Intuit announced this week that it is
But the bigger question is: How did Mint last as long as it did, given its
Personal financial management, or PFM, is a category of banking technology that allowed consumers to bring in their transaction data from multiple bank accounts, typically by sharing their passwords with the PFM provider. Want to see your checking account from PNC, your high-yield savings account from ING and your credit card balance from Capital One on the same screen? Just
It sounds crazy, but it's what consumers wanted — even though they didn't know they wanted it.
One of Mint's competitors, Wesabe, launched in 2005 and shut down in 2010. After its demise, I spoke to Marc Hedlund, Wesabe's second and final CEO. Here's an excerpt from
Wesabe approached its audience delicately — in hindsight, too delicately, Hedlund said. Phishing was a common menace in headlines when Wesabe launched, and banks were extremely vocal about how important it was for consumers to never share their passwords and their transaction data with a third party. "When I would go around and talk to people about the idea of Wesabe before we started the company, everyone — I mean 90%-plus of everybody — told me that they would never in a million years use a startup website that asked them for their bank passwords," Hedlund said. "That it was just a ridiculous, laughable idea." Wesabe's first mistake was taking this advice. Companies should avoid being "too attentive to what the audience says it wants," he said. "That's how you get bad movies." |
Instead of asking for passwords, Wesabe required users to download transaction data from bank websites (banks offered this feature to let users import their finances into software such as Intuit's Quicken). This was a cumbersome, manual process — but far more secure than giving a startup all of one's banking passwords.
By addressing security head-on, Wesabe made it the elephant in the room that users couldn't ignore. Mint, by contrast, simply never drew attention to the elephant. Security-minded consumers could find information about the topic on Mint's website if they looked for it, but Mint almost never made the issue a focus of its own marketing. (Wesabe eventually softened its security stance and allowed users to give it their passwords).
Banks did not watch this industry develop from the sidelines without weighing in. Some attempted to block PFM sites from being able to scrape transaction data by using consumer passwords. Others
Eventually, the market shifted. In 2007, the same year Mint launched, so did the iPhone, which eventually allowed users to fill their device's screen with banking apps and log in seamlessly with biometrics. Today, one can skip from account to account by swiping through apps as easily as swiping through Tinder profiles.
Many PFM companies failed, but it's not clear if Mint would have succeeded on its own if it hadn't sold to Intuit in 2009. Almost no PFM sites charged end users for the service, and instead hosted ads or accepted referral bonuses for getting consumers to open new bank accounts with partners.
Under Intuit, Mint continued to attract users, and claimed to have
Intuit also owns Credit Karma, and plans to migrate the remaining "Minters" to that platform on January 1, the company said in a
