Transcription - Aaron Patzer on Fox Business

March 20, 2008

Aaron Patzer on Fox Business

Interviewer – Well balancing your cheque books and keeping track of your credit cards bills, are just two of the things that organising your financial life might make tedious for your life, but our next guest says he has a refreshing alternative to managing your money – Mint! Joining us for today’s edition of C-Suite Sit Down is Mint.com CEO Aaron Patzer, welcome Aaron.

AP – Thank you for having me here.

Interviewer – What is Mint.com and how does it work?

AP – Yeah, so Mint.com is a free personal finance web application, it links to all of your credit cards, your checking and savings accounts, your brokerages, your 401K’s, your 529 plans. So you see all your finances in one place. It’ll tell you how much you spent on gas and groceries, how many times you went to Starbucks last month, it will send you little reminders and even save you money.

Interviewer – So there are a lot of other companies online who do this very same kind of thing, what do you offer that the others don’t?

AP – Well really the concept behind Mint.com is to make personal finance effortless. People really don’t want to be accountants, they want to get in and out of their finances in less than 5 minutes a week and I think Mint.com is the easiest thing out there. It takes about 2 minutes to set up and that’s really about all the work you have to do.

Interviewer – So if I’m inputting on your website why is it easier for me? Is it just the way it’s laid out or what?

AP- Yeah, it links directly to all of your banks so you never have to do any data entry at all it, just pulls in all your information, every single night. So really you can actually set it up and just forget about it. If you have a bill that becomes due, if your balance drops too low, it will tell you about it through an email or a text message.

Interviewer – So tell me, how did this start?

AP – Ah, Mint.com was really born out of my frustration with existing products like Quickend or Microsoft Money – I used to spend 2 hours every weekend, sort of inputting my information into those systems and I got tired of doing all that work so I decided to start a company and make it effortless.

Interviewer – So what is behind the screen, you say you link into brokerage accounts and bank accounts, do you have a lot of partners for this?

AP – Yeah, we connect up to 5000 different financial institutions and we have, like, 5 patent pending algorithms that we developed that do it all seamlessly.

Interviewer- And what is it, how do you make money doing this?

AP – Yeah, so a lot of people ask that because Mint.com is free and we can make money if we can help the consumer save money, so for example we might say “Hey, you’ve got $20,000 in your Bank of America savings account, you’re not earning any interest, you’re paying all sorts of fees. If you move that money over to ING or to eTrade you’d make $700 / $800 per year so you are up as a consumer you make more interest” ING picks up a new customer and they pay us a sales fee or a referral fee.

Interviewer – How many members have you got so far?

AP – We launched about 6 months ago and we have about 200,000 members so we’re on track to hit about a million by the end of the year.

Interviewer – You started getting into the internet when, I understand when you were 16?

AP – Yeah, I started my first internet company when I was 16 back in 1996/97.

Interviewer – And what kind of stuff did you do?

AP – I built websites, I’m from sort of a small town in the Mid-West there wasn’t a lot of economic opportunity and erm, the web is just a great way to, well basically hide your age.

Interviewer – Now where do you go with this, are you making money now, do you eventually plan on an IPO, what kind of revenue, what can you tell us?

AP – Yeah, we’re making money right now. We’re not profitable yet, but maybe one day when we are the IPO would be the right route.

Interviewer – Well good luck with that. Guess what you’re all dressed up in Mint!

AP – In fact when I’m out in public I only wear green.

Interviewer – All right Aaron thanks so much for coming in and thanks for ---here the interview fades and ends.