Personal Capital brings its financial smarts to iPad, makes sense of your stock options

Financial advice startup Personal Capital is finally making its way to the iPad after emerging from stealth last August. And good news for startup workers: the company has added a new feature that will help to demystify your stock options.

Similar to other financial sites, Personal Capital allows you to hook in your various accounts and get a clear view of your financial life in one spot. But the startup goes far beyond the likes of Mint with its financial advising aspect, which pairs you up with a knowledgeable adviser for a cost of less than 1 percent of your assets per year.

Personal Capital’s iPad app, available now on the iTunes store, is free to use if you just want a consolidated view of your finances. You only have to pay if you want help from the company’s 10 on-staff advisers (the company is a registered investment adviser with the FTC). Not only will the iPad app let you view your transactions and debt, but it also offers the unique ability to drill down into your investments to see how individual elements are performing.

“The single most important thing for people to track long-term is asset allocation,” Personal Capital CEO Bill Harris — formerly CEO of PayPal and Intuit — said in an interview with VentureBeat last week. “Not only is [our service] the only way to get a view of your multi-institution asset allocation, it’s the only way you can get a multiview [seeing them all in one screen].”

Similarly, Personal Capital’s stock option capability lets you get a clear view of your various options. You can view your vested and unvested value across multiple companies, both public and private. For private companies, of course, you’ll have to plug in information about the company’s stock value. Harris tells me he’s “almost embarrassed” Personal Capital didn’t have this feature available at launch.

“We’re building these products for ourselves,” Harris said, explaining why the company is able to offer features never before seen in the financial tech industry. “We know in our gut what’s possible… we also know what we want.”

The company currently has over 10,000 users, and it aggregates and tracks over $2 billion worth of assets. Harris views Personal Capital more as a financial services company, rather than competitors like Intuit, which he calls “fundamentally a software company.” The company is heavily focused on consumer experience, which comes half from its technology and half from its interpersonal interactions, Harris said.

Redwood City, Calif.-based Personal Capital was founded in 2009. The startup has received $25 million in funding to date from Institutional Venture Partners and Venrock, after bootstrapping itself to the tune of $2 million. The company tells me it still has half of its funding in the bank.

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