Silicon Valley-based startup Mint, which provides a service that lets users manage their checking, savings and credit card accounts online, will launch a new product on May 6 that lets users track virtually any type of investment account as well. Users will now be able to manage all of their financial assets on the Mint site. With this change, Mint says, 6,500 US financial institutions: 2,520 banks, 1,621 credit cards, and 2,381 investment accounts are supported.
Brokerage, IRA, 401k and 529 assets can be managed. For now, only student loan accounts and mortgages are left off, although support for those types of accounts is coming soon. The site will show all your buys, sells, dividend distributions, etc. across multiple accounts. Dive into a single account or equity for its individual performance. Account performance v. the S&P and other indexes is graphed, and account charges are also shown.
There are some things you still won’t be able to do with Mint, such as stock trades, bill payments and funds transfers. Mint CEO Aaron Patzer says those features will eventually be added, with a focus on bill payments first. Funds transfers and stock trades are a little stickier, though, and may eventually require state and/or federal regulation of the company.
Investments will soft launch on May 6 for very active Mint users and roll out from there. Anyone who wants to be in the beta right at launch (whether they are a current Mint user or not) can sign up at mint.com/techcrunch and will be added on May 6.
Other services, including Cake Financial (another TechCrunch40 startup) Vestopia, Covestor, and UpDown also offer investment tracking.
We’ve been tracking Mint since their launch at TechCrunch40 last year. The 20-person company has now raised $17 million in venture capital and has 230,000 registered users (40% of which are active, Patzer says). 10,000 new users sign up each week (13,000 last week)
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Pretty neat..much awaited feature
This increases the “barrier” to customer acquisition, as this data is just as personal for individuals. Having played with Cake Financial I can say it offers little more than Fidelity’s website, so why risk divulging private data without true value add like advisory or something? Cool moves, but I am skeptical.
This is awesome. Mint has been invaluably simple.
Yes, this is much-awaited… and I admit it is exceedingly cool in the interface… but I still need mortgages in there so I can track my home equity line. Fingers still crossed…
It’s a shame they still don’t seem to be supporting banks/institutions outside the US. I can understand how hard it must be to work with the banks, but they’ve been in beta for a while now, to the point I would have expected international support.
On the investment account feature, it looks and sounds great, however they could soon be treading in murky waters. If the features keep rolling along, user rated investment funds combined with easy entry/exit could result in a lot of people thinking they’re amateur financial analysts/advisors and unwittingly loosing a lot of money.
Mint needs work. I discovered what I felt was a major bug and I immediately canceled my account. It made me wonder how I could trust this company with the usernames and passwords of all of my important accounts.
Tons of potential. Like e-mail, this is one of those killer apps that will cause people to sign-in at least daily.
Mint has another big problem WRT double listing charges in some kinds of accounts. This makes it impossible to categorize or budget without going through and uncategorizing duplicate entries (per support@mint). Thing is, you can’t just set up a rule to (un)categorize them because they are dupes and rules will affect both instances, so you have to change them BY HAND. A dealbreaker for me.
I’ve been on the tipping point of signing up for Mint all week, and this addition just might do it for me.
Mint was in whatever Forbes issue we have in our bathroom… (http://www.forbes.com/2008/01/03/microsoft-google-intuit-tech-ebiz-cx_ag_0103mint.html - It’s an interesting read)
Is this an admission that the current mint model wasn’t working? They’ve had a lot of time money and attention but not fantastic results.
@harold: um, so what part of 200K users + 10K new users per week = “not fantastic results”? they’ve only been live for 9 months, and you’re ripping them on a 6-figure userbase?
seriously, what’s your comparison benchmark? 1M twitter users in 1.5 years?
i mean i know i’m an investor / fanboy, but i don’t get why you think rolling out new features to address user demand is anything but basic common sense (or cents, if we’re thinking money
get a clue, dude.
I wasn’t expecting Mint to add this functionality. But it will be well received. Rock on.
I’ve found mint to be a little slow, but it is a web app and not a desktop application so that’s just how it goes. It would be nice if they could toss in some ajax on the categorization process and speed that up. I find that I spend a lot of time categorizing.
@anthropocentric - what was the bug you found that caused you to cancel?
Hasn’t Yodlee been providing this type of personalized account management for years now?
http://www.yodlee.com
If Mint would switch its monetization method from selling data to credit card companies to providing a white label financial management tool to financial institutions, I would use it in a heartbeat. But based on this paragraph, I doubt that will happen:
“There are some things you still won’t be able to do with Mint, such as stock trades, bill payments and funds transfers. Mint CEO Aaron Patzer says those features will eventually be added, with a focus on bill payments first. Funds transfers and stock trades are a little stickier, though, and may eventually require state and/or federal regulation of the company.”
@Chris - yes, they all use yodlee. Now that mint is providing investing data, I’ll cancel my account with Covestor (don’t need bragging rights, thank you).
@ Dave -dude, you’re great at getting money from the VCs, and it is a cool product, but this growth will stop very soon - it’s not a viral app, no matter how you look at it. but mint will never be able to help me with investing as they do with helping me with my personal budget. vestopia is kind of doing that, but they also have a long way to go before getting there - and then please sync the two apps together, or with any other pro help for my investment needs!
I’m glad they’ve added investments. I hope they also have a good way to compare trading companies because I’m getting tired of the one I’m with right now (First Trade). It always takes longer to pull money from the account than the 2-3 business days that they suggest and its a ACH transfer.
I’ve heard about mint.com for a long time and for some reason I didn’t sign up until yesterday. I’m glad that I have. They do have some things in my mind that should be improved like comparing your spending to your income, so you can actually see yourself saving, but it’s still a great tool that I will continue to use.
Is anyone aware of a UK equivalent of Mint - That has direct access to account data?
Ta
@EH - Thanks for bringing the duplicate transaction issue up. We are working on resolution for this now which I think will work really well for your needs. It will launch shortly.
Re: rules, tomorrow we are launching a new way to re-categorize transactions, including a much improved approach to creating and managing rules.
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts on these features.
I’ve been using Mint for a few months now, great app. I hope they add student loans soon so that I can track all of my stuff in one place.
Mint is great as a daily/weekly place to watch cash flow and manage a budget. But I don’t think I’d want to see my 401k balance every time I sign in. My 401k is a long-term investment account, and I like to check it once a month or once a quarter.
So while I understand what Mint is trying to do here, I don’t think this feature is a huge deal. I’d rather see them focus on improving the core cash flow and budgeting functionality.
Nice! I am a big fan of Mint. My wife and I have tried to track our budget and finances with spreadsheets, Money, and Quicken and always gave up because they were just too involved. Mint really makes it easy. I look forward to May 6.
@Andy Kant We’ll be adding support for student loans, auto loans, and mortgages in a June release time frame. At that point, all your assets, all your debts, both short and long-term can be reflected on Mint for a true picture of your net worth.
Aaron Patzer, Founder & CEO, Mint.com
I am with Chris. Yodlee has been my source for this information across many more financial and non-financial service areas for years.
@chris, @steve: Yodlee is a Mint partner, and yes i agree it’s a cool service… i’ve also been a user of Yodlee for ~5-6 years. that said, Yodlee ended up building their business more on the enterprise / white-label opportunity, so the consumer service hasn’t really been their focus.
in addition, Mint has done a lot of work to enhance Yodlee features and create additional value through algorithmic categorization, as well as a substantially new model for suggesting ways to save money / reduce debt / find better financial options.
Aaron & team are doing some solid work, and i think it shows. hope they keep it up
[disclosure: i'm a Mint advisor/investor]
Providing stock brokerage “may” require federal and state registration??? Try “definitely” will require registration. And that is a huge hurdle. But certainly where Mint should go if it wants to provide a real value-add. A single platform to manage (not just track) all of my financial transactions–that would be stellar.
Dave,
I might know too much information about security and banking to know what the “typical” consumer thinks about the security of placing all your financial information on a site that is not audited or under the regulations of Financial Institutions but at sometime it might come up?
While you claim to have no data or passwords you are passing the data off to a partner which few consumers know. Consumers know banks and companies like Intuit. They keep my money secure and I do my taxes with them. No one seems to be bringing this up.
It is a very cool application I agree but why not cobrand it and sell it to banks?
i think it’s a good news for investors.
Still waiting….
“This feature is currently being built and will be available to all mint users coon!”
Got an email today:
Sign me up for Mint’s investments beta!
http://www.mint.com/investment.....riend.html
thnks
thnks