Ex-PayPal and Personal Capital CEO Bill Harris Launches Hybrid RIA Evergreen Wealth
Fintech executive Bill Harris has launched a new registered investment advisor, Evergreen Wealth, with artificial intelligence to provide tax-aware investment management and AI-powered financial guidance to affluent and high-net-worth clients.
Evergreen Wealth launched with $100 million in assets under management and Harris, who was the former CEO of PayPal and Intuit, has self-invested over $10 million of his own capital into the launch of the new firm.
Evergreen Wealth, which is a tech-based platform, provides financial planning, investment portfolio analysis, investment management, and tax planning through an artificial intelligence engine. The firm employs a range of tax strategies — including direct indexing — to help investors offset, reduce, defer, or in some cases even eliminate taxes on their investments.
Evergreen Wealth is not Harris’s first venture into the RIA space; he was the founding CEO of wealth manager Personal Capital, which had $23 billion in assets, before it was sold to Empower Retirement in 2020.
Due to Harris’s career in the financial technology industry, spanning backgrounds in cybersecurity, tax software development, and portfolio management, the formation of EvergreenWealth comes as Harris wanted to bring together the “adjacency” that was developed from his prior positions.
“I had never done anything with consumer-facing investments, so that was the reason for personal capital,” he told Connect Money in an interview. “It’s the reason I’m doing it again now with [Evergreen Wealth], and I love it.”
Clients who choose to invest with Evergreen Wealth are required to invest a minimum of $250,000. Harris stated that Evergreen’s ideal client base should have between $1 million and $10 million in net worth and investable assets between $500,000 and $5 million.
Evergreen Wealth has chosen Apex Clearing Corporation and Charles Schwab as its custodian.
While the wealth management industry continues to have many experienced financial advisors leave large wirehouses to jump into the independent space, Harris states that the industry needs a “technological makeover,” and because of his experience and because his firm is tech-driven, it gives Evergreen a boost in the sector.
“Most people who are starting out don’t have the scale, they don’t have the money, and they don’t have the time,” Harris said. “So, what’s our particular advantage? We’re building our own tech. We’re building everything.”
Evergreen Wealth launched with offices in Dallas, Miami, and Raleigh, North Carolina. Harris said he hopes to open offices in New York and Palo Alto, California.
The company currently has about 50 employees, who mainly consist of coders, architects, and QA engineers, and Evergreen plans to add about 8-10 advisors by the end of the year, Harris said to Connect Money.
As the industry continues to advance and adapt to current market trends and increasing demand from clients, other RIAs can learn from Evergreen’s adaptation of AI usage, Harris said.
“I think the direction we’re going is the direction the entire industry is going because it’s just a better way to invest. Watch this space, because what [Evergreen] is doing today is what you could be doing five to ten years from now.”
Pictured: Bill Harris
