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Intuit, the maker of money management software, Quicken, is accusing an emerging competitor, Mint, of making false claims. Mint claims that it has gone from 3,000 new users a day to 850,000 users in a matter of months.
Intuit takes issue with Mint’s definition of “users”. Comscore reports that Mint had about 400,000 monthly visitors as December 2008. I am surprised that Mint has that many users because when you sign up, the application asks you for your banking information and asks you to link to your banking account. At that point, I closed my tab as I am sure most people do.
Also, a brief interaction I had with a senior management employee at Mint does not give me too much confidence in the company. The employee presented information that was false. I pointed that out to the employee who responded with “Well we are a startup you know …“. Had I not had access to this information I would have believed the employee.
As for Intuit, the company is stuck in the 1970s (it was founded in the 80s). The CEO is busy trying to remake the company by implementing stuff that is pure PR – like 20% play time for engineers like at Google – a little research would have shown him that it is a gross exaggeration and merely a recruiting tactic used by Google. Also, the company could not admit to laying off employees when indeed they were.
However, Intuit’s Quicken Online is a great product and Mint’s product is Web 2.0 fad. You can get similar services for free on Etrade, Schwab, Fidelity Online, Wells Fargo, and more.
Channels: intuit, mint.com, online services
Interesting. However, as a Mint user, I can vouch for the usefulness of the service.
Comment by Rathi — February 20, 2009 @ 2:32 PM
What is your interest in saying this? Are any of the family or friends working there? The product is useless.
Comment by googosh الصفحة الرئيسية — February 20, 2009 @ 3:04 PM
[...] Intuit Accuses Mint Of False Claims By jessehattabaugh Intuit, the maker of money management software, Quicken, is accusing an emerging competitor, Mint, of making false claims. Mint claims that it has gone from 3,000 new users a day to 850,000 users in a matter of months. via webguild.org [...]
Pingback by Intuit Accuses Mint Of False Claims « Codery — February 20, 2009 @ 3:49 PM
@googosh – if you do not like the service, do not use it. I am a user of the service, I saw the CEO give a presentation at Stanford and immediately signed up for it. Love it, it is super easy to use, pulls in all of my information without storing account numbers, and gives me a summary view of all of my checking, credit card, savings, stock holdings, real estate, and loans with up to the minute updated information directly from the institutions I have these services with. It is awesome.
@Daya
You clearly aren’t a member of the younger facebook generation used to sharing the intimate details of their lives with everyone. Such people would sign up for this service without even blinking at the requirements of inputing their account numbers. I did.
Comment by Josh — February 20, 2009 @ 4:00 PM
@Josh I am a member of the younger facebook generation used to sharing the intimate details of their lives with everyone. But I would NOT use Mint.
Comment by Ron — February 20, 2009 @ 4:58 PM
@Daya I’ve personally used Quicken Online for the last 5 years (over 100 employees) and also am a big fan of Mint.com.
Your review of Mint seems a bit short sided given that you haven’t even signed up for the service and are making blanket statements of an awesome service that is not the same as Quicken online but a new approach to personal finance. BTW, Quicken has already copied the Mint model and offer it up to their customers. In fact, if you look at the Quicken site, it is VERY similar to the Mint site. Take a look and report on that! http://quicken.intuit.com/online-banking-finances.jsp
You say that the other financial institutions have similar services… I don’t think so. Are you saying that I can link my bank accounts, credit cards, investments, other assets into my etrade account and have them tracked for me via web, SMS, and email? Again, I think you should try out the service before creating an article about it and not really knowing the value of said service.
Did you also know that Quicken Online is only available on a PC with ActiveX controls required? That means people like me on a mac are hosed unless they are running Fusion or Parallels.
Would love to see another report AFTER you’ve signed up for the service and figured out why it is they are growing. Maybe the numbers have been fudged a bit but who cares? It isn’t a ponzi scheme or anything.
For someone that writes for the Web Guild, it is surprising to see that you would be scared of such service when it is the internet as we know it now. Secure information exists and it leveraged in unique ways such as Mint.
FYI, I do not work for either Mint or Quicken.
Looking forward to some further investigation.
Comment by Alex Kim — February 21, 2009 @ 10:16 AM
@Alex,
This is Chelsea with Quicken. Quicken Online does work with multiple browsers (IE, Safari, Firefox), and on a PC or Mac. Hope this helps.
Comment by Chelsea — February 21, 2009 @ 3:59 PM
@Chelsea
Correction on my comment… should have noted that I used Quickbooks Online for the last 5 years, not the latest Quicken Online.
Comment by Alex Kim — February 22, 2009 @ 3:46 AM
I would be surprised to see if Mint survives – if they are good they will be acquired. But I think they are reallly a fad. Sorry but that’s the truth and I am BIG Facebook fan.
Comment by Jarod Ickes — February 23, 2009 @ 7:33 AM
I signed up for both mint and quicken online at the very same time, in two browser tabs. Both use the exact same method of pulling your account data: you enter your online username and password for each account you would like to see displayed in the service. At no point do either know or see you account numbers (for the record, you can’t even see this on your bank’s online site either).
On both services, you are not sharing any private data publicly. The only sharing is general averages that you can compare yourself against. For example, you can compare your spending in a given category (example: Food & Groceries) against others in the country, state, or specific city. I don’t see where the “Facebook generation” and “public sharing” come in to play, since at no point is the site sharing anything that I or any specific user has done. Commenters posting about that clearly do not use the services nor have taken the time to use and understand them.
ANYWAY -
They both do the same thing. The difference: Quicken looks like it would have been an advanced product a few years back, and felt so slow that I immediately tired of it. Mint is MUCH smoother; the intial process and walkthrough during my account setup won me over immediately. It was more modern looking, with much better user interactions to let you know what is going on in the site (updates, data refreshes, graphs, and pie charts are all animated and provide more understandable views of the data). This isn’t just fancy-schmancy bs either – anything that gets people to better understand increases or decreases in their finances and ultimately help people control their finances is quite important given the current state of personal finance in this economic climate.
Keep in mind I went into this WANTING to use Quicken, hoping for some TurboTax integration – and the product wasn’t good enough for me to use it given even that convenience.
In either case, aside from monitoring my finances, the services don’t offer much else. Mint seems to make money off credit card referals (for example, they tell me I can save $X amount of dollars if i switched to a specific cash-back credit card versus my current card, given my current balances, or different bank accounts with higher interest rates). I can see this being useful to most people.
Also, I’ve been signed up for only two months, so i am not really seeing the historical data that might make me really be able to pay attention to my finances the way i will be able to a year from now. I’ve been checking it every day; the consolidated alerts for payments due or checks posted are quite helpful.
My wife and I sat down and were able to look at some pie charts at spending and we immediately saw areas we wanted to control. Anyone who thinks this sort of stuff is useless must be blind to their finances, and I can only wish for them they are blind because they have so much money they don’t have to worry about their futures like the rest of us.
Comment by bob — February 28, 2009 @ 9:47 AM
Hilarious to see this at the top of Google’s search results for “intuit mint” and sitting right next to “Intuit to acquire Mint for $170 million”.
Comment by Frank — September 16, 2009 @ 10:47 AM
>Intuit’s Quicken Online is a great product and Mint’s product is Web 2.0 fad<
Astonishing just how wrong a commentator can be. I've been using Mint.com for two years now, with steadily increasing satisfaction. (And of course Intuit, recognizing that Mint could and, almost certainly would, crush them – and in not too distant a future – snapped up the company somewhat less than a year ago.)
Comment by Seneca — May 17, 2010 @ 3:09 AM