Since launching and winning the top spot at our TechCrunch40 conference three weeks ago, personal-finance startup Mint has been on a roll. On Friday, Mint was named Best of Show at the 2007 Financial Innovations conference (along with peer-to-peer lender Prosper and mortgage-finder Mortgagebot).
CEO Aaron Patzer reports to us that, in just the past three weeks, Mint has already helped organize more than $2 billion worth of people’s personal financial accounts, and identified more than $40 million in potential savings for those members. (Mint helps you find better interest rates on bank accounts, credit cards, and other financial products). Interest in the site spiked right after TC40. At one point, Mint was signing up a new member every five seconds. Not bad for a service from a previously-unknown startup that asks for access to all of your private financial data, including your bank and credit-card accounts.
Apparently, getting consumers to give up that level of privacy, has not been an issue so far. (The old axiom is true: people really will do anything to save a buck). Now comes the hard part. Getting all those people to keep coming back past the initial stage of curiosity.
Update: I asked Mint CEO Patzer for some more details on how many people are using Mint, and he responded with the following data. Keep in mind, this is only 18 days worth of data and thus should be treated as extremely preliminary (these are early adopters, so they may be more likely to embrace such a service and use it more often than a mainstream user):
—That $2 billion is spread across 50,000 registered users.
—About 70 percent (or 35,000) have come back more than once.
—Those who have been in the system at least a week (including beta testers), visit Mint.com 2-3 times a week.
—About 10 percent (or 5,000) come to the site every day.
—And 10 percent have signed up for mobile alerts.
(See also his comments below about the lengths Mint goes to secure customer data).
“The number one thing to realize about Mint is that their business model is disingenuous and flawed. It’s a company built for the advertisers, not the users. To that end they have provided some nifty pie charts (quite possibly the worst of all types of charts) and some annoying auto-categorization all in the name of getting you to give them access to your financial transactions.”
Yeah! What he said!
http://fakestev...er.blogspot.com
Any dumbasses here sign up MINT.COM?
Oh man…. Have you heard of IRS tax?
Wake up and smell the coffee. Use your mother’s common sense — Never give out information to any quality startup that isn’t FDIC & bank approval. Your mom will tell you… I don’t care MINT had super secure code. It’s just word…
I feel sorry for people who sign up that product. It will not help you get rich or make you feel rich.
Also, my mom said, “When you become billionaire or millionaire entrepreneur.
I think you should watch Firewall or Ransom movie. It can happen to anyone in real life.”
I’d love to use the site, but I do want to see the answer to the question that Allen (#32) is asking before I go anywhere near sign up.
No one can hack me on Mint.com — I’ve got norton!
I suspect that the more scrutiny Mint gets over security, the more apt they are to get hacked–if only to prove a point.
Dave- I appreciate you replying to me by saying I am not the target user and ignoring my question (as it appears Aaron has).
Also interesting to learn that you are an advisor and investor in Mint. Good luck with the graphing social conference that tc (and others) are sponsoring this week!
@Dave McClure
It doesn’t matter how secure Mint is, if your target market doesn’t trust you, you won’t get very far. Why will Joe Customer use Mint versus a product offered by their bank? Targeted advertising to save money? Word on the street is that your targeted advertising isn’t very accurate…
Aaron,
I enjoy your company’s product (success = server crashing with first big PR blast) and look forward to future innovations from you all.
John
The $40M in identified savings is inflated – it recommended that I sign up with Verizon FIOS (great! oh, right, that’s not available in my area), Time Warner triple play for $99 to save on my phone/internet/cable – ok, so I already have Time Warner, and that price means I need to give up HD, DVR, HBO, and other channels. Last it recommended I sign up for a different Amex card than the one I have, but it was a wash, no savings.
Anyway, good service, something I’ve been waiting for, but I’m still going between wesabe, yodlee, mint, and geezeo to see if any can really replace MS Money for me. So far I’m spending most of my time in wesabe.
All this talk about security is meaningless if there is insurance in place if something bad does happen with a third party vendor and client’s accounts. Mint is the one acting as an “agent” therefore they should be fiscally responsible for the money.
I’d like to see Mint step up to the plate and offer an insurance policy to any member who is a victim of Mint fraud/theft/hacking and loses money for every penny lost. Not a limited FDIC $100,000 but the full amount of the money, whatever is in the hacked account.
Lloyds of London would probably take that risk, albeit at an expensive premium for Mint. If they are serious about their business and the level of protection they are affording their clients, this should not be an unreasonable request.
Therefore the question is: has anybody at Mint looked into providing this type of insurance policy?
@Aaron
Thank you Aaron for taking the time to respond here.
I signed up immediately because I’m very bad at tracking my finances. And then I read some more comments about the dangers of putting this account information through the website. So then I was wondering if I had made a mistake.
Thanks for helping to alleviate at least some of those fears.
And the people here complaining about the offers and being for companies and not the user? They haven’t emailed me or anything, and it’s just put at the bottom of the screen. If that’s what they need to do to offer this service for free, I’m fine with that.
So to summarize Aaron and Dave, Mint’s target audience is people who don’t care a lot about security and it’s plenty secure enough for them. And no answers about the difficulty of deleting your account from Mint or if your bank will still cover you for fraud if you use Mint. Very reassuring. Please do yourselves a favor guys and hire someone less glib to do your PR. You’re not winning many people over with your answers.
Speaking of PR, does anyone know who Mint uses? Granted, they aren’t handling the comment backlash well (here, Consumerist, the first TC post), but 1) I don’t think that is their fault and 2) the story placement, awards, etc have been amazing.
I’m guessing that Mint is paying them a small fortune, but they seem to be worth it. This is the best marketing for a poor product I’ve seen since Spock.
@Aaron, I dont think you understood what I meant. You may have a read only connection via Yodlee, but its the same username and password that I use to access my bank.
The point remains that if someone got a hold of my username and password from hacking into mint/social engineering/disgruntled employee etc., they could easily withdraw money, and there would be nothing I could do about it after the fact.
In the case of a bank hack, the bank would be liable for the money..
@TDavid, former NC beauty queen
By law you have:
– $0 liability for credit card fraud,
– $50 liability for bank fraud (if you notify your bank within two days)
Again, 90% of all fraud starts offline (http://www.info...cleID=178600217), for example when someone takes your credit card at a restaurant, or digs through your mail. Sadly, a large portion of fraud is actually committed by friends and family members.
Mint.com helps keep you safe by providing email and text-message alerts for:
– Low balances (e.g. someone is draining your account)
– Unusual spending (e.g. someone buys $1000 in electronics in a day)
– Low available credit
If there are any anomalies, Mint.com shows you right away. The alternative is to a) login to every single credit card, checking, and savings account every day to check for fraud, or b) wait 30 days until a paper statement arrives before noticing an issue.
By taking a proactive approach, Mint.com actually helps protect you from the vast majority of fraud – better than just about any website out there.
Aaron Patzer
Founder & CEO, Mint.com
Concerning whether using Mint.com violates your bank terms & conditions:
Consider that Quicken and Microsoft Money ask you for the exact same credentials as Mint.com, and have been for the past 10 years. MS Money even uses Yodlee to make it’s connection to banks (same as Mint.com, BofA, and Fidelity).
The problem with those tools is they cost $30-$80, sunset their products every 2-3 years to force an upgrade, require an hour to setup, and take an hour a week to maintain.
Mint is like an extension to online banking: pull all your accounts together in one place, finally see where your money goes, get alerts on anything out of whack, and find savings opportunities worth an average of $1,000/user.
Aaron Patzer
Founder & CEO, Mint.com
I use yodlee, and though it isn’t great, it is what i have set up. I wish mint were around when i set yodlee up. I don’t have anything worth stealing anyway
btw, can you guys tell us one more time about how you use yodlee and what other companies use their service as well? It isn’t clear yet. Does BofA use yodlee?
“We have a read-only connection to the banks which does not pull in your name, address, etc. It doesn’t exist on our servers.
For that matter, neither do your bank user names and passwords. Mint.com uses Yodlee for account aggregation. Yodlee is the back-end piping that connects all the banks, credit cards, and brokerages together. ”
So where are the user names/passwords stored? Yodlee? They have to be stored SOMEWHERE… and
“Again, 90% of all fraud starts offline (http://www.info...cleID=178600217), for example when someone takes your credit card at a restaurant, or digs through your mail. Sadly, a large portion of fraud is actually committed by friends and family members.”
Also, at every level that someone touches your financial information, fraud can occur. I am curious how advertisers see our personal financial information in order to offer us services that will save us money. Even with the good press from TC40 and Finovate, you have an uphill battle and I wish you luck.
I still maintain that if given an opportunity to choose between Mint and a service offered by their financial institution, customers are more likely to choose the latter. At their bank, they don’t have to worry about their financial information being used by third parties.
Aaron – thanks for not answering my question
And fyi – Quicken/Money allow me to import my data which is something you do not so it’s not the same.
Maybe we can do an interview on CN Aaron where we can get to the bottom of some of the issues raised here.
Can anyone explain to me how did Mint manage to obtain the cooperation of all thses thousands of banks and credit card companies?
What’s in it for them? The prospect of customers getting advice on lower rates? Beats me.
@David Litsky
Mint never gives your information to third party advertisers. We have a proprietary database of financial offers, interest rates, and communications (phone, tv, internet, wireless) providers. The matching is done in software, anonymously.
Your information never leaves Mint.com. If or when you click through on a savings opportunity, no information is passed except that the click came from Mint.com.
Mint does make a small referral fee from advertisers on some offers. That’s what keeps Mint free. Whether we have a relationship with a provider in no way affects our ranking algorithm – we find users the best interest rate or lowest price regardless.
What this means in the end is Mint only makes money if we can find ways for the user to save money. And we think that’s pretty revolutionary. The only ads you see are ads that make you money…think about how different that is as a business model.
Aaron Patzer
Founder & CEO, Mint.com
Aaron,
While the security issue doesn’t bother me too much, one issue I have found with your product (touched on by @Alan) is that the offers you make are often not competitive with or comparable to what we are getting, you just don’t have a way to know that!
For example, I have a Capital One card with 1% back. You see my Capital One account with ? for a cash return, and “offer” me a 1% back card (a *savings* of $250/year!). There needs to be a way to user input the specifics of current accounts and products before you offer to “save” me all that dough!
The website is very pretty and the charts make tracking my spending super easy – thanks for that!
@Jusatry
Fair point. Within the next month or so, we’ll be able to accurately capture the rewards earned on just about every credit card. Then, we’ll be able to accurately reflect the fact you are earning 1% back on your Capital One card.
Right now without rewards (we show your current rewards as “unknown”), it’s not always an apples-to-apples comparison. It will be soon!
For what it’s worth, putting a mathematical model around all the complexity, tiered rewards structure, and nuances of credit cards is very difficult. We’ve filed two patents on it already and gone further than anyone has gone before. We’ll go further still!
Thanks for the feedback.
Aaron Patzer
Founder & CEO, Mint.com
I think what Aaron and the venture capitalists behind Mint miss is that any society that lives in and around the 1% they get back on rewards cards churning from one cell phone provider to another, or moving their checking account around to save a few bucks, is absolutely, without a doubt, the saddest sort of society one can imagine.
Trying to muck up new markets for banks and cell phone companies is so awful and boring that it makes my head want to pop off. It’s simply a sign of the times where we have turned into a culture of vultures and business models like Mint are inevitable.
Interesting model, time will tell. It is all about trust.
We are in the online debit payment business and have found that online Buyers who trust the online Seller have no problem using their online bank to make a secure debit transaction. Our payment service does not share or store the consumers bank information, just a payment confirmation to the Seller.
Brian Crozier
Co-Founder & VP UseMyBank
There are some very genuine criticisms of Mint.com from a security point of view. I am not sure an online service is the best way to deliver this functionality. I believe Intuit, for instance, is much better positioned to provide this capability in a desktop application.
If you read reviews such as http://techlaho...-mintcom-sucks/ you will find that not only are there functional issues with mint.com, it is quite apparent that the level of maturity with respect to security, is also not there.
This looks like an awful lot of sensitive information I have to enter to make this work- – info that my bank already has. What a pain. Why can’t I just do this at my bank?
I was real impressed by the idea, but the site is awful. No way it belongs on the TC40.
First off, too difficult to get your accounts setup. Lots of retries needed to get stuff working.
Secondly, un answered requests for help for certain accounts they said they support. For one CapOne savings.
Third, lack of response big time from support. The typical “we are so busy” crap.
Finally, a high level of arrogance to add other banks/services. Basically said hey that is a small bank/institution – tough luck.
I also think you should be able to remove the accounts immediately.
TC looks bad, very bad on this one. Losing your edge there MA
I’ll start by saying I currently use Yodlee and Wesabe.
I was turned off by Mint just because the very first question was something akin to “please give me you bank account number and password”.
Looking at today’s screenshots and review up on lifehacker.com I’d say that mint looks really interesting and potentially useful to me.
I love how yodlee moneycenter can show me literally everything and the reporting is even decent.
Wesabe is cool and actually very powerful, but a lot more work and lot more “in the works” than yodlee at this point.
In my first 12 hours using yodlee and wesabe, I actually got my budget report I was looking for quicker with wesabe.
Since then, yodlee is prooving to be both more reliable and easier to keep up to date with. That said, I’m still running both in parallel.
I am tempted to try mint as well, but wondering what it offers me that yodlee doesn’t. And then if I need that additional functionality.
I know the online quicken is coming soon, but have no faith that they will get it right.
Wesabe stores the account numbers and passwords on a local “uploader”, which really downloads and uploads … but the model for storing passwords is more like quickens.
But when I log into Yodlee, it feels more secure to me, with the multi-screen passwords.
Personally, in the defense of mint.com — I’d venture to say that their website is way more secure than the average person desktop computer is.
I think it is counter-intuitive to give out information to a website — but it is far easier for a hacker, spyware or key-logger to get your information from your home PC than from a professional website, IMHO.
Another thing not really mentioned in these comments is that we all need to be changing out passwords prety regularly. If your really worried about mint or a hacker getting this information, you can protect yourself by selecting secure passwords and changing them regularly.
I would also mention that sites like http://www.clipperz.com and http://www.passpack.com are also places where it would seem the last place to send your private information, but which are actually really secure.
I think mint and clipperz are example of “the future” … whereas
quicken and using the same password everywhere (like most people do) — are example of the poor ways of the past.
Savage
I signed up to Mint.com. It’s ‘09. Two years after this article. They’ve got serious connectivity issues that some people are saying are attributable to Yodlee. If they don’t get their act together soon, there’s going to be a going to be a serious backlash which they may not be able to recover from, as a brand.
I was curious until they asked for my account login info. This kind of access would allow them to do what ever they desired with my hard earned money. I would be interested in hearing about any recent experiences with Mint.com