Ever since popular personal finance site Mint.com announced two weeks ago that it was being acquired by Intuit for $170 million, there's been some speculation about what that deal means for Yodlee, the company that provides a lot of the Mint's data, particularly from banks. Yodlee's Senior Vice President of Strategy and Development Joe Polverari has been giving interviews in which he's pretty dismissive about Mint's potential, so I talked to him a bit more about why he thinks Yodlee has the bigger opportunity.
You've probably seen some of the coverage casting Yodlee as the loser in this deal. TechCrunch's Michael Arrington compared Yodlee to Adobe's role in the YouTube acquisition -- both Yodlee and Adobe provided a lot of the underlying technology behind popular websites, but didn't make much money from their respective acquisitions. Not surprisingly, Polverari says that's a bad comparison, because Yodlee has deals with more than 12,000 banks -- it'd be a better analogy if there had been "a whole bunch of YouTubes."
Yodlee is betting on bank websites over independent sites like Mint, he adds, because that's where people will always feel more comfortable handling their finances. Mint has improved on the bank sites with its user interface and features, but the banks are starting to learn from Mint -- for example, they're starting to realize they need to provide users with better data about hidden fees, otherwise people will just go elsewhere.
"Banks recognize they're going to have to behave their way out of this situation," Polverari says.
He points to PNC Bank as an example of a better bank website that partners with Yodlee, and he says there will be similarly revamped sites launching soon. Once the banks figure out what they're doing, users will start to gravitate towards them again, leaving Mint and Intuit with a "niche" audience.
Not that Yodlee is abandoning its deals with Mint or other personal finance sites, Polverari says. It's just focusing more on making deals with financial institutions. He says that as far as he knows, Mint will continue using Yodlee's data, and Mint also says there's no plan to switch.
Still, Polverari's comments suggests that the partnership between the two companies is at least a little testy.