Personal Capital, a financial planning website, appears to be gearing up for an IPO

Jay_Shah_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

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.

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