Transcription - Mint CEO Aaron Patzer Demo’s Mint’s Online Finance Software at Finovate 2007

October 12, 2007

Mint CEO Aaron Patzer Demo’s Mint’s Online Finance Software at Finovate 2007

I’m Aaron Patzer the founder and CEO of Mint.com. Mint is a free personal finance web application, it takes literally two minutes to set up and that’s really the only work that you ever have to do which is great because most people don’t want to spend a lot of time working on their finances, they want in and out quickly. Not only is Mint free, but it actually saves and makes users money. On average about $1000 and in a few minutes I will show you exactly how.

So I’m going to log into the application, it’s Mint.com. These are my own personal finances, I decided not to use a perfected canned account but to use my own finances so we’ll connect here in just a second. So the overview page gives you your finances at a glance, it will show you how much cash you have, how much debt, if your balances dip too low it will send you an email or text message reminder before you hit an overdraft. We connect to 3500 different banks and brokerages through Yodelay the alert sections gives you just the highlights, so that I can see that I’m spending more than usual on restaurants, or that I have a Visa bill that’s due today. And I can get all of these alerts through email or text message, low balances, credit card bill reminders, high spending, Mint will even warn you about bank fees. Sorry to all the bankers in the room on that one.

So Mint has serious technology behind it there are four patents that are pending or are being filed on the technology. So just seconds after setting up your accounts, remember it only takes two minutes you see exactly where all your money goes. One of our patents, patent pending algorithms will automatically categorize and classifies all of your transactions with about 90% accuracy. Quickend, by contrast is about 40-45% accurate with its automatic categorization. So you see exactly where your money goes how much you spend on gas, groceries, how many times you’ve been to target and how much you have spent. You can dive in and get the details, so if I dive into food and dining I can see how much I’ve spent on restaurants versus groceries versus coffee, it’s really precise. Of course you can dive into the transaction view and see all of your accounts in one place, or individual accounts, see what I spent on auto and cable TV.

So in addition to just showing you where your money is going and giving you alerts if anything is out of whack Mint helps you save real money, make real money. So if I click on the ways to save tab we can see that Mint found $1129 in savings that are unique and personal just to me. So it shows that I’ve got Fifth Third checking account, I’ll zoom in for those of you at the back. I’ve got $22,000 there it’s not earning any interest, I’m paying all sorts of ridiculous bank fees, if I switch that to ING’s Electric Orange checking I could earn 3.5% and that would mean $700-$800 per year more in my pocket. It’ll find the credit card that is right for you. So Mint is really smart, it knows that I pay my balances off in full every month so it doesn’t try to optimize on interest rate, what it will do, it sees that I spend a lot of gas and groceries so it will give me the card that gives me the most rewards in that category. It accounts for things like the annual fee and the weird tiered reward structure that some cards have, balance transfer fees, it’s really, really precise to be as objective as possible to the user and to provide real savings. If you spend $150 per month on phone, TV and internet Mint will see those transactions come through and might suggest that you bundle them together with Comcast or AT&T or Horizon Triple Play bundle. For me I have actually a good rate on most of my monthly bills so I don’t see anything there. The things about Mint is, the only offers that you see, the only ads, if you will, are ones that are calculated to save and make you real money. So that’s pretty revolutionary, no-one has ever done that before. The only ads you see are ads that make you money.

Now as a bank or one of our partners what you get is, you get something, an advertisement that is contextual, it’s relevant, it’s personalized and it’s quantified in dollars and cents – this user will save $800 if they take up that offer. And because of that precision we have already signed up ING, HSBC, Capital One, Comcast, AT&T and a host of others, so if it’s not on your road map for acquiring customers it should be because it’s really precise. So in about ten minutes users can get their information set up and in the system, they can get alerts if anything is out of whack ad they can find thousands of dollars in savings opportunities. Mint is so easy to use, people actually use it, and they are using it in droves. We launched two weeks ago, in our first week we drove more traffic to our site than WellsFargo.com. We organized over a billion dollars in users transactions, we found $22 million in savings opportunities for our users.

So again if you want to take a deeper dive on the consumer aspect of this feel free to see me afterwards. If you want to partner with us or want a radically different way to acquire your customers in a way that actually helps them make them money, we are well funded and we would love to talk to you. Thank you.