Mint, also known as Intuit Mint and formerly known as Mint.com, was a personal financial management website and mobile app for the US and Canada produced by Intuit, Inc. (which also produces TurboTax, QuickBooks, and Credit Karma). Mint's primary service allowed users to track bank, credit card, investment, and loan balances and transactions through a single user interface, as well as create budgets and set financial goals.

History

Founding and fundraising

Mint.com was originally created by Aaron Patzer and provided account aggregation through a deal with Yodlee. In February 2008, revenue was generated through lead generation, earned via earning referral fees from recommendations of highly personalized, targeted financial products to its users. Mint raised over $31 million in venture capital funding from DAG Ventures, Shasta Ventures, and First Round Capital, as well as from angel investors including Ram Shriram, an early investor in

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. The latest round of $14 million was closed on August 4, 2009, and reported by CEO Aaron Patzer as preemptive. TechCrunch later pegged the valuation of Mint at $140 million in 2009. It had 35 employees, before it was acquired in 2009.

Purchase by Intuit

On September 13, 2009, TechCrunch reported Intuit would acquire Mint for $170 million. An official announcement was made the following day. On November 2, 2009, Intuit announced its acquisition of Mint.com was complete. The former CEO of Mint.com, Aaron Patzer, was named vice president and general manager of Intuit's personal finance group, responsible for Mint.com and all Quicken online, desktop, and mobile offerings. Patzer further added the features of the online product Mint.com would be incorporated into the Intuit's Quicken desktop product, and vice versa, as two collaborative aspects of the Intuit Personal Finance team.

Operations under Intuit

Mint switched to using Intuit's own system for connecting to accounts after it was purchased by Intuit in 2009. It was later renamed from "Mint.com" to just "Mint". Mint's primary service allowed users to track bank, credit card, investment, and loan balances and transactions through a single user interface, as well as create budgets and set financial goals. In 2010, Mint.com said it could connect with more than 16,000 US and Canadian financial institutions, and to support more than 17 million individual financial accounts. Patzer left Intuit in December 2012. By 2011, Mint had replaced Intuit's Online Quicken product, a process that took place in 2013, with users migrated over. In 2016, Mint.com reported to have over 20 million users. In 2019, Intuit's consumer sector, consisting largely of Mint and Turbotax, had $2.775 billion in revenue. In 2020, Mint had 13 million registered users. ''Fast Company'' criticized the app for having been neglected by Intuit, noting core functionality remained the same, but that the software was not being significantly improved over time. It quoted founder Aaron Patzer saying "in my mind, it's been in maintenance mode the last eight years."

Shut down

Intuit announced Mint would be shutting down on December 31, 2023, and prompted its users to move to its Credit Karma product. This was later changed to March 23, 2024.

Security controversy

In 2010, it was reported that Mint asked users to provide both the usernames and the passwords to their bank accounts, credit cards, and other financial accounts, which Mint then stored in its databases in a decryptable format. This raised concerns that if the Mint databases were ever hacked, both usernames and passwords would become available to rogue third parties. Some banks support a separate "access code" for read-only access to financial information, which reduces the risk to some degree. In January 2017, Intuit and JPMorgan Chase settled a longstanding dispute, and agreed to develop software where Chase customers send their data, for financial purposes, to Mint without having Intuit store customers' names and passwords. It was also agreed Intuit would never sell Chase's customer data.

References

External links

* {{Authority control 2006 establishments in California American companies established in 2006 Financial services companies established in 2006 Account aggregation providers Accounting software Intuit software Companies based in Mountain View, California Software companies established in 2006 Finance websites IOS software Android (operating system) software WatchOS software 2009 mergers and acquisitions