Yesterday, Intuit closed on its previously announced $170 million acquisition of personal budgeting site Mint, making Mint founder and CEO Aaron Patzer the new vice president and general manager of Intuit’s Personal Finance Group. He is now in charge of not only Mint.com, but also all of Quicken’s online and desktop products. What will his first order of business be? I spoke to him today to find out.
“Over the next 6 to 9 months,” he says, “we will end-of-life Quicken Online and their customer’s data will be migrated over to Mint.” Just a few months ago, the Quicken Online team was questioning Mint’s success. Now, Patzer is their new boss.
It’s not so much revenge as it is a smart business move. Intuit doesn’t need two different online financial planning sites for consumers, and it bought Mint because it couldn’t beat it. Combining the two is the obvious move. (Both help consumers keep track of their money and spending by monitoring their bank accounts, brokerage accounts, credit cards, and other financial accounts).
Quicken Online has roughly 1.5 million registered users, but only about 100,000 are active in any given month. In contrast, Mint has about the same number of registered users (1.7 million), but nearly 700,000 are active every 30 days. “The biggest opportunity for us is to reactivate those users who thought that maybe Quicken Online wasn’t for them,” says Patzer. (Read his account of how he built Mint over the past two years after winning TechCrunch40).
Other than Quicken Online’s users, is there anything that he’d like to keep? Patzer can only think of one feature Quicken Online has that Mint doesn’t and which he wants: the ability to manually enter cash transactions or record checks which have not yet cleared.
The fact that Intuit put him in charge of Quicken’s desktop products as well as its online services says a lot about where it thinks the future of that business is going. The growth is definitely in the online portion of the business. And now Intuit can start cross-selling Mint from its Quicken desktop products, as well as TurboTax. Some consumers, however, will always prefer the perceived security of a desktop app when it comes to their personal finances, which is why Patzer is starting to think about ways to store some information from Mint locally by using something like Google Gears, Adobe Air, or Microsoft Silverlight.
Building hooks into TurboTax will present other opportunities beyond simply signing up new members. When a TurboTax user decides to sign up for an IRA to save on taxes or want to know what to do with their tax return, Mint can present the best rates and offers from competing financial institutions and earn a hefty fee for finding one of them a new customer.
Patzer has other ideas for connecting Mint and TurboTax as well: “What I want to do is to take your stock transactions and everything you’ve tagged in Mint as a medical expense or business expense and push that over to see if you should itemize deductions. If we pull in your 1099s and deductions, we have done half your taxes for you. We could reduce the time it takes you to do your taxes to 20 minutes or less.”
The next step after that would be to get into financial planning for big life goals such as paying down debt, saving for college, buying a house or car, or saving for a home renovation or a big vacation. He wants Mint to be at the center of every major financial decision a person makes.
When he sold to Intuit, he took some flak for not going it alone, but Patzer believes he made the right choice because he can build a bigger business much faster at Intuit. He wants to keep pushing online, as well as mobile, desktop apps, and international (which is hard to do in finance with a 38-person startup). Mint already has a popular iPhone app which has been downloaded more than 350,000 times, and is now working on an Android app.
But the biggest reason Patzer sold is because Intuit will help Mint get to scale faster. Mint’s value is in the personal financial data that it tracks, and that data will be much more valuable with 5 million active users than with under one million. Getting to 5 million and 10 million and beyond is the game. And however popular Mint was among younger, Web-savvy consumers, some people were never going to trust it with their financial lives. About 25 million people a year already trust Intuit with their taxes, half of those online. That’s the most sensitive financial data a person has to give. If you already trust Intuit with your taxes, making the jump to Mint becomes a lot easier for those who might have been hesitating before.
As long as Turbotax stays untouched, this is cool.
My applauds to him. He’s such an enthusiastic, vibrant, and generic person and I know he is someone who can easily provide the solutions to our needs anyday.
Intuit are a lucky company to grab Mint.com while they could, and to have Aaron on the team is just a really big bonus. They’re already a winner.
Using “end-of-life” as a verb has to be the best euphemism for “kill” that I’ve ever heard.
This is great to hear – anything Mint can do to make taxes less of a hassle is only going to rapidly increase their adoption. Scanning your purchase history for deductions and figuring out if you should itemize? I might even pay money for that.
Best of luck to Aaron for continued success in his new role.
Importing financial data into Turbo Tax for itemization already exists in Quicken. If you want to pay money for that feature it’s been there for years.
It’s cool if those quicken features will be passed to mint for those users to make use of.
Does anyone know if mint.com will be integrating Intuit’s myquickreceipts.com now that we know they are absorbing Quicken.com?
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November 3rd, 2009 4:13 pm – Leo
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Like the first commenter, you’re in for a SERIOUS reality check at Intuit. Intuit is a slow, slumbering, bureaucratic, politically driven, “not invented here” blood sucking monster. How do I know? I used to work for Intuit until their work culture and B.S. “work life balance” made me burn out. They have no clue how to run a software business and hire dictators to run organizations they have no idea how to run. So,ummmm, good luck there Aaron. Just like all MANY web startups (Flikr, Delicious, etc) that got bought up and had their founders work for the file and rank and then get disgusted, pissed off and leave, you will too…Too bad you sold out. Mint would have been able to eat Intuit’s lunch.
Leo, if you can, explain the work life balance measures. I’d be interested as to their effectiveness/ineffectiveness.
I would love to have bill pay make its way to Mint!
Mint is awesome. I can finally trust Intuit
Good to hear international expansion is on the agenda for Mint.
Fingers crossed for a UK launch soon!
I hope they get it to the UK soon too. From all the comments and forum posts it definitely seems like there is a big market for it. I think we’ve waited long enough
Having now that piece of the puzzle, I can understand why he ’sold’ Mint to the big competitor. Because of this kind of agreements, that even your start-up gets bought – it will replace the old modded gas guzzler.
Now all have peace in mind and can continue to use Mint. And I apologize for saying things (writing) before the whole picture was revealed.
Well, for readers it was revealed to a certain extent – who knew that Aaron Patzer & Crew had made such a deal. It simply wasn’t reported or leaked. Period.
spot on! i completely understand everything you say. period.
I’m surprised- I thought that the Mint acquisition was primarily a defensive play to protect the Intuit franchise and deny competitors an entrance. This move is both a big vote of confidence in Patzer and an unusually harsh move to overhaul Intuit’s personal finance leadership team.
Sounds great with one potential drawback for me. As I understand it mint still does not support Canadian banks and quicken online does. With this change will mint add in this support or will I find the financial tool I use suddenly become useless?
who thinks he’ll stay at intuit a day past his contract? anyone?
I haven’t used Mint, but Quicken (at least the Mac version) was one of the worst pieces of software I had ever purchased. And Quicken Online doesn’t keep track of investment accounts, so I stuck with simple online banking from my bank. The entire Quicken franchise needs to be axed, renamed, and started again from scratch. I won’t give it another penny.
Agreed. Quicken for Mac was atrocious. Mind-bogglingly bad. Mint saw an opportunity and went for it, and I’m hoping I will benefit.
The only thing left that I require is support for foreign accounts (I am in the minority two times over: a Canadian Mac user).
The slave becomes the master. It’s happened before–Nation’s Bank and Bank of America, Audi and Volkswagen/Porsche.
I left Mint because I moved my banking to a local credit union that Mint couldn’t seem to connect to for some reason. I went to Quicken Online because they could easily connect to ALL my financial accounts and had a simple and easy to use reporting system. Hopefully Mint will improve their ability to connect to financial institutions and their customer service (since I got very little from Mint when trying to connect).
I had a similar experience – but I wasn’t using a local credit union, I was doing my banking with a major bank that Mint was totally unable to support. Here’s hoping that Mint makes sure it can support all the banks that Quicken Online can support before killing the only service that has worked for me online.
My primary financial institution is currently supported by Quicken Online, but not by Mint. I am curious to see what happens when they “End-of-Life” Quicken Online. I am hoping that the new Mint/Quicken will support my financial institution because I really like Mint.
Anyone have any insight into how this situation will be handled?
Thanks
I assume this is based on business partnership to allow access to bank information. Since Quicken has been around the block, I assume they have partnerships / relationships with banks and/or financial institutions than Mint. Based on this assumption the new Mint (or product) should leverage what Quicken has access to. Again, just an assumption.
“Some consumers, however, will always prefer the perceived security of a desktop app when it comes to their personal finances”
I’m sorry, but there is a real (not just perceived) security difference on the PC I control and an online service. I’ve been a loyal Quicken user since what was probably Quicken 1, and they need to ensure they keep the desktop version. I certainly hope this new guy does not get in and mess with a good thing too much. Otherwise, I’d just end up keeping the current product and never upgrade again.
Does Mint even generate revenue? Why would you pay $170M for a company that gives its stuff away for free? The only rationale I can see is keeping MSFT, YHOO, GOOG away from snapping it up–it’s about risk neutralization if anything, not positive returns from a IRR standpoint–it will never be positive I think.
Patzer should pay very close attention to the first comment at the top of this thread, by the reader identified as William Blanchard:
“As long as Turbotax stays untouched, this is cool.”
There are current Quicken Online customers who have not only grown used to the tool, but actually like it, and may not want to do things the Mint way.
Others may have complex account profiles or data histories that they frequently reference.
Patzer needs to figure out a painless migration path that will appeal to these two populations and not alienate them. I’ve used both products and love Mint, but when it comes to UIs some people actually get quite set in their ways.
Ian Lamont
The Industry Standard
I agree. I tried Mint, but found Quicken Online much better. Two main reasons are 1) Mint is horrible at recognizing transactions and severely truncates payees. So if you have a purchase on 1234 ABC Road, Anywhere, US, Mint will just pull something like “ABC Road, Anywhe.” This means that you can’t use the feature that allows you to use a set description for a payee. i.e. if there are multiple merchants on that road, you are screwed. Also Quicken Online lets you enter your specific bills as upcoming transactions and it will factor those in and give you your “RealBalance” taking them into account. I find Mint’s budget feature to be not nearly as useful. I’ve tried to go back to Mint a number of times, but I just end up having to manually adjust a bunch of transactions and keep a list of my bills to properly account for how much I have left.
Can you provide a way to import our Quicken Desktop files into Mint? I’d prefer to have it online, but I have so much data invested into Quicken Desktop.
I don’t care for mint.com too much, but I remember getting an email from them telling me to log in to my account or else it would get deleted or something. I thought it was rather coercive and felt compelled to log into my mint account..maybe this is why their number of active users is higher? I don’t know if quicken emails their users to log in or not…
I am not a member of Mint, so I don’t know what kind of emails they send out. Scammers do their phishing by telling people they need to log in to keep their account active, and they conveniently provide the necessary link in their email, a link which is fraudulent.
Here is my question – does Mint provide a non-deletable record of the time and date of every log-in by a member ? That would be convenient for members to keep a watchful eye in case they are concerned about identity theft. But how many people keep their own records for every time they log-in ?
I was one of those MINT users that visited the site evry single day to check on my finances. I used to run my financial life out of MINT.
Then they decided to sell. To Intuit. But what really convinced me to close my MINT account was the following: I learned about MINT being sold not from the MINT team, not from a letter from Aaron, but from an article in TechCrunch. Looks like Aaron was so busy drinking Jamba Juice and practicing his speech at TC40 that he forgot to send a note to the people that made MINT a success (us, the users) first of all. Then, to add to the insult, he did sent an email to all users, late that same night, after everyone knew about it.
That is the same attitude that made me leave Quicken. I go to OfficeMax and I walk as far as possible from those Quicken boxes. (I do use Turbo Tax, but it’s becoming to “quickenized” lately).
So, if the way to improve MINT is to make it more “quickenized”, well, I will miss my MINT, but I’m not going there.
You should see the emails from MINT’s marketing team that I got that day: “we had no idea Aaron was doing this…” and blah, blah, blah.
Have fun at Intuit, Aaron.
I miss MINT…Now it takes me almost 1 1/2 hour to check all my financials, visiting 9 different sites every other day.
seriously, you left Mint because TechCrunch scooped the story a few hours before you got a personal email from the founder about the deal?
good thing you didn’t have a legitimate reason like you decided to brush your teeth with a toothbrush you happened to pick up from a distant cousin who used Mint, and found out he might have cooties.
srsly dude… get a clue.
use the product or don’t use the product on the merits of its features, benefits, customer service, or whatever… but don’t whine about timing for some BS PR announcement as a significant reason.
i care more about the folks talking about TurboTax integration or Canadian bank support… at least they have practical concerns.
maybe you can find a better product where the founder will give you a personal morning wake-up call & fold your laundry.
sheesh.
oh yeah sorry… i’m a [former] Mint investor, and the product kicks ass, as does the team, and they are responsible & hardworking, & care a lot about their customers.
which is why they won.
Reasons that I left Mint:
1. Consolidating access to financial services might be convenient, but it’s also inherently dangerous.
2. Mint did a very poor job of managing and triggering notifications. I was getting tons of notifications about “unusual” account activity, fees being charged, etc. that were just flat-out incorrect or at least misleading.
3. Mint made it very difficult to manage credit card charge categories in a predictable way. I’d set a particular recurring transaction as a certain category, and it would turn up in a different category later. Even a minimally intelligent review of the historical data in my account would lead to better results. Mint just seems to go with whatever random category assignments that come from the card carrier, which pretty much obviates the benefits of a system like Mint.
4. The business model (selling “savings” to customers) is terrible. None of the offers/promotions on the site were even remotely interesting to me. Some will argue that this aspect of the site will get better as it becomes more targeted. I do not like the idea of a site targeting me based on my financial information, even if it means logging into multiple sites.
5. Hated the interface. Way too standard-issue RIA/FLEX and clumsy as can be.
If it makes you feel any better, the employees found out via TechCrunch as well. Somebody leaked it to the press before employees could be notified, let alone users.
J. Briggs,
I am sure mint brings in plenty of revenues. I signed up for a new checking account and credit card through mint.com and I am sure they got a commission from it.
“Some consumers, however, will always prefer the perceived security of a desktop app when it comes to their personal finances…”
Perceived security? Gimme a break.
The Govt and Taxman will soon know everything about us. Do the russians still own facebook? Does Rupert still own myspace?
Grandpa tried to buy his way into youthful vigor.
Dont work. Grandpa goes broke. Young feller runs off with the piggy bank.
It’s Grandpa’s fault for putting lipstick on the piggy bank.
Aaron truly is interested in what is best for Mint.com and it shows after many speculated about how much more money he could have made had he keep it private for a few more years. He’s interested in helping the consumer and felt the best platform to do that was through Intuit. I couldn’t agree more, they have a huge breathe in the personal finance/budgeting market. I hope that we one day can work alongside Aaron to help the consumer with finding an advisor for their investments.
Min is great! But why sell out for a measly $170M. Looks and sounds like it could have been much bigger if they just kept working at it for a few more years.
Great – but – get INTERNATIONAL going guys!! I’m amazed how slow companies in the UK have been to exploit the opportunity here.
I was very close to launching a personal finance solution for the UK market in 2008, but pulled out to focus on my dating business.
It’s an absolutely killer opportunity – there’s a few guys in the UK poking about, but nobody with the clout of Mint who could really bring it to the mass market.
Ross
Great job, i’m already on my way to become a Mint user.
Seems that Intuit tax and online pending transactions services will complete Mint feature list.
Looking forward for the mobile version.
What’s next: MINTuit? I look forward to watching Aaron and his team bring Quicken back to life and make personal finance the future focus of Intuit.
As soon as they can get a RoundTuit.