Staying on top of your monetary situation is important, but it’s hard to trust a third-party service with your financial data. And while there are lots of personal wealth management apps to choose from, picking the right one becomes challenging as you deal in a variety of different assets and currencies.
Personal Capital is a popular service among those looking for free tools for wealth management and financial planning, but it’s only available in the U.S. and doesn’t support accounts based in Canada.
Luckily, Canadian citizens have access to a sizable pool of wealth management apps, too. Let’s take a look at some of the best Personal Capital alternatives available to Canadians and talk about what makes Kubera top the list.
What Is Personal Capital?
Simply put, Personal Capital is a financial tracking and wealth management tool for people based in the United States. It comes with a bunch of different features for planning and monitoring your personal finances, such as account tracking, budget planning, savings planning, credit score reporting, and cash flow management.
Then there are the industry-standard security features to protect your financial information, including encryption, access controls, and built-in fraud protection.
These standard money management features are available free of charge, and for those looking for long-term wealth management services, Personal Capital offers access to a private financial advisor who helps you manage your assets and investments to achieve your financial goals.
Seems pretty straightforward, right? It is, until you read the fine print.
Personal Capital: Reading the Fine Print
Sadly, as is often the case with software providers, when you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.
Technically speaking, Personal Capital isn’t free.
While the platform doesn’t actually sell your financial data to third parties, according to its own privacy disclaimer, it regularly uses your data to market its paid financial services. And sometimes, it even shares that data with third parties to that same end.
That means pretty much any employee or advisor at Personal Capital has free access to your data so that they can use it to sell you their paid services. For privacy-minded users who care about their financial data, that’s a major red flag.
Of course, none of this even matters for international users, as Personal Capital is only available for U.S. citizens. If you’re based in Canada and want to use Personal Capital to manage your assets and wealth, you’re fresh out of luck!
The reason why Personal Capital isn’t available to users outside the U.S. is simple: its network of financial aggregators simply doesn’t support countries such as Canada, the U.K., European Union, Australia, or Singapore.
Thankfully, Canadian citizens can take advantage of a slew of personal capital alternatives to manage and monitor their financial accounts. Let’s go over some of them below.
Wealthica: The Canadian Alternative to Personal Capital
Founded in 2015 in Montreal, Wealthica is a free budgeting app and fintech tool that lets you plan your finances and track your investments through a single unified dashboard. Its planning and monitoring services are very similar to Personal Capital, except that they’re available in Canada.
Wealthica does not offer any long-term wealth management features or access to financial advisors to manage your investment portfolio. It’s simply a financial tracking app that helps you stay on top of your net worth.
As with Personal Capital, Wealthica clearly states that it doesn’t sell your financial data or personal information to third parties. However, it also states that it uses your personal data for internal marketing purposes and to advertise its paid services.
Sadly, Wealthica isn’t a great option for those who travel a lot or need to track assets in multiple currencies and locations. It’s based in Canada and can only help you manage Canadian assets. If you also have savings accounts based in the U.K. or Singapore, for example, Wealthica won’t be able to help you track those.
Wealthsimple: A Robo-Advisor for Canadian Investors
Launched in 2014, Wealthsimple is an online investment account management service that uses an algorithm to recommend different ways to grow your savings. The robo-advisor’s services are available exclusively to Canadian citizens.
Unlike Personal Capital, Wealthsimple does not feature a financial dashboard or offer any tracking and monitoring solutions for your accounts. Instead, it focuses on investment services like commission-free stock trading, tax filing, portfolio management, and crypto trading.
Wealthsimple also enables users to set up socially-responsible and Halal portfolios. With no minimum investment amount required to open a new account, it’s very accessible to budding investors looking for financial advice.
Wealthsimple is, once again, more of a financial advisor than a tech company. It suggests ways to grow your investment portfolio, but the lack of personal finance tools makes it ill-suited for anyone looking to track assets or manage savings.
Kubera: The Best Personal Finance App for Global Citizens
Kubera is the smarter alternative to Personal Capital and the most powerful option on this list.
We’re clearly a little biased here, but that’s because we’ve built a personal balance sheet and wealth tracker that’s available no matter where you and your assets are located.
That’s right, Kubera’s crypto tracker supports the broadest range of assets, currencies, and investment classes — from bank accounts to cryptocurrencies to debt — located anywhere in the world. You can track all your assets in one place and get an accurate overview of your financial state.
Kubera even calculates ROI on investments automatically. All you have to do is add asset details like cost, value, and cash flow in and out. The platform will apply holding time to show you the accurate internal rate of return (IRR is a more detailed version of ROI) for any and all assets.
In addition, Kubera’s recap feature also crunches massive amounts of data to give you an easy-to-digest summary of how your portfolio and allocations are performing daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly.
And that’s still not all. Kubera’s beneficiary management suite lets you set a beneficiary to handle your portfolio in case of unforeseen events. Adding a new asset is easy, too — all you have to do is add a new row, like in a spreadsheet.
But the best thing about Kubera is the fact that because we offer a paid subscription, we don’t monetize your financial data and we don’t pester you with ads or upsells. Plus, we prioritize state-of-the-art security to protect your personal data against breaches and leaks. We take your privacy very seriously.
Ready to check out Kubera? Sign up for a trial and see if it works for you!
How to Choose Your First Wealth Management Tool
Here are some things to look out for when choosing the wealth management tool that’s right for you:
- Transparency: There’s really no fancy feature that can compete with data transparency as the number-one thing you should look out for. Your financial app has access to a lot of confidential data — and you want to make sure that they’re not letting it fall into the wrong hands. Ensure that you properly understand the privacy policy of the app or service that you’re signing up for.
- Variety: The second most important thing to look out for is how many types of locations, assets, and institutions are supported by your financial app. You want a wealth management tool that properly catalogs all your assets to give you a full overview of your financial health, no matter how much you travel or diversify.
- Security: Hackers today have a lot of different ways to gain access to your financial data even if it’s not openly shared. The last thing you want is for your credit card information to be leaked as part of a major data breach. Pick a wealth management app that encrypts your data both in transit and at rest while also supporting multi-factor login authentication for added security.
- Your Favorite Features: There are a slew of optional features you should be looking out for, depending on what it is you need out of your financial app. For example, do you need robo-advisor functionality from your financial app? Do you need a dashboard that gives you a pane of glass view of your financial assets? And do you want a tool that focuses on day-to-day budgeting or investment management?
Kubera is a wealth management tool that focuses on personal finance tracking and budgeting. We become your personal balance sheet by connecting all your bank, brokerage, and crypto accounts for a bird’s eye view of your financial health at all times. We take your privacy seriously, which is why we have a strict code of conduct when it comes to how we handle your personal data. If all of this sounds like something you’d be interested in, why not take us for a spin with a free trial?
Are you a financial advisor, wealth manager, or other type of financial professional? Kubera’s white-label-ready client portal might be just what you need to capture today’s growing market of Millennial, Gen Z, and tech-savvy clients. Request a demo today and see why Kubera’s institutional platform is already being used to track billions in assets.
