Transcription - Michael Bazeley of the Mercury News interviews Aaron Patzer on Personal Finance Management
September 17, 2007
Michael Bazeley of the Mercury News interviews Aaron Patzer
MB-Ok, we’re here with Aaron Patzer one of the, or the founder of Mint.com which is, did you guys demo today or are you about to?
AP-Tomorrow morning
MB-Tomorrow morning, tuesday
AP-Yeah
MB-For one of the 40, the TechCrunch, for folks that have never heard of Mint what is it?
AP-Mint is a free personal finance web app, it’s about ten times easier to use than Quickend or Microsoft Money. You can set it up in about two minutes if you have your online banking passwords handy and it actually helps make you money.
MB-So is that sort of who you are distinguishing yourselves from, the Quickends and the Microsoft Money’s of the world?
AP-Well I wouldn’t say that we were directly competitive, Quickend and Microsoft Money are really desktop software, that’s more of accounting software. With Quickend or Microsoft Money it’s more of a software package that you can buy for $30-$80 you have to renew it every few years because they sunset their products. It takes an hour to set up and a couple of hours every week to balance your cheque book etc. Mint is more automatic, its web based, it brings the power of the web to your finances.
MB-So it’s an online subscription service then?
AP-It’s free, so no subscription required.
MB-We’ll get back to the business model in just a minute since I have some more questions, but why don’t we show people what it is?
AP- Sure. I can describe the business model as well. So I will log in
MB-It’s a web tool, so you don’t have to have a business model you realize?
AP-Oh, but we do. So this is the overview page, I have linked in a few accounts here, I’ve linked in my checking account, my credit cards and it shows me how much money I have, shows me how much I owe and it will actually send me email or text message alerts if my balance dips too low so that I don’t bounce any cheques. So the alerts section here shows you just the highlights, it tells me hey I’ve got a credit card that’s due in four days. I spent more than usual on travel this month, this month and my pay check got deposited. So you can get these alerts through email or SMS so you can actually, you know, get your bank balances on your phone. It’s like having a mobile interface to any bank. So Mint has serious technology behind it, it has about four patents that we are filing for the technology and after setting up in about two minutes you can see exactly where your money goes, so this will load up in just a second. So it shows me how much I spent on business services, home, food and dining, shopping, it shows me how much I spent on my Google Adwords campaign – so I entered my business card for that. It’ll show me my spending on gas for the past few months, how much I spend each month at Costco or Safeway or Albertson’s, which restaurants I go to most often. If I want to dive into the details, I just click a category and here it shows me the breakdown between restaurants, groceries, fast food, coffee, it’s really precise.
MB-How is it getting the information about the various types of expenditures?
AP-So we have a patent pending algorithm that categorizes and classifies your transactions with about 90% accuracy. By contrast Microsoft Money’s is about 15% accurate and Quickend is about 40% accurate. So in order to know where your money goes you have to put a lot of effort into those tools.
MB-So it’s looking at the banking transaction information that you are getting from the bank and it’s?
AP-Yeah, that’s right. So all we get are, if you’re sort of used to online banking you’ve got your balances and you’ve got sort of garbled looking financial transactions and what we do is categorize them and turn them into plain English.
MB-So you get enough, for like of a better word meta data from the banking transaction information for you to be able to categorize that?
AP-Yeah, that’s right so usually you see sort of an all caps transaction and we figure out exactly where you went and then categorize it appropriately. You see all of your accounts together as opposed to logging into four different locations. You can sort by category, see how much you spent on advertising, how much you spent on auto. You can sort by merchant and see how, its taking a lot of merchants, see how much I spent on Amazon. I do about $60 on Amazon purchases a month and go one and half times a month. So Mint not only tells you where your money goes, but if you click on the ways to save tab it will actually show you how to save and make real money. So it sees that I’ve got a Capital One card here and I’m not earning any rewards on that card if I switch to discover I’d make $995 cashback and with a lower interest so. Here it says here’s your checking account, I’ve got a Fifth Third checking account, it’s got $23,000 in it, Mint knows that I’m not earning any interest so it suggests that I move it over to ING where I can earn four or five percent interest – that would be $900 a year in my pocket as a consumer. If you look at the details of the credit card, if you pay any interest on your credit card it will show you how much you could save by switching to a new card. It considers balance transfer fees, interest rates, the final, the final rate of the card, it’s really precise. 5% back on restaurants, it knows I spend a lot in restaurants so it gives me one of those cards. If I spend a lot on travel it will give me a miles card, if I spent a lot on gas it might suggest a gas card.
MB-How are you making money then, is it through partnerships with these credit and financial services companies?
AP-Exactly, so Mint only makes money if we save our users money. So if you’ve got $20,000 in your B of A bank account and you’re not earning any interest on it, you’re paying all sorts of bank fees, Mint suggests you move to ING you make $900 more a year in interest and Mint would earn a $20 referral fee. So our results are actually no way based on our relationship with providers we actually have a mixture of sponsored and none sponsored results. So we show you the best interest rate, the best provider for phone, cable, internet, the best credit card based on the algorithms, based on the math rather than our relationship. But sometimes our sponsors appear on top sometimes they don’t so the idea is to be as objective and unbiased as possible. Sometimes make a bit of money.
MB-So you’re an affiliate essentially?
AP-Exactly.
MB-Is Mint open yet, or will it be this week? What’s the status?
AP-Mint will be completely open to everyone starting Tuesday September 18th at 9.00am
MB-Mint.com
AP- Mint.com
MB-How much did it cost to get Mint.com
AP-I’m not saying, but I negotiated for it for three months
MB-Thanks for your time I appreciate it, good luck.
AP-Right
