals and their financial advisers, who manage their clients’ holdings, take an annual cut of overall assets, and periodically offer updates in person or over the phone.

Bill Harris has a plan to bring this kind of personal wealth management into the Internet Age. A longtime Silicon Valley veteran and a former chief executive officer of Intuit, Harris has quietly worked for two years on a startup called Personal Capital, raising $27 million in financing. Harris hopes to create a new kind of financial-services firm catering to moderately wealthy individuals whose net worth—from a couple hundred thousand dollars to a couple million—is not quite fat enough to attract the high-priced investment advisers at Morgan Stanley or Goldman Sachs. “We want to bring personalized, high-end wealth management services to a part of the market that is fundamentally underserved,” Harris says.