Ex-PayPal CEO and Co-Founder Bill Harris on Tuesday announced the public launch of Evergreen Wealth, a digital RIA with offices in Dallas, Miami and Raleigh, North Carolina, that he said is focused on providing tax-aware investment management and AI-powered financial advice to affluent and high net worth clients looking to build long-term wealth.
According to the firm, many advisors and investment firms focus on their clients’ pre-tax returns, while it focuses on after-tax returns.
The RIA will accomplish that through the use of “Dynamic Portfolios,” Harris told reporters during a news briefing in New York City that was also streamed live online.
A Dynamic Portfolio, he explained, is a “tax-optimized, personalized, diversified way to manage your money.”
The “enabling technology” for it is “raw compute power” through chips that can now “do so much more than they could do when I started my last” investment advisory firm, Personal Capital, he said, referring to the wealth management firm he co-founded in 2009 and served as CEO of through April 2017, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Personal Capital grew to become a firm with $23 billion in client assets, Evergreen said, before it was acquired by retirement firm Empower in 2020. Harris also served as CEO of Intuit.
Introducing Harris, Sarah Mogill, Director of Strategy at Evergreen, told reporters she felt the pain “all New Yorkers feel every year when it’s April and you see your tax bill.”
“I lived here for 10 years and that tax bill is never fun to take a look at,” she said. “But this isn’t just a problem in New York. This is a problem across the country, [in] any high tax state. Think California. Think Connecticut, New Jersey, Washington, Oregon. Investors across the country are being let down. But luckily, Evergreen Wealth intends to fix that, because at Evergreen Wealth, we believe that it’s not about what you earn but it’s about what you keep that truly counts.”
Unlike ETFs and mutual funds, “where every fundholder receives the same cookie-cutter product, Dynamic Portfolios contain hundreds of individual securities, which can then be hyper-personalized to match the goals of each client and tax-optimized across their entire portfolio,” using AI analytics, according to Evergreen.
Evergreen said it uses various tax strategies, including direct indexing, to offset, reduce, defer or eliminate taxes.
For high-income taxpayers, especially those living in highly taxed states, the “tax alpha” can be more consequential than the expected gains, if any, from trying to beat the market, according to the firm.
Evergreen advisors use research provided by Evergreen Intelligence, its proprietary AI advice engine; its financial knowledge base; and agentic AI tools to provide their clients with “personalized” advice, it said.
Each client will receive personalized insights and advice, provided to them by a dedicated advisor, which are “maintained in a private data vault to prevent exposure to any AI models on the open internet,” according to the firm.
Evergreen advisors will be available to clients through chat, email, phone or video conference.
Evergreen Intelligence’s personalized insights are also being made available on demand to the firm’s clients directly via desktop and mobile apps that can be accessed 24 hours a day, seven days a week, the firm said.
Wealth Management Market Is Ready For Change
The U.S. wealth management market manages more than $144.6 trillion in assets now, with $124 trillion expected to transfer between generations by 2048, according to Evergreen, citing data from the Investment Adviser Association and Cerulli.
However, a lot of the sector still operates on outdated technology, according to the firm, and “younger, affluent investors want more than traditional products and quarterly meetings,” Harris said in a news release.
More than 50% of those younger investors don’t want their parents’ advisors, according to Harris.
He said, “They demand sophisticated tax and investment services, available on their schedule. We built Evergreen Wealth for this generation of investors.”
Jeff Berman, Contributing Editor and Reporter at Wealth Solutions Report, can be reached at jeff.berman@wealthsolutionsreport.com.
