Wednesday, April 11, 2012

How One Startup Is Digitizing the Business of Personal Finance ...

This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.

The world of personal finance is slowly experiencing an Internet revolution, but many people still rely on the old brick-and-mortar shops for advice about investing, mortgages, retirement accounts and other complex financial processes.

Personal Capital, a California-based startup, is seeking to change all that by fusing the worlds of finance and technology.

The Mint-like funds tracker provides services catered to people who manage a wide variety of finances ? a mortgage, a retirement fund and so on. And Personal Capital also offers customer-focused financial advice over the phone, via email and through video chat.

Mashable spoke with Personal Capital?s CEO, Bill Harris, to talk about how his company is disrupting the entire financial industry and bringing everything online.



Personal Capital, says Harris, isn?t meant for the person in their twenties with a basic job, savings account and credit card: ?Once you?ve got complex finances, this is where we can help.? The company is going after a ?relatively small? group of people that have to pay close attention to their financial lives. So far, the company has 10,000 people representing more than $2 billion in assets; it raised $27 million before launch.

?The mission that we?re on now is to revolutionize how financial services are delivered in this country,? says Harris. ?Financial services are being delivered in a way they?ve always been delivered for the past 50 years ? predominately through physical distribution channels, like brick-and-mortar bank branches, adviser offices, paper processes, things like that.?

Harris says the key is to ditch the shops and bring everything to the Internet.

?We have the point of view that this is one of the two industries that be the most fundamentally changed by the Internet,? says Harris. ?Many industries will be changed, but I think the two most completely revolutionized businesses are media and finance ? with both, you can do an

Read the rest of this article at: http://feeds.mashable.com/~r/Mashable/~3/Veob5JXhbnQ/

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