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Mint has certainly caught the attention of the nation's press. Over the weekend, I watched CEO Aaron Patzer interviewed on San Francisco's channel 5 (video here). Today, the Wall Street Journal ran a Q&A with Patzer in the Lee Gomes Talking Tech column under the headline, Financial Software Moves to the Web (p. B3, see note 1). The WSJ article itself is a throwback to the late 1990s, talking about the advantages of Web-based apps vs. desktop apps.
The Mint press coverage reminds me of the 2000/2001 period when Yodlee and Vertical One burst on the scene with "account aggregation" services. Mint wisely steers clear of that out-of-fashion term and focuses on the benefits it provides, namely saving users from themselves by pointing out the sometimes substantial money to be earned putting spare cash to work in a higher-yield account.
We will continue to watch Mint closely, not because its services are unique: Yodlee, Wesabe, Jwaala, Geezeo, Digital Insight (Intuit) and many others provide essentially the same thing. But Mint is the hot new kid on the block and seems to have struck a nerve, at least with the early-adopter financial junkies, which includes the personal finance press. It will be interesting to see how the company builds on its momentum and what implications, if any, its early success has on the broader banking marketplace.
Note:
1. Thanks, Mom, for the WSJ tip. And no, the "developers conference" mentioned in the article was not our FINOVATE, it was TechCrunch 40 held two weeks earlier. Mint won awards at both.
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