Mint, the personal finance startup that won last year’s TechCrunch 40, has launched a host of new features including investment tracking, 401k managment, and more flexible budget sheets. CEO Aaron Patzer says that the new features finally make Mint a one-stop place to get an overview on your entire financial portfolio, and will drop the site’s ‘Beta’ label accordingly. Patzer also notes that in the past few weeks of economic turmoil, Mint has been seeing its highest traffic ever -with registrations up 100% - as users scramble to save money wherever they can.
Mint originally released its investment tracking functionality to a small portion of its users, and will now be expanding the feature to everyone. Users can track their Brokerage, IRA, 401k and 529 accounts, and can drill down in each to see how their investments are performing relative to the market average.
The site is also opening an entirely new 401(k) management center, where users can identify present and past 401k accounts. Patzer says that old 401(k)s from past employers can lead to regular maintenance fees, which Mint will help users avoid by switching old accounts to rollover IRAs.
Finally, the site is also introducing what Patzer says is the site’s most oft-requested feature: user-defined transaction categories. Previously users of the site’s budget management tool (which automatically categories purchases depending on where they occur) were restricted to a set of options defined by Mint. Now users will be able to enter their own categories and set up custom rulesets.
So where does Mint go from here? Patzer says that Mint will soon be enhancing its mobile options, with a new SMS feature in the next few weeks and an iPhone application around the end of the year. Unfortunately, making transactions on Mint (be it to pay bills or execute trades) still isn’t possible and won’t be for some time, which means you’ll have to go elsewhere to move your money around.
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But when o when will it be in use for UK users. Curses!
http://www.barrecruit.com
Agreed
All these new features sound great but mean nothing if you’re not based in the US. I’d really like to use Mint but can’t, so will have to go elsewhere… I’d be interested to know what the barriers are for them setting up internationally?
Quite a few. They have to build business relationships and the technical pipes into each financial provider in a geography. Hitting a new market means setting up a lot of foundation work initially.
And now with 401k management, they would ideally have the equivalent for each country they operate in as well.
Bottom line - Will happen, but don’t hold your breath.
Yeh, obviously, this is quite worthless when you have accounts in different countries. It also seems to me there are not a huge amount of major banking institutions in Western Europe that would prohibit entry. In Austria for example there are only a handful of major players. Get them on board and you ave another country locked up.
It’s also annoying that its not very clear on the site that it’s for US customers, they just seem to assume that everyone visiting is from the US. I’m still not even sure if the site is useless to me as someone from the UK (maybe I could manually enter transactions?)
I’m a Mint user and it’s totally awesome!
How strange. I thought this was about Mint the web analytics software [http://haveamint.com]. Now I look at the iconography and screenshots of the Mint UI, and see that they seem to come from the same place. Talk about strange synergies!
It would be nice to pull all your finances into one site but I’ll wait until my bank does it through their portal and I have all the transactional functionality. There is no way I’m giving a startup access to any of my accounts.
According to the nuts and bolts of their About section, they do not have access to any of your accounts. At all. Period.
Still Mint needs to expand to all the geographical locations.
I think the updates to the budget functionality are great. i spend more time budgeting than looking at my investments.
I am a satisfied mint user for about a year now. I like 98% of what it offers - here are a few for the wish list:
-I signed up for alerts when a direct deposit hits over $500. This usually gets to me (a) 3 days after the transaction. (b) with 2-3 text messages for the same deposit.
-I use QuickBooks online for my business, there I can use the bank register ro enter checks I wrote (like an acutal checkbook) and when they clear the bank, QB automatically matches the transaction as entered, and clears it in the register. Why is this important? Today in mint, I can not use it to track *actual* balances. When I write checks, I want to be able to enter those checks into a register and see the “real balance”.
Other than these 2 issues, it’s a great and free service and the security issues have been addressed to my satisfaction previously.
(On another note, Quicken announced today that they have stopped charging for their “mint competitor” service. As far as I am concerned, mint is far superior)
I wouldn’t join a site that has a Patzer as CEO, especially nothing to do with money.
Do tell.
How’s Mint in terms of security? Handing over the keys to my financial world is something I’m reluctant to do unless I know the recipient is completely secure, and provides some form of insurance should their negligence lead to a security breach exposing my assets to theft.
According to Mint:
- No personal information. They only ask for a valid email address, password and zip code.
- “… ask for your online banking user name and passwords, but [they] do not see or store that information.”
- Mint does not know your bank account numbers or credit card numbers.
- You cannot move money with Mint.
- Covered by Verisign, TRUSTe, and RSA, and tested daily by Hackersafe.
In short, Mint does not seem to have access to any of your personal information or specific account information, and if someone gained access to your login, they could only see your transactions, not your account numbers, and none of your online-banking usernames or passwords.
heh with today’s market, maybe most ppl would rather pretend their 401s etc. are chugging along just fine.
still, a timely offer from Mint as if there isn’t a better time to stay on top of your finances, then I don’t know what is.
if you’re able to aggregate all your brokerages and retirement accounts in one place, it does save a lot of time and trouble to have to resort to other tools just to simply get a quick look at your current asset allocations, fund performance, etc.
the additional alert features on investment related fees and interest rate changes is a nice plus too.
I often see a lot of comments on “when will it stop being US-only.” localizing mint to other regions will definitely be a challenge, and I’m sure they’re up to the task but personally I don’t see that happening anytime soon. it’s not an easy task to find reliable or quality source for foreign financial institutional data.
Been using Mint since its beta launch and they do a great job of continually improving features and usability. I’m excited about the new stuff. Love Mint!
There is already a service similar to Mint in the UK. Check out http://www.kublax.com
and in Germany very soon http://www.kekaya.de
Kublax serves the UK market. It won the Seedcamp award in 2007. It is backed by the Skype founders and other top-tier business angels in the UK.
Mint is an interesting website but still very much a work in progress and often quite frustrating to use. Many times it can’t reach bank websites (when going directly via browser works), the summary reports are very primitive (even when compared to a program like Quicken), and worst of all their tech support (only via email) is slow and not very responsive (they cite back information from their FAQ’s rather than answer specific questions).
This site has alot of promise, and everytime, I begin to use it again, I get frustrated by its many basic shortcomings.
I know its free, but still rough around edges.
I used Mint for a while but the biggest problem I had was the duplicate transactions. That was the ultimate deal breaker for me. Until they solve that problem I won’t be compelled to go back no matter how many new features they introduce.
Anyone know if they got that fixed?
I’ve been using it for a few weeks and haven’t had any duplicates. I was hesitant at providing my info in the beginning, but after seeing how the login process works, it’s absolutely no different then an offline MS Money or Quicken connecting to your Bank.
I could not think of a worse time for MINT to exist… who’s left out there that actually wants to play with the market… track and be reminded of their devastated portfolio… lol…. this site will be cut with the same falling knife of the economy o’er the next two years.
Recruited a friend to mint, and they abandoned their bank (a little local thing) because they couldn’t connect it to mint.
If mint can earn that kind of dedicated audience… they’ll do fine.
I have doubt to have mint secure my asset. It’s one thing sharing my personal information but another sharing my username and password to my banks. One day mint will steal my money without me knowing. Like taking a penny or two or something in that form. I don’t trust companies or emails that ask for my username and password to my banks.
Mint uses only your account login credentials for access to your account information and Mint ***does not store these credentials***.
Have financial institutions given Mint read only access? I’d love to use the service but am affraid to hand over the keys to my bank accounts.
It’s great to hear that Mint keeps on expanding upon it’s excellent service, but it pains me to see that it still hasn’t released a Canadian Version.
Come on Mint, show your friends north of the 49th parallel some love.
@Jmartens @Laura - Our connection to banks is read-only, we cannot move any money. Read more about that here: http://mint.com/privacy
@Jay - The problem with duplicates is bank specific, but we made literally hundreds of improvements in the latest release of the product, and I’d say give it a shot. If you have any problem, contact us.
Thanks all!
Thanks Jason. I actually asked a guy on twitter what he thought since he is an IT security expert and he gave you guys the thumbs up.
Guess I’ll give it a shot…
Love the idea of the site, but even out of beta I still don’t trust it.
I’ve been trying mint since April. It’s great really — if it worked with my primary bank it would blow competitors (Wesabe?) out of the water. (My ING Direct account works *great*; the local bank gives me trouble.) My bank’s online portal uses cey-ebanking.com (FNIS?) and no matter how many ways I present my authentication information, the log on always fails. That’s not the frustrating part, though… Understanding that this product is in Beta, I contacted support and had what I thought was a productive exchange of emails with Damon (of PayPal fame). He recommended several steps that were promising and indicated that they were working with “the provider. I tried to log on a few more times and still nothing..
I sort of gave up for a while — though my bank is listed, it just won’t work. (In a way I wish they’d remove the banks that don’t work — to eliminate false hope on my part). I contacted support again a few weeks ago and got the standard response for my problem. I replied, referencing my previous case. I’ve yet to hear anything. Reading this article, I tried again. Still nothing.
I’ll probably try again in a few months.
Please bring Mint to Canada.
I just can’t understand why Mint can’t go international. Quicken and Wesabe has been doing it with no problems.
I’m currently using Wesabe, but the information it shows is of no use to me. I would like something more sophisticated like Quicken, Quick Books or Mint. Giving usernames and passwords is a risky business. I agree that Mint would have to commit itself in some form to protect this informationm and in case of identify theft, they should pay for any damages done.
Many comments talk about the apparent lack of international alternatives to Mint. One is covering Europe and called Kublax. It can be found at http://www.kublax.com It works really well (hence so we don’t feel so bad Mint is not in Europe yet).
Yes, but only in the UK. Please, remember there are other countries in Europe. Europe isn’t just the UK.
dear mint,
as you probably know, many many more people would use your services if there was a way to make them feel even more secure. maybe something like a login device for the desktop or something.
keep up the great work.
Thanks for blogging about Mint.com . I found your blog post very helpful when I needed to learn more about Mint.com .
Since I blog about identity theft and corporate responsibility, I looked more closely at Mint.com and its data security issues in a recent blog post:
http://ivebeenmugged.typepad.c.....ecure.html
You and your readers may find this helpful.
George
Editor
http://ivebeenmugged.typepad.com