Big news in the world of personal finance account aggregation software, with the announcement that web-based account manager Mint has been purchased by Intuit, the maker of Quicken, which has both PC based and online (Quicken Online) versions, and is one of the most widely used personal finance software packages. eConsultancy reports on the $170million deal:
Mint.com is simple: it allows users to aggregate data for their bank, credit and investment accounts and track those accounts through a single interface. Through this, Mint.com can help users identify areas for savings (it claims to have found over $300m in potential savings for its users) and promote financial services that users may be interested in.
This is a pretty amazing deal for Mint which is just 3 years old as a company (and launched to the public just 2 years ago), yet managed to acquire 1.5 million customers in that time, saving them millions of dollars in the process.
It will be interesting to see how both Mint and Quicken develop in the future – both are to be continued, with both Mint and Quicken Online to be kept as free products, but it will be interesting to see if both tools are continued into the future, whether they merge into one tool or whether one of the tools quietly disappears (more likely to be Quicken Online).
It must also act as both an incentive to UK based aggregators to get their acts together to offer the same level of functionality and usability that Mint can offer, but also a threat that the US behemoth will eventually launch a UK flavour of the site with some big backing behind them.