I don't know if it has anything to do with the publicity Mint received in recent months following its acquisition by Intuit or the promotional links from Quicken's website, but the online PFM juggernaut just blew the roof off its monthly traffic. According to Compete, in January, Mint had 1.7 million unique visitors, 600,000 more than a year earlier.

To provide a little context, not counting the Dec. to April tax-time traffic spike at Intuit, Mint's traffic is now slightly HIGHER than that of its parent company (see chart #1 below). That gives you a little understanding of why Intuit coughed up $170 million for the startup.

Another way to look at it: Mint now has as much traffic as the tenth largest U.S. retail bank, BB&T (see chart #2).

The interesting question for 2010: Now that Mint is part of the establishment, what startup will rise up to challenge it? Or will the banks, back on a path to profitability, fill the need going forward? 

Chart 1: Mint's traffic is now similar to Intuit's non-tax-time traffic

Source: Compete (link)

Chart 2: Mint now has about the same number of visitors as the tenth largest U.S. retail bank, BB&T
Note: Mint is blue line below

 
Source: Compete (link)

Note: For more information on the PFM space, see our Online Banking Report on Personal Finance Features.

Leave it to Mint to make 140 characters of personal finance chatter sexy. Yesterday, I noticed a link to a new feature called Money Tweets tucked away at the bottom of an account-alert (see inset below; note 1). The site launched in November (press release), but I was all wrapped up in P2P payments at the time (note 2) and never looked at it.

Mint's effort is the best use I've seen of Twitter as a content-creation tool (see screenshot #1, below; note 3). And once established, the site basically runs on autopilot, making it a cost-effective way to bring fresh, real-time content to your customers. 

Money Tweets has five content areas:

• Aggregated tweets from 20+ writers on five subject areas: savings, investing, budgeting, loans, and retirement
• Tweets about Mint using Twitter search
• Tweets from Mint using its Twitter stream
• Tweets from anyone answering the company's Question of the Day such as today's topic, "Is now the time to buy a house?" (upper right in screenshot below)
• Tweets from anyone using keywords taken from personal finance trending topics

Bottom line: Aggregation of the tweets from personal finance experts (with extra credit for adding your own voice to the stream) is a promising tactic for your online marketing plan. But most (all?) financial institutions will want to steer clear of streaming unmoderated tweets from anyone mentioning your company's name. That's going to cause way too many internal headaches as it attracts spam and customer complaints. 

Main page at Mint's Money Tweets (link, 8 Jan. 2010)

Notes:
1. As an aside, Mint's superb graphic design extends even to its email alerts, which look like a sticky note on the screen.
2. For more on the P2P payments market, see our latest Online Banking Report, published earlier this week, Making the Case for Person-to-Person Payments. 
3. For more on using Twitter, see our May report, Connecting to Customers with Twitter.

If anyone still wondered how serious Intuit is about incorporating the Mint brand into its portfolio after its $170 million acquisition, take a look at the latest version of the Quicken sales site. Mint is prominently featured (see first screenshot below), especially if you scroll one "ad spot" over (second screenshot).

I also found Mint mentioned at PayTrust, Intuit's bill management site (third screenshot). There's even a small plug on the Quicken Online login page (fourth screenshot).

However, on Mint's site the co-branding is not reciprocated. Quicken is not mentioned at all and Intuit is relegated to 8-point type at the bottom of the page (fourth screenshot).

The latest traffic figures from Compete support the theory that Intuit is de-emphasizing Quicken Online in favor of Mint. Traffic to <quicken.intuit.com> fell 50% in November to about 400,000, while Mint held steady at about 3x that, 1.2 million unique visitors.

Source: Compete, 10 Dec 2009 (link)

Quicken homepage on default choice, Quicken 2010 (link; 9 Dec. 2009, 11 PM)

Quicken homepage with Mint.com selected from scrolling choices
Note: Yellow highlight is mine

Intuit PayTrust homepage (link)

Quicken Online login page (link)

Mint homepage
Intuit mentioned twice at bottom of page (yellow highlight is mine). 

Note: For more information on the PFM space, see our Online Banking Report on Personal Finance Features.

The latest Advertising Age profiles the 40 hottest brands in the United States. In the current climate, I wasn't expecting to see a financial brand. But there was a one financial tech company that made the list.

Intuit's TurboTax. It even made the cover photo montage (see inset), although you have to look carefully to see the box laying flat in front (note 1).

Who would have thought tax prep software could be cool? Part of the reason: TurboTax's marketing VP, Andy Young, has been pushing the envelope looking for novel ways to market tax prep services. For example, last year TurboTax was the first company to use a Google program that displayed an Intuit tweet stream on AdSense partner sites such as Facebook, MySpace and VentureBeat (see screenshot below from our previous post). Clickthroughs went to Intuit's Twitter page, rather than its main website (note 2).

And things were clicking last year for TurboTax with 11% growth to 18 million units, despite an 11% decline in boxed-unit sales. The growth driver? Online of course, up 36% year over year.  

Implications for FIs: Banks have driven users to TurboTax for years earning a slice of revenue under affiliate deals. But the potential to provide TurboTax services is set to grow exponentially.   As announced in September's Finovate, tax prep/TurboTax will soon be integrated directly (e.g single signon) in Digital Insight's FinanceWorks. 

VentureBeat home page (9 April 2009)

Note:
1. I might have missed the TurboTax box, because I was too fixated on the Five Guys cup on the left, which is coming to Seattle very soon.
2. For more info on leveraging Twitter, see our report published in May, Online Banking Report: Connecting to Customers with Twitter.

Fair Isaac's popular forum (powered by Lithium; screenshot below) which supports its myFICO retail credit score/report unit, took first prize among 16 entrants in the Business-to-Consumer Supporting category in the recent Forrester Groundswell awards (winners list).

The Groundswell awards are based on business results using various social technologies. In total there are 16 categories.

The myFICO forum is currently receiving:

• 120,000 unique visitors in Sep 2009, up almost three-fold from a year ago (see chart below)
• 20,000 new posts added each month...with more than 500,000 posts archived
• 400,000 searches per month
• 10,000 new registered users per month

According to information supplied with the application, the forum is helping Fair Isaac in the following ways:

• Lowering call-center volumes: Total call center volume was down 1% in 2008 compared to a 23% gain the prior year.
• Reducing call-center talk time: 10% of callers are referred to the forum for more information and/or help from other users.
• Driving traffic: Traffic to myFICO.com from the forum equals about 40% of the volume from search engines.
• Improving sales: The average amount spent by a customer grows by two-thirds after they join the forum and 13% of all myFICO sales online involve a forum view.

While myFICO was the only financial services winner, Bank of America was one of four finalists among 23 entries in the B2C Talking category for its Morris on Campus student-banking campaign as was MasterCard Brazil for What's Priceless to You? 

Significance to Netbankers: myFICO's busy forum shows that despite the proliferation of blogs and social media, an old-school online forum is a good way to build a community and off-load the tech support burden. Of course, forums don't run themselves, and you'll spend a considerable time moderating them. But considering the alternative, it's an expense worth considering, especially if community-building is part of your strategic goals. Intuit has also had great success with its community forums, attracting 130,000 monthly unique users (see chart below).

myFICO forums (link, 29 Oct 2009)

Website traffic for myFICO and Intuit forums from Compete (link, 29 Oct 2009)

For more info:

• Online Banking Report: Credit Report Monitoring (Aug 2007)
• Online Banking Report: Bank 2.0 (blogs and social media, Oct 2006)

I was poking around the various small business online accounting sites today researching our next Online Banking Report and thinking about which service would suit our business, given that Microsoft is pulling the plug on Money.

I was already familiar with Outright.com (a Finovate 2009 presenter; demo video coming soon), FreshBooks, and LessAccounting. But I was completely surprised by one contender in the free category: Intuit QuickBooks Online.

The software giant offers three flavors of online-only accounting (see screenshot below; full comparison here):

• QuickBooks Online Free: Create and send invoices, print checks, track money flow for up to 20 customers and run basic reports; even includes email support
• QuickBooks Online Basic: In addition to the above, for $9.95/mo, users can manage an unlimited number of customers, set permissions for others to access data, and choose from a library of 40 standard reports
• QuickBooks Online Plus: Full-fledged QuickBooks for $34.95/mo, mimics most features of QuickBooks Pro (see comparison here)

Financial institution opportunities:
All four online accounting companies offer free versions and premium fee-based options (note 1). Consider linking to them from your small business resource center. For extra credit, develop a co-branded version you can offer your customers or negotiate discounts for the fee-based versions.

Intuit's QuickBooks Online product line (14 Oct 2009)

Notes:
1. Outright.com is currently free for all users, but says it is working on value-added, fee-based options.
2. For more info on the small biz space, see our Online Banking Report: Small & Microbusiness Banking (June 2004). Note: Anyone who purchases the 2004 version now, will automatically receive the newer version when it's published later this month.

The rumors broke yesterday and the confirmation came today. Intuit is buying two-time Finovate Best of Show winner, Mint for $170 million (see note 1). Few people are surprised by this move or the price. Mint's latest VC investors had just invested at a $140 million valuation a few weeks ago, so $170 mil is in line with that. It's also a 5x return to the total VC investment of $32 million, so everyone associated with Mint has to be pretty happy, especially in an environment where most assets have fallen by double digits in the past two years.

The bigger question is whether the startup is worth $170 million? To Intuit, I think the answer is definitely yes (see below).

Intuit shareholders were indifferent with no real movement in share price today (see inset) on lower-than-normal trading volume (note 2). Because of the deal, Intuit lowered per-share net income estimates by 2 cents ($6.5 million loss) for FY 2010, and says there will be no material impact after that.

Apparently, Intuit will keep the Mint brand, at least for now. Mint CEO Aaron Patzer will be general manager of Intuit's personal finance products, both online AND desktop.

I'm no M&A expert, but here's why $170 million sounds reasonable to me:

• At Intuit's current multiple (20x), Mint needs to generate approximately $10 million in annual profits to break even for shareholders. With 1+ million users at Mint, that's $10 per user per year, less than a buck a month.
• While Mint isn't likely making that type of profit today, the combination of lower costs from Intuit back-end systems and additional revenues from upselling Intuit services (TurboTax, Cuckoos, and others), should elevate Mint to a $10 million-plus business unit relatively quickly.
• Intuit needs an entree to the young-and-frugal segment, and Mint can be the starting point with users migrating to Quicken Online (which can be returned to a fee-based, advertising-free service), TurboTax, and/or QuickBooks over time.
• Plus there's a bunch of intangibles that are difficult to quantify until you see how Intuit handles the Mint.com user base. Even though there's the usual grousing from Mint users today, in reality, Intuit's trustworthy brand name should be able to retain current users and grow the base.

Here's how I break down the purchase price:

$5 to $10 mil >>> Assets: Code, IP, employees, etc.
$10 to $20 mil >> Brand: Name, URL, traffic, awards, etc.
$100+ mil >>>>> Customers (1,000,000 at $100 each)
$25 to $50 mil >> Option value

Notes:
1. Mint won the audience voting for Best of Show at both our 2007 and 2008 Finovate conferences. If you want to see and meet the next Mint, we have a few dozen tickets left for Finovate 2009 on 29 Sep (purchase tickets here).
2. Last week, shares fell $0.40 or 1.4%.

Microsoft will stop selling its Microsoft Money packaged personal finance management (PFM) software at the end of this month (FAQ here). Online services will expire Jan. 31, 2011, or earlier depending on when users activated their program.

The company will continue its online-only account management and bill pay services at MSN Money. Banks supporting direct downloads to the program, such as US Bank and Wells Fargo, will have to migrate users to other options, most likely Intuit's Quicken.

For me, it's an end of an era. The main reason I became involved in the online banking industry was to participate in a four-bank group that worked with Microsoft to add online banking and bill pay to Microsoft Money 3.0 (note 1), released in Feb. 1994 (see inset). It was an industry milestone and a major coup for the company at the time, bringing online banking to its PFM more than two years ahead of Quicken. 

So, after 15 years of using the program, I'll finally have to make the long overdue move to QuickBooks to manage our company finances. But to be safe, I'm going with QuickBooks online, which I'm guessing will not become obsolete in my lifetime.

Microsoft Money Plus page announces the end of the line (link, 9 June 2009)

Notes:
1. According to Wikipedia, Microsoft Money is currently on version 17.

Yesterday, Intuit launched its first native app for the iPhone, Quicken Online Mobile. It's already risen to number four in the Finance category (note 1), and will likely hit number one given the number of Intuit fans using the iPhone. Currently, E*Trade's new Mobile Pro claims the top spot.

Intuit has incorporated some interesting features including this user-friendly "what's left until payday" feature. Users can access a graphical map of their future balance level (below) and get a warning (right) if the account looks like it will run out before the next payday.

Intuit also uses the GPS/location-based capabilities of the iPhone with a built-in ATM finder (click on inset for larger view). And finally, users are able to input transactions on the fly to get a real-time look at the impact to their budgets on the latest expenses.

The two-minute YouTube video (link) is worth watching to see how to position your iPhone PFM as a mobile financial assistant (speaker is Intuit product manager, Barron Ernst):

There are a number of personal finance apps available on the iPhone platform including Mint, Wesabe (announced Tuesday at FinovateStartup), MoneyTrackin, iBearSoft Software, and dozens more. 

Notes:
1. Quicken's mobile app is number four in the free apps section of the iTunes Finance apps section as of 8:30 AM Pacific time, 2 May 2009. It has 73 user reviews with an average 4-star rating (excellent). In comparison, Mint which launched its iPhone app in December has nearly 13,000 reviews.
2. According to VentureBeat, Quicken Online passed the 1-million user mark in mid-April.

Intuit's TurboTax unit has long pushed the envelope in promoting its brand through social networks. Its Vanilla Ice YouTube promotion two years ago (previous post) is still one of my favorite financial user-generated-content (UGC) promotions.

But UGC promotions take a lot of planning and support, and unless they go viral, they may generate just a few thousand views and little new business (see note 1).

Intuit's use of a real-time (note 2) Twitter feed in a banner ad (see at VentureBeat, screenshot below) is so much better than a YouTube promo in a number of ways:

• Much more cost effective: It costs Intuit virtually nothing to post its Twitter stream to VentureBeat (other than the advertising expense). Intuit is already broadcasting on its Twitter channel for other reasons. This is just a repositioning of that content.
• When Intuit answers a question within its stream (@ replies), it creates moderated "user-generated micro-content." The newness of the content creates more interest and attention than a static banner ad.
• The company jumps on the Twitter-bandwagon, a good way to generate press mentions.

Bottom line: This approach works only if you are creating an interesting stream of Tweets. TurboTax, during the early-April tax return mania, is a great example. Other financial companies can mimic the approach, and you'll probably want to run a contest or do something innovative to keep your Tweets lively. 

VentureBeat home page (9 April 2009)

Landing page at Intuit's TurboTax Twitter page @turbotax
(link, 9 April 2009)

Notes:
1. But if you have a huge budget, the payoff can be great. According to Jeffry Pilcher's Financial Brand post today, Barclaycard's Waterslide promo, referenced on the UK homepage, generated more than a million views on YouTube. Barclay's TV ad is here, the YouTube page is here and the Web-based game, here.

2. It's a "speeded-up" real-time feed. The banner ad cycles through the five most-recent Tweets (all of which were posted yesterday). Each one is on-screen for several seconds, making it look like there is much activity. 

We've regularly cited third-party estimates of website traffic to Mint and other PFMs. More often that not, we'll get a comment or email taking us to task for using such inexact and/or irrelevant data. But we believe that website traffic, even a rough approximation, is a leading indicator of success. 

Luckily, we now have better metrics for the two online leaders. In response to what appears to be a truth-in-advertising query from Intuit's general counsel (see note 1), Mint disclosed its registered-user count (note 2), which has been growing at an average of 17% per month in Q4 2008 and so far in this year. 

As of yesterday, Mint had 934,000 users, double third quarter's end-count. That's 3,400 new registered users per day (seven days a week), almost 25,000 per week. The company should pass one million before St. Patrick's day.

While this growth in registered users is impressive, what's truly astonishing is that 70% of the registered users, 680,000 so far, have entered at least one bank or credit card username/password in order to automatically download transactions into Mint.

In response to Mint's disclosure, Quicken Online reported its 650,000 registered users, currently growing at a 45,000-per-week clip. If that continues, they'll pass one million before the April tax deadline.

It looks like there's quite a battle shaping up between the two leading online personal finance specialists. And don't overlook the banks. Both Bank of America (2.5 mil as of April 2008) and Wells Fargo (1 mil as of Nov 2008) have more online personal finance users at this point.

What it means: Account aggregation, left for dead a few years ago, is making a fearsome comeback. The three biggest players, Bank of America, Mint, and Quicken Online, now have more than 4 million registered users, approximately 4% of all U.S. banking households (note 3).

Table: Mint Registered Users by Month

Source: Mint, Feb. 2009
*Registered users are anyone who has signed up with email address
** Through Jan 25 (per Mint letter, 28 Jan)
***Through Feb 19 (per TechCrunch post, 19 Feb)

Notes:
1. Intuit's letter to Mint here.
2. Mint's response here.
3. Yodlee provides the aggregation engine for both Bank of America and Mint.
4. For more info, see our Online Banking Report on Account Aggregation and Online Banking Report on Personal Finance Features

January is always a great month for personal finance. Consumers working off holiday spending binges and/or attempting to live up to New Years resolutions naturally find their way to personal financial management sites. It's especially pronounced this year as consumers try to better understand their spending and manage for the downturn.

So it's not surprising to see that traffic grew by 300,000 unique visitors in January (+20%) compared to December. Total traffic was up 4.5-fold at sites open for a year or more (see Table 1). Including the class of 2008, total traffic was 2.0 million, a five-fold increase from a year ago.

Highlights:

• Mint had another great month, increasing site visitors by about 200,000, a five-fold increase in the past year. Mint's gain in January was more than that total traffic of all nine 2008 newcomers combined. Mint had a 60% market share of the total of 1.8 million visitors in the category, about the same as December. 
• Geezeo continued its wicked pace, growing 30% during the month, and posting a 12-fold increase over a year ago.
• Quicken Online, which launched in January 2008, more than doubled visitors to 150,000 compared to December. However, traffic at Quicken is hard to compare to other sites due to the massive traffic at its parent site: for example, <quicken.intuit.com> received 1.2 million visitors and <intuit.com> website had more than 10 million. 
• Wesabe was the only site, of those open for a year or more, that turned in a traffic decline, falling more than 30% in the month. However, keep in mind the Compete estimates are derived from an online panel and are not always accurate, especially for sites in the low six-figures or less. The company said that it had record page views in January. That includes both U.S. traffic, measured by Compete, and international visitors.
• BudgetTracker also turned in amazing results, nearly doubling its traffic to an estimated 27,000 visitors.
• Of the 2008 startups (see Table 2), Thrive was the only one showing strong growth, increasing 50% over the previous month. On Friday the company was acquired by Lending Tree for an undisclosed amount.

Table 1: Traffic at online PFMs launched more than one year ago

Table 2: Traffic at the online PFM class of 2008

Source: Compete, 7 Feb. 2009; estimates of monthly unique visitors from the United States

*The percent changes were calculated from the underlying data set and due to rounding of the monthly traffic figures; the percentages may look slightly off

Note: For more information on the market, see our Online Banking Report on Personal Finance Features and Online Banking Report on Social Personal Finance.

Finovate 2008 kicks off with a demo of Intuit's Quicken Online. The presenter is Todd Stanley VP/general manager of Quicken Online and Barron Ernst, product manager.

Quicken Online, the online version of the popular desktop personal finance manager, was launched in January 2008. One notable difference between Intuit's strategy and other online PFMs, is that Quicken Online costs $3/mo. The vast majority of competitors are ad supported and free of charge.

What's new
Intuit is removing the fee from Quicken Online; it is now free of charge, which means, of the major online personal finance companies, only Mvelopes/Finicity charges a fee.

The new user interface will be available Oct. 30.

Introducing more mobile integration.

Intuit joined the messaging race with the beta release of Quicken Beam. The free service sends users text-messaged balance-and-activity alerts from most U.S. bank, credit card, and credit union accounts. Users may also query the service for balance plus last five transactions by texting "Bal" to the short code 636363.

Currently, the service runs independently of Quicken and can be used by anyone free of charge. According to the official press release, the service was developed in Intuit Labs.

What's innovative
It's not a new feature. Quicken Online (see second screenshot below), along with most major banks and personal finance specialists (Mint, Rudder, Wesabe), already supports text-message alerts (see note 1). But this is a relatively low-cost way to hook users early on with an extremely simple service, then migrate them to more robust Intuit services later on (Quicken, QuickBooks, TurboTax).

And the Quicken stamp of approval means a lot when turning over your log-in credentials to a third party. If you want to talk to the company about Quicken Beam, Intuit will be demo'ing the latest features of Quicken Online at our Finovate Conference in October. 

Financial institutions that lack text-message support might consider linking customers to Quicken Beam. Yes, you are turning customers over to another financial provider, and yes, your compliance folks will hate it. But customers are going to do it whether you want them to or not. You might as well get credit for making a solid recommendation. And realistically, using Quicken Beam is unlikely to hasten anyone's exit from your bank or credit union.

Qucken Beam homepage (25 Aug 2008) 

 Text messaging in Quicken Online (25 Aug 2008)

Notes:
1. Geezeo really differentiated itself with mobile capabilities in its May 2007 launch. 

2. For more information, see our Online Banking Report on Personal Finance Features.

Earlier this week, Visa launched its Facebook Business Network. While the first to use Facebook, several other major financial institutions have opened small biz networks on the Web in the past six months:

• Advanta's Ideablob launched last September at DEMOfall (previous post here). It's a unique website with monthly contests awarding $10,000 to the best idea, as voted on by users. It's an intriguing concept with decent traction, almost 30,000 unique visitors last month according to Compete (see chart below). (Full disclosure: I just realized I'm wearing an Ideablob t-shirt; schwag can still pay off!)
  
• American Express's OpenForum: As the name suggests, it's a business forum and resource directory, not unlike Bank of America's (see below). American Express has added posts from several prominent bloggers such as John Battelle's Searchblog and Anita Campbell's Small Biz Trends to keep the site fresh. The site has 5,400 members and monthly traffic of about 11,000 unique visitors, up threefold from a year ago.  
  
• Bank of America's Small Business Online Community, a general forum and resource directory, launched in October 2007 (see original post here). It's primarily a forum, with some additional articles on the side. Total membership is just under 15,000.
  
• Capital One's Slingshot, launched in February, is primarily a business directory. But it does aim for community involvement with user-submitted business reviews and comments on certain topics.
  
• HSBC's (UK) Business Network: Another forum-and-blog site similar to AmEx's OpenForum. So far it appears lightly used, with just six blog entries this year and 270 member profiles.
  
• Intuit's Quickbooks Group: Although not a financial institution, the Quickbooks site is a good example of an active community with more content, including ten blogs, and as much traffic as the others combined (not including BofA which is unknown) with nearly 90,000 unique visitors, almost double the number a year ago.
  

 Unique website visitors in May 2008 (source: Compete)

I've written about how the iPhone could change the way consumers use mobile phones to access data (see note 1). But this slide from the Steve Jobs keynote yesterday at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), says it much better:

In case you can't read the slide, it says that 98% of iPhone users use the built-in Safari browser, 94% use email and 90% use text messaging. That's an amazing level of usage for what used to be considered "advanced" smartphone features. So far, the impact on ecommerce companies has been relatively small, with just 6 million users worldwide. But with Apple dropping the price by 50% to $199, there will soon be 10, 20, or 30 million Americans connecting to the Web via iPhone. If 90%+ use the browser and messaging, it will have a major impact in online/mobile banking usage.

New App Store
And to help those millions of new users find useful things to do on their phone, Apple is building a new App Store, accessible directly from the main deck of the iPhone once users download the 2.0 software in July. The App Store will include thousands of applications optimized for the iPhone that can be downloaded over the air.

Some will have a cost, with the developer keeping 70% of the revenue, but most are expected to be free. Since there is NO COST to list your app in Apple's App Store (see update below), financial services companies should rush to get their app loaded as close to the July 11 launch date as possible.

So far, only two banks, Bank of America and Germany's Postbank, have included their apps in the current online applications directory (here). A number of other financial apps are listed including Wesabe, Buxfer, and the latest, QuickBooks from Intuit (see inset right and screenshots below). Expect many more in the months and years to come.

Update 11 June: Important clarification from commenter "gerontius" (number 3 below). The current app directory includes webpages optimized for the iPhone. The new App Directory will include "native" apps that run directly on the iPhone operating system. That makes the bar quite a bit higher, depending on what you want to do. 

Bank of America    Buxfer  

myBudget        Postbank 

Wesabe           Yodlee 

Note:

1. For more info, see our Online Banking Report on Mobile Banking

The two dozen online competitors of Intuit's Quicken can breathe a sigh of relief today. The 800-lb guerilla has done them a favor, levying a monthly fee for its new online-only option, Quicken Online (press release here). While the $2.99/mo fee, after a free month, is reasonable, it's much different than FREE. Look for the websites of the competition to trumpet the $35.88 annual savings very soon.  

Intuit could easily have offered its online option free of charge. While that would cannibalize its packaged version, the overall impact to its bottom line would have been insignificant (note 2). And a free Quicken would have made it much harder for Mint, Wesabe, Geezeo, Buxfer and others to gain a footing (note 1).

My guess is that Intuit doesn't feel too threatened by the startups, yet. The security issue is extremely difficult for a new company to overcome. Intuit is one of the few tech companies with a brand that has trust levels on par with a financial institution. Millions already entrust their entire tax return, which has far more personal info than an online bank account, with the company. 

Intuit will allow the startups to build a following, then acquire the promising ones and convert their users to Quicken Online. All for less than the cash it would have foregone by offering Quicken Online free.  

We'll compare and contrast Quicken Online with the startups in an upcoming Online Banking Report (previous reports here and here).

Notes:

1. A few hours before Quicken Online went live, Mint issued a press release trumpeting its 100,000 registered users. That's an impressive number for a company that went live in September (previous coverage here). However, assuming 20% to 25% of those are active, there are still more than 500 times as many Quicken desktop users. 

2. Intuit's fiscal 2007 pre-tax profit was $670 million. 

Intuit has been beta testing a fully online version of its flagship product Quicken since September. According to Eileen Ambrose, writing for the The Baltimore Sun (here), the product will launch Jan. 8, 2008, at a price of $2.99/mo (note 1), $12 more than the entry-level, packaged version ($24 at Amazon), but $8 less than Quicken Deluxe ($44 at Amazon).   

Intuit is already advertising it on Google when searching "quicken online." Below is a screenshot of the landing page (here):

The service is still in beta and requires an "application" to use. Interestingly, one of the requirements listed in the FAQ is that beta testers must allow Intuit to download data from their bank account nightly. So obviously, account aggregation is a key component, not that that's a surprise. Automated account downloading is now "table stakes" for online personal finance.  

We'll look at the service in detail after we've had a chance to use it.

Note:

1. Intuit's ad on Google says (below), "Sign up for the new Quicken Online Free!" which sounds like a lot less than $36/yr.

One of the biggest themes at our upcoming FINOVATE 2007: DEMOing the Future of Online Finance (here) is the interesting developments in the online personal finance space (see lineup below).

As we mentioned last week, the race to add personal financial management (PFM) features to online banking sites is just getting started. To some extent, every bank and credit union supporting online banking already offers extensive personal finance functionality. Think back on how the average person managed day-to-day finances prior to 1997: telephone calls, ATM slips, or in my case, the moment of terror once per month when opening the monthly bank statement.

But now that everyone offers base level PFM, the new race is to provide advanced features to hold on to customers, attract new ones, and potentially cross-sell complimentary products such as debt consolidation, mortgage refis, insurance and so on (see note 1). We also hope to see some fee income from the new features, either through elevated checking account fees, or with premium online banking surcharges (note 2). The latter appears unlikely to happen in the United States unless Bank of America starts charging fees.

At FINOVATE we'll see demos from five key players:

• Two industry veterans, both two-time OBR Best of the Web winners, will be launching significant new versions this fall: Digital Insight (Intuit) and Yodlee
• Two "class of 2007" new startups: Jwaala (coverage here) and Mint (coverage here)
• And Geezeo, which recently changed its name and moved aggressively into personal finance (coverage here)

Digital Insight (Intuit)
One of the most intriguing acquisitions in online banking in the past ten years was Intuit's purchase last year of online banking platform provider Digital Insight (see coverage here and here). Everyone expected the merged companies to push hard on personal finance, the core of Intuit's much-admired brand. I've had a chance to see the Personal FinanceWorks and Small Business FinanceWorks demos several times and came away impressed. Combined with the depth of Digital Insight's client base, these products have a chance to become the online banking standard within a few years. Intuit is a two-time OBR Best of the Web winner with its Web-based tax services.

Yodlee
Yodlee used to be known as "that account aggregation company." But over the years they've worked hard to shed that image and morph into a full-service financial tools provider. The company offers account-opening tools, bill payment services, personal financial management, long-term archives, and, yes, account aggregation, although it's now more integrated with the company's other services, especially its MoneyCenter personal financial manager. MoneyCenter is the engine behind Bank of America's MyPortfolio which helped Yodlee win its second OBR Best of the Web (see coverage here).    

Notes:

1. For more info on online personal finance, see Online Banking Report #132/133 and #142/143.

2. For more info on premium online banking pricing, see Online Banking Report #109.

You know you have it made when your company becomes a verb. Everyone on the planet knows about Googling. Then there is MapQuesting directions to the party, Yelping the best Thai food South of Market, and in financial services, Zillowing the house down the street. Someday, you may Wesabe your wireless provider to see how much users spend there and how they rate the experience.  

At least that would fit the vision of Wesabe co-founder and CEO Jason Knight, who I caught up with over coffee yesterday in Seattle as I was putting the finishing touches on a report on Wesabe and other so-called "social personal finance" companies (note 1).

I came away with a new respect for what Wesabe is trying to do. They are not so much looking to be a Web-based Quicken, as I assumed; but more a Quicken/Google mashup, delivering consumer insights by finding meaning in millions of consumer purchases. Overall, it's more like what Google does with a billion Web pages, than what Quicken does with a few thousand transactions (for each user). 

But unlike Google, which can crawl websites at will, Wesabe must convince consumers to open up their spending files to the equivalent of a search engine crawl. To do that, Jason says that Wesabe "must make financial information interesting (to its users)" while also making it drop-dead simple to upload data to Wesabe.  

No easy task. But Wesabe seems to have a head start on making that happen. More on that in our full report (see note below).

Note:

1. Our next Online Banking Report, Social Personal Finance, will look at the entire sector. You'll find it here next week. It will include a detailed look at Wesabe and Lending Club, which is catering entirely to Facebook users (see post here), and what banks should do to compete and/or partner with this new type of financial provider.

At WBR's Net.Finance conference yesterday, Jon Kaplan, head of Google's Financial Services Group, showcased ways to work with Google that were NOT related to search. He showed some cool and free ways to showcase your brand on Google Earth, Google Gadgets, Google Calendar, and more. We'll look at those in future posts, but by far the most entertaining example is Intuit's refreshingly creative TurboTax Rap promotion.

The company sponsored a contest that ended on the traditional U.S. tax day, April 15, that offered a top prize of $25,000 to the best YouTube video featuring TurboTax. Intuit also gave the first runner-up $5,000 and the third place video $1,000. And anyone who uploaded a video entry received a free copy of TurboTax. Intuit hired 1980's rapper Vanilla Ice to do the intro and announce the winner.  

To promote the contest, Intuit created a special-purpose website (see screenshot below) and built a YouTube page (see below). The winning entry, showcased on Intuit's YouTube page, has more than 250,000 views. That's enough to put it on YouTube's most-viewed page (currently, it's number 13 on this week's most viewed), which really turbocharges the viewership. In comparison, the two runner-ups have less than 9,000 views.

This is brilliant work by Intuit. Although it was a costly promotion, it was still less than a major print buy and more importantly, it introduced the TurboTax brand to a whole new group of younger customers who'll be buying tax software for many decades. It will be interesting to see if Intuit makes this an annual event.

YouTube page  <youtube.com/thetaxrap>

Website home <turbotax.intuit.com/taxrap>

Intuit's $1.3 billion acquisition of Digital Insight closed yesterday, marking the beginning of a new era of innovation in small business online banking (previous coverage here). It's a market that's been underserved for years (see Online Banking Report's, Small- and Microbusiness Online Banking, #107/108).

Intuit, which has iPod-like domination of small business accounting and bookkeeping via Quicken and QuickBooks, can now leverage the software relationship into the banking relationship.  The bloggers at Intuit's QuickBooks team-blog expanded on that theme here, discussing their goal of integrating electronic invoicing and payments into the bank site:

Why the purchase? One reason is to try to sell functionality of our record-keeping software as a service through banks, letting small businesses create, send, and get paid for invoices, all online at a bank's site. With millions of QuickBooks customers, we think we have some insight into small business' needs.... We learned from our tax return business how quickly packaged software can move to a Web service. Last year, for the first time, more people used the online version of our Turbo Tax Web service than the desktop version.

This is not necessarily bad for financial institutions. In fact, it probably levels the playing field for the smaller banks and credit unions that are the core of the DI client base. Through integration into Intuit's accounting products, smaller banks will be able to offer sophisticated small business solutions that equal or surpass what Bank of America or Wells Fargo offers today.

Intuit's bold move to purchase online banking pioneer Digital Insight came as a surprise, both to analysts and shareholders. Reactions were mixed, with shares drifting downward after the 8 AM EST announcement Thursday, ending the week off 3% (see chart here; Intuit presentation on the acquisition here).

Although the software developer has made a few forays into selling bank technology, including owning a bill payment processor in the mid-90s, it has generally stayed focused on packaged software for consumers and small businesses.

Just two weeks ago, I met with Intuit execs at the coming out party for its financial institution services unit at the China Grill down the hall from BAI's Retail Delivery Conference in Las Vegas. They were excited about several new services built on the Teknowledge unit purchased last year (see previous post here).

Analysis
Only time will tell whether the acquisition makes sense for Intuit. It's a savvy company that understands the personal finance space as well as anyone, so I tend to believe they know what they are doing.

Regardless of what it does for Intuit's share price, the merger is bound to shake up the online banking product offerings at banks and credit unions, especially for smaller businesses, the Quicken and QuickBooks crowd.

In September, we published a report predicting significant growth in personal finance functionality in online banking services (see Note 1). This merger should further accelerate that growth. As Intuit integrates Quicken, TurboTax, and QuickBooks features into the Digital Insight line, other platform providers will feel pressured to keep up.

This is good news for U.S. consumers who've generally NOT been able to enjoy the benefits of tightly integrated personal finance and online banking.

End Notes:

(1) See Online Banking Report #130/131, Personal Finance Features for Online Banking: Why MySpendingReport Trumps Free Bill Pay

"The biggest profit center at banks is customer ignorance, which banks have mistaken for customer loyalty."
-- Gary Hamel, speaking to 1,000+ bankers at BAI's Retail Delivery Conference, Nov. 15, 2006

I've always been a sucker for management-guru speakers. I can still remember Tom Peters speaking at a sold-out show in Peoria, Illinois, back when I was a wet-behind-the-ears management-trainee for Caterpillar. It was 20 years ago during the height of "In Search of Excellence" mania and it helped me realize a lot can be done to improve business performance.

So every year I make it a point to sit up front when BAI trots out the guru-du-jour to inspire the banking crowd. This year, it was Gary Hamel, a Harvard guy that, I'm sorry to say, I hadn't heard of prior to Wednesday (see the End Note for a summary of his recommendations presented to the BAI crowd).

But man did he grab my attention with his challenge to the assembled bankers and tech-company reps (see quote above). He believes banks are vulnerable as customers become better equipped to compare the price of various financial services, a natural role of the Internet.

The importance of switching tools
Hamel believes financial services loyalty will disappear once customers discover how easy it is to move their accounts to pick up a hundred basis points on their savings rate, or avoid $35 overdraft fees.

In his BAI presentation, Hamel pointed to U.K.-based uSwitch <uswitch.com> as an example of a new tool to help financial customers compare and switch banking accounts (we'll profile it in an upcoming article).

As Hamel was delivering his keynote, Intuit was busy in a nearby Mandalay Bay eatery briefing analysts on its new account switching service, scheduled to go live December 15. The clever service is built on the Teknowledge aggregation engine acquired last year (data sheet here). Intuit's service is similar to Yodlee's service announced in September (see our coverage here). We'll be covering it in more detail as it goes live. 

End Note:

Hamel's management philosophy
I have yet to read Hamel's books, but what he talked about Wednesday could be boiled down to the following:

• Employees shouldn't be "managed" they should be "led."
• In practice, he'd like to see nearly all management eliminated and replaced by small, self-managed teams working to achieve company goals.
• As much as possible, teams would make their own product, pricing, and staffing decisions.
• Compensation would be highly dependent on the team's results in achieving the ambitious profit goals set for them by the company.
• His examples: Whole Foods, W.L. Gore, and Google.      

Step 1: It's tax time
Step 2: Then it's play time

So starts one of the most interesting financial services websites to come along in a long time. Leave it to Intuit to come up with a way to make submitting your tax return seem almost fun. It's RockYourRefund.com website is basically a jazzed up portal into TurboTax for the Web, a service that's been around for more than five years.

Analysis
Sometimes it seems futile trying to make boring financial services interesting. Well if Intuit can do it with tax prep, you can do it with your financial products.

Take a minute to look at it yourself, but the premise is you get a 10% coupon at Best Buy or up to $200 off a trip after you've completed your tax return online via the TurboTax website. Cost for the online service is $5.95 for federal plus $9.95 for state tax returns.

Action Item
This approach would work wonderfully with bill payment. Offer coupons and offers that users would receive after paying their bills. A benefit for saving time and money using your super-convenient epayment service. (For more information on how to build a killer bill payment service, see Online Banking Report #80, 81, 82, 86, and an update on the market in #115 published three days ago. )

-- JB

Looking for ideas to appeal to the Quicken segment? Personal Mvelopes, an online personal financial management system from In2m Corporation, stitches together account aggregation and bill payment into a $9.95 per month offering.

Analysis
The company has recently attracted some good PR (Kiplinger's, Boston Globe, BankRate.com) that may translate into some accounts. But unless In2m partners with stronger financial brands, the finance site will struggle to attract paying customers.

Consumers are wary, make that VERY WARY, of online financial services offerings, especially from unknown entities. But if a bank were to license the system and operate it under its own name, it might become moderately successful. (We say moderately, because budgeting is not a mainstream activity, and many of the budget-minded are already locked in to using Quicken or Money.)

If nothing else, the system demonstrates good customer advocacy. The bank could bundle additional services, such as long-term transaction archives, to help justify the $10 per month. Also, bundled revolving credit could boost the business case substantially.

If you'd like to learn more about the how personal finance is penetrating online banking, check out Personal Finance Features for Online Banking: Why “My Spending Report” trumps free bill pay on the subject from our sister publication, the Online Banking Report.

Following are some of the better emails we’ve seen from financial providers in recent months. Because we only see those from financial institutions where we have established relationships, we would appreciate seeing others you’ve received. Send them to: info@onlinebankingreport.com .

Wells Fargo/ShareBuilder

This is our favorite holiday email. It was marketing NetStock’s ShareBuilder on behalf of co-branding partner Wells Fargo. It was sent the week after Thanksgiving (Nov. 28) and featured a engaging graphic of a young child and just 32 words of text (not including the mousetype fine print).

The pitch was for starting ShareBuilder accounts for children, with a $25 bonus for accounts opened prior to Dec. 31. A unique, if somewhat complicated, holiday gift idea for parents and grandparents.

First USA

This is a good example of a simple old-fashioned holiday greeting. FirstUSA punched it out on Christmas Eve and included a well-crafted P.S., “Maximize your holiday time by managing your accounts online at: Cardmemberservices.firstusa.com.

PayPal

PayPal sent several emails during the holiday period promoting a usage sweepstakes that rewarded users for shopping with PayPal. Taking a page from Visa’s annual holiday promotion , winners received their PayPal purchase free of charge. This message kicked off the program on Nov. 30.

PayPal also provided shopping ideas and a link to a directory of PayPal shops (right-hand side of the screen). The look of the emails was crisp and clean like the company’s Web site, but we would have preferred a bit more holiday cheer in the graphics.

DeepGreen Bank

DeepGreen Bank sent this message on Dec. 10 promoting holiday usage of its Home Equity Line of Credit. The message was pretty straightforward and was signed by DeepGreen CEO Jerome Selitto.

It’s a good email overall, but it’s a bit boring. The usual, great rates, great convenience, yada, yada, yada. To increase readership, it would be better to put some of the info into eye-catching graphics.

The company made a serious error by not putting DeepGreen in either the email subject or sender field. Unless you know the CEO, it looks a lot like a SPAM until you open it.

Intuit’s Quicken.com

We received our first holiday email from Intuit on Nov. 15, with a message entitled, “Holiday Gift and Sending Guide.”  The message had the usual format of Intuit’s monthly Money Matters email letter, with no holiday graphics. Beside the spending and gift advice, it featured a fifth anniversary sweeps for NetBank.

Although much of the advice is boilerplate, we like how it positions Quicken.com as a provider of thorough and timely advice about all aspects of your financial situation.

Normally, we don’t like to see outside advertising, but the NetBank sweeps added interest to the message.

NextCard

The December installment of NextCard’s monthly email newsletter was full of shopping discounts. The full newsletter was a bit cluttered taking up about four screens (at 800x600 on a 19-inch monitor).

The newsletter also promoted the Visa Magic Moments sweepstakes that awarded cardholders free purchases at a randomly selected second every day (box on the right).

To help differentiate its message from in-box SPAM, NextCard incorporates the cardholder’s first name in the email subject field.

Intuit appears to be as close as anyone in creating the first popular Web-based financial supermarket. Looking at the Web traffic across its various domains, you get a sense of the company’s broad appeal in tax services, bill payment, insurance, loans, stock quotes, and most recently statement aggregation (screenshot below).

When it comes to online financial services, Intuit has most of the bases covered including its newest feature, MyAccounts statement aggregation.

Traffic at Intuit Web Sites

millions of unique users¹

Source:  PC Data Online www.pcdataonline.com 

¹Includes duplicate users across various Intuit Web sites

Intuit Cashfinder

www.cashfinder.com

Intuit shuttered its Business Cashfinder Web site after just a year in business (see OBR, 6/98) . Repeated calls to the company were unreturned which is unusual for Intuit who we’ve always found to be very accessible. We speculate there were two problems:

•  low usage due to its convoluted process application process
•  channel conflict with the 31 financial institutions supporting QuickBooks, which had an imbedded link to CashFinder (OBR 9/98)

Intuit

Eric Dunn, CTO
Nancy Tubbs, Product Manager, Interactive Billing
2525 Garcia Avenue
Mountain View, CA94039-7850
(650) 944-3037
www.intuit.com

Electronic Bill Pay Volume:
The estimated 3 million payments per month (plus/minus 25%) from Quicken, QuickBooks, and soon Quicken.com users, are processed by Checkfree and included in Checkfree’s total volume; Intuit owns 19.1% of Checkfree.

Claim to Fame: The top brand in PC-based financial management, and arguably the number one personal finance brand on the Web.

Status Report: Intuit continues its industry dominance with a 60% market share of electronic tax filings (OBR 2/99); 70+% share of PFM users; 75% share of the small biz accounting software market (OBR 9/98); estimated 15% share of the U.S. bill payment market; and leading personal finance Web site, Quicken.com.

Bill Presentment Plans:

•  The company first put a bill presentment module in Quicken 98, but has only had one biller using it, Florida Light & Power, www.fpl.com
•  More importantly, Quicken.com was slated to begin offering ebilling in first quarter 1999. Intuit has established a price of zero for billers presenting bills via standard OFX format, provided the biller agrees not to charge the user for the service.
•  One biller is in bill presentment trials using QuickBooks.

We visited the largest search/portal sites at the end of September to see who was advertising what for users seeking information on business loans.* We were surprised to find the search term sparsely used by financial services companies. The only advertisers were The Lending Tree pitching its online loan auction service at Infoseek and Excite; Intuit promoting CashFinder.com and Quicken on Infoseek; Capital One hawking a 9.9% credit card on Yahoo, and ConsumerInfo.com with a small buy at Infoseek.

Source: Online Banking Report, 9/30/98 *Methodology: We searched on the term “business loan” (parenthesis included) at each of the sites from a Seattle Netcom POP. We hit reload 10 times to measure how often banners were presented. This is only an approximate measure of banner advertising. Time of day, geogrpahic location, and user profile could all impact which banners are presented.

Intuit

www.cashfinder.com

Intuit’s latest foray into financial services.

Intuit (Mountain View, CA) continues to expand its presence online with an innovative service matching lenders with businesses looking for financing. It has great potential once the base of participating lenders and/or product offerings is expanded. The service debuted last month with eight participating banks, American Express and a leasing company (see table at right).

Business CashFinder Participating Lenders

Source: company, 6/25/98

1. Businesses head to www.cashfinder.com .

2. A seven-part questionnaire is completed online, which takes about 60 seconds if you know your SIC code, a couple minutes if you have to look it up using Intuit’s integrated SIC database.

3. Based on your business type and financing needs, Intuit returns a page showing what type of financing options are available (credit cards, leasing, line of credit, and/or loans).

4. Business owner selects desired loan type (credit card, lease, line of credit, installment loan) and reviews specific lender products available (no rates provided but other costs are disclosed).

5. Business owner selects a desired program.

6. Intuit readies a custom file containing an application form and tutorial specific to the needs of the applicant.

7. Business owner downloads the 2.2 MB software applet and logs off the Net.

8. Business owner loads the Intuit applet and completes the questionnaire on a local PC (must be Win95/98 or NT4.0).

9. Business owner prints the completed application and MAILS it to the lender.

10. Lender contacts the applicant directly with loan options.

In our recent tests (6/25/98) we found the process intuitive, and easy to get started. At first we thought the requirement to download an applet to complete the application was bizarre, but when you consider the nuances of all the different possible loan applications across ten lenders, it begins to make some sense.

Most business owners won’t mind spending a few extra minutes when seeking financing. And it eliminates the privacy and security issues relative to completing an online form. But still, why not offer a choice? Some (many?) owners lack the time, skill, or patience to go through the download process (we admit to falling into this category, but won’t say for which reason).

Intuit should find a workable HTML solution. And while they are at it, we’ve got a few more items on our wish list:

•  a fax number to submit completed applications
•  some way of querying the lenders regarding rates prior to applying
•  email template/form to make it easier to ask questions

The service lacks Intuit’s famous ability to design products from the user’s perspective. It doesn’t answer basic questions like: What’s the rate? What happens if my lender of choice declines me? Who sees my application? What if I change my mind? What if I’m in a hurry? What if I have a Mac? and so on.

Overall, we give Intuit an A for the idea, and a C- for execution. Cashfinder was probably rushed to market to coincide with the release of QuickBooks 6, which includes a hotlink to the Cashfinder site. We’ll take a closer look at QuickBooks, and its new online payroll and direct deposit functions next month (OBR 8/98).

Contact: Erik Dunn is SVP/CTO, (415) 994-6000.

Step #1: A seven-part preliminary questionnaire
is used to determine which loan options are available to prospective applicants.

Step #2: Choose which financing option to apply for.
In our hypothetical test (as a small NY firm), we could choose from three credit card choices, three leasing options, one line of credit, and one installment loan.

Evaluate specific product terms. Even though we asked for $150,000 to $250,000, we could only choose from Key Bank’s credit line with a maximum line amount of just $35,000, or Union Bank’s which starts at $5,000 and max’s out at $50,000.

Note: Intuit provides estimated turnaround time, 24 hours for Key and 48 hours for Union; and the number of questions on the application, 102 for Key Bank and 95 for Union Bank.

Intuit

www.quickenmortgage.com

Intuit gets right down to business with a three-step process and a $225 discount for online applications.

Intuit’s (Mountain View, CA) QuickenMortgage site has attracted more than 1.2 million visitors and 13,000 prequalification forms since its Oct. 1997 launch (Source: company 3/97). We wonder how many were distracted by the advertising across the top of the page. You can’t have it both ways. If you are trying to engage prospects and get them to apply online, you don’t want them clicking on an ad for Quicken 98.

Mortgages may be the first traditional banking product to lose market share to Web-based competitors. Why? It’s a significant consumer purchase, estimated to consume more than 80% of a household’s disposable income in the year of purchase. Second, with thousands of unregulated and highly competitive mortgage brokers scrambling to grab another tenth of a point of market share, innovation is a certainty.

Intuit’s QuickenMortgage $20k GiveAway is a clever way to develop a database of mortgage leads. The sweeps is easy to understand, easy to enter, and gathers just enough info to qualify the leads without being overly nosey. The $20,000 grand prize can be earmarked for home purchase, second home purchase, home improvement, or mortgage principal repayment. Alternatively, users can take a $5,000 cashiers check. Intuit is also giving away a copy of Quicken Deluxe during each of the 34 days the contest runs.

The entry process is broken into three parts (see screenshots right). The first step is a single checkbox and blank to enter your email address. This draws users into the form before they have a chance to think about going elsewhere. The second step calls for name, zip code, and home ownership status.

The cleverest part of the entry form is the close. Instead of simply thanking entrants and wishing them a nice day, Intuit has them select a mortgage-related activity to close out the entry process. Users select from one of these four exit ramps at the end of step #2:

•  See how much house I can afford.
•  See if I should refinance my current mortgage.
•  Comparison shop for the best refinance deal.
•  Get advice on starting out to buy a home.

During this final step, Intuit hopes to get users involved in its site, determining if it’s time to refinance, purchase a home and so on. If the company was sneaky, or clever, depending on your viewpoint, they could append the information entered into the calculators with your profile entered earlier in the contest entry form. This would create a powerful database of mortgage prospects complete with name, email address, homeownership status, a proxy of disposable income (intended use of the $20k), current mortgage size, current mortgage rate, and desired mortgage size, term, and rate. What more could a loan marketer want, short of a completed application?

As long as the Web site fully discloses the data being collected, we see no problem with this approach (although consumer groups may see it very differently). We checked Intuit’s Privacy Statement www.quicken.com/support/privacy but it wasn’t clear on the issue of collecting user inputs to calculators. The company did disclose they were actively gathering user info through registrations and cookies throughout the Intuit site and Excite’s Business and Investing Channel. Intuit has even turned its privacy policy into a profit center running banner ads on top and bottom for credit report monitoring and brokerages.

Step 1: Just two questions to ease entrants into the survey with a low threshold of pain: (1) what you would do with the $20k, and (2) your email address quicken.imgis.com/qm/quicken1.html.

Step 2: Just a few more details: name, zip and birthday, then the killer close, four choices of what to do next.

Step 3. Intuit hopes you’ll spend a little time
with its refi calculator before moving on.