[Update: Mint has won the TechCrunch 40 conference's competition, which goes to the most impressive presenting company from among the 40 participants. Mint will receive a $50,000 cash award and other services and awards from corporate sponsors.]
Mint, a long-awaited online tool for managing your personal finances, has launched today.
For those who have used Quicken or other traditional personal accounting software to manage your checking, savings and credit card accounts, Mint will be a relief.
Once you sign up, you provide Mint with access to all of your accounts. Mint automatically categorizes each paycheck and each expenditure, then provides visual graphs and pie charts showing exactly how you’re spending your money. The entire process takes a matter of minutes.
Other software typically requires you to manually enter line items — a process that can take hours. Even Wesabe (past coverage), another online personal finance tool, requires you to download software to help it sync your bank account information with its online service.
For first-time Mint users, the user experience is as if a veil is being lifted from your eyes, exposing how you’re wasting money on food, gas, clothes, movies, and any number of other items.
Mint continues updating while its users are offline, connecting to their bank accounts every night, securely downloading transaction data, updating accounts and making note of unusual activity or low balances. It also searches out better deals to help save money — for example, credit cards offering lower fees than your current ones.
You can choose to let Mint send you email and text message reminders about bills, and updates about your own spending activity; the site also works from your mobile phone.
I caught up Aaron Patzer, the founder and chief executive, at an event last week. He spent the first six months working on Mint by himself in his bedroom, he told me, building the technology that searches and categorizes your financial data from across institutions.
During Mint’s beta period, the company says users have found ways to save an average of $1,000.
Upon testing the software last week, I immediately changed a number of personal spending habits, and feel even guiltier about some others. It also gave me even clearer proof that Bank of America has done a great job of nickle-and-diming me at every turn.
This tool should have mass appeal, especially considering the large amounts of money Americans have been borrowing in recent years — provided people are willing to entrust Mint with their personal data.
Tags: co:Mint, inv:first-round-capital, people:aaron-patzer9 Comments
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SmilingTriton said:
Am I missing something here? People will REALLY give to Mint their banking account username/password so Mint could get their daily transactions and upgrade those nice looking graphs? I’ll ask it one more time: People will REALLY give to Mint their banking account username/password?
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Eric Eldon said:
Well, I gave Mint my personal data. I trust Mint at least as much as I trust Bank of America, frankly. Also, the US government can access anything BofA has and much more. Who do you trust?
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FIRE Finance said:
Mint’s servers were extremely busy today, we could not even add our accounts. We do have a concern about giving our personal data to Mint. Security is a big question mark. But willing to try the package provide their servers are ready to serve us. Nice review!
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Mary said:
I’ve been using Yodlee through Fidelity. I like the looks on mint so far but haven’t been able to download any transactions today. Hopefully the servers will catch up tonight!
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Scott Pannier said:
I can’t really believe I readily registered on Mint.com and submitted my username and passwords for Bank of America, Chase, Citibank, and Discover…oh well!
Clearly something was wrong though b/c none of my accounts were uploaded, I was getting error pages back from Mint. Looks like I wasn’t the only one trying to integrate my accounts to see what Mint.com spit back.
“If you build it, he will come” but I probably won’t remember next week what the site was called or be interested in using it after my first go-around.
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Tester said:
These sites have to realize that when they launch they have to work and at scale. Obviously there will be a spike in traffic - but if you get me or anyone else to the site and it doesn’t work - you have just lost a customer forever. Put in your info and wait and wait and wait - great user experience. . .
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Alexander Falk said:
Nice report and screenshots, but I must say that I’ve rarely seen a company being so much over-hyped without any foundation. How could Mint win the TC40, without being scalable or getting their math right? They just promised me that I can save $35,977 by switching to CapitalOne:
http://www.xmlaficionado.com/2007/09/mint-pomises-to-save-me-35977.html
Not a joke - I’ve posted actual screenshots! -
Max said:
Mint: The easiest way to manage your personal finances thanks for this post!
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Andy Michaels' Blog on Internet Marketing and Online Success said:
But while it’s well and good– not to mention politic– for NKU to distance itself from Jacobsen’s actions and to use the occasion of her misbehavior to trumpet the institution’s support for free expression and robust debate, it’s also troubling to reflect that any institution could have any professor on its payroll who possesses such thoroughly warped notions of individual rights. Jacobsen is nearing the end of her career; her ignorance is not due to naivete, but to years of consolidation. She has worked in…
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