I first read about Mint.com on Techcrunch. The concept—centrally aggregating all of your financial accounts in a central place—is smart. And I know firsthand just how large a market need the site fills, griping at the void when I moved away from Bank of America a few years ago, losing access to their My Portfolio functionality. At the time, I thought filling this hole would make for a great startup. The task is not as hard as it sounds prima facie, because Yodlee already provides the backend technology for aggregating financial information. Shoulda, coulda, woulda, right?
Anyhow, when Mint.com was mentioned in the Sunday Times, I decided to give it a try. The site is very easy to use; I was registered and logged in within seconds, and a couple beats later I had entered a couple of accounts and was looking at my complete financial situation. Mint's site is fast, both in intra-site navigation and in downloading your financial data, which is done automatically but also conveniently on demand. Mint seems to take privacy seriously, with good security practices and retention of minimal information. They do not, for example, even ask for your name, although they could easily scrape that from most of the sites they aggregate. But probably the biggest plus is that they do more than aggregate; they analyze, graph, categorize, and compare your financial information. I know, for example, that whereas I pay $0 a month on gas, the average Mint user spends over one hundred.
My most significant issue in using Mint.com is that the site is clearly still in beta. Some functionality simply does not work (last night I was unable to remove one of my accounts from aggregation, for example). Other features are not yet implemented. And although I consider their dedication to privacy a plus, I would still prefer this service be offered by a provider I already had a trusted relationship with, such as Google or, probably ideal, my bank. Obviously, however, that hurdle was insufficient in stopping me, or Mint's many other users, from joining.
Among missing functionality, the biggest hole is the lack of support for non-bank, non-cash financial accounts. Stock accounts are not supported, even when held with a financial institution whose bank side of the house Mint supports. This means my trading account, IRA, and 401(k) were all absent from the aggregation, significantly distorting my financial summary. Since I still have to login to other accounts to see those figures, the utility of Mint is greatly diminished. In Mint's FAQ, they mention that non-cash accounts are a potential future feature. I hope so.
Mint's business model is suggesting financial optimizations—for example, credit cards with lower interest rates or savings accounts with higher ones. Since so many Americans are using a bag of crap like Bank of America, such recommendations are pretty valuable. They don't do it now, but Mint could also do fairly well targeted (read: useful) ads based on your transaction history. If they add support for investment and other account types, I might just be hooked.