Personal Capital appears to be gearing up for an IPO

Personal Capital’s CEO Jay
Shah.
Courtesy of Personal
Capital

• Personal Capital, a personal finance and wealth
  management company, is hiring a “manager of SEC
  reporting.”
• The job posting could be a hint at IPO aspirations for
  the California-based startup.
• A spokesperson told Business Insider that an IPO has
  always been the plan but couldn’t say how near one may
  be. 

Personal Capital, a financial site that allows users to connect
all of their accounts to see their money in one cohesive
dashboard, appears to be gearing up for an initial public
offering.

The company published a
job listing on Wednesday afternoon seeking a “Manager
of SEC Reporting & Technical Accounting” in its Redwood
Shores, California headquarters. According to the posting, this
person “is responsible for providing technical expertise and
support for the SEC filing and compliance related reporting and
technical accounting functions for a pre-IPO company.”

The person will also lead preparation of regulatory filings
required of companies to list publicly on a stock exchange, it
said.

A spokesperson told Business Insider that its “no secret we want
to be IPO ready” and that this job posting is “in keeping with
that plan.” The representative could not provide details on a
timeline for the IPO, and pointed to
previous public statements by CEO Jay Shah noting it was a
potential option. 

Other companies have posted similar job openings just a few
months ahead of an S-1 filing, the first regulatory document
required for an IPO.
In speaker maker Sonos’ case, the job apps were posted in
April and an
S-1 filed in July. 

Personal Capital’s product works under a simple premise: connect
all of your financial accounts and see them all in one place.
These can include simple savings and checking accounts, credit
cards, investments held via a broker like Robinhood. 

The service is free for anyone to use, and the company then sells
financial planning and wealth management services to high
net-worth customers. CEO Jay Shah
told Business Insider last year that paying customers have
Personal Capital manage about $300,000 on average. Advisory fees
are proportional to assets managed, and start at 89 basis points
down to 49 basis points for wealthier customers.

Other brokerages, like
TD Ameritrade, have been forced to invest heavily in similar
dashboards to compete with these free services like Personal
Capital or Mint, which is owned by Intuit. 

Personal
Capital’s dashboard as pictured on the company’s
website.

Personal
Capital

Currently, 1.5 milion users are tracking more than $550 billion
through the site. Data from all those accounts allows
Personal Capital to give customers a personal “you index” to
compare with benchmark indices like the S&P 500. The company
also personally manages about $8 billion worth of assets for
customers

As a private company, Personal Capital has raised roughly $215
million in venture capital across nine rounds over as many years.

“Our mission is better financial lives through technology and
people,” Shah said in the interview last year. “We have a segment
of our free user base that will just continue to use our free
software and that’s just fine, we’re doing something that we
think is slightly philanthropic and trying to help people see and
understand their financial lives.

“When it comes to people that have complexity and substantial
assets, we have found that when they engage and when they look at
what we offer as a solution, they find value there,” he
continued.