Transcription - Mint.com TechCrunch40 Presentation
September 18, 2007
Mint.com TechCrunch 40 Presentation
You spend the majority of your life working for your money, but do you know how well your money works for you? At the end of the day do you even know where your money goes? I’m Aaron Patzer, the founder of Mint.com and today I want to talk to you about your money.
Now if you’re like me you’ve got 4 debit cards, some credit cards, savings accounts, maybe more and it’s tough to keep track of all this stuff, I know because I used to spend two hours every Sunday trying. I tried Quickend, I tried Microsoft Money, I even tried my own Excel spreadsheets – it was too much work. So today we’re going to show you a revolutionary new way, not just to manage your finances without the work, but to actually save and make you money.
So I’m gonna show everyone in this room where to find over a thousand dollars, and I’m going to do it in six minutes, set up and all. So I’m going to sign up to as a new user, to Mint, the site will be available about an hour after I’m done here, it’s completely free. It’s also anonymous we don’t ask you for your name, we don’t ask you for your address, none of that. We know about your finances but we don’t know about you. So Mint links with bank level data security to over 2000 banks, credit unions, credit cards and I’m going to add my accounts live. So I’m going to add my Capital One personal card, I’m gonna add Mint’s business cards so you’ll be able to see where Mint spends its money and I’m gonna add a checking account. So at this point you might be wondering “Well does Mint have my back?” I’m gonna give you a little demonstration, it’s just kind of fun, if I search for B under financial institutions, if you have a National Cattleman’s Beef Association card, we’ve got you covered – we’ve got your back. Looks like I mistyped my password, but we’ll continue. So this is the only work that you will ever do in Mint, you set it up once, it takes about two minutes. By contrast if you were doing this in Quickend it would take 29 screens and about an hour. It updates on a nightly basis so you always have your current balances, you always see exactly where your money goes. You see how much money you have, you see how much money you owe.
If your balances dip too low Mint will give you a text message or an email alert before you bounce a cheque, so Mint helps prevent bank fees. The alert section gives you the highlights so here I can see well I’ve only got $400 remaining on my Visa card. You can get alerts for bill reminders, unusually high spending so hey I spent three times more than usual on restaurant this month, so here’s a bill reminder. It’s like having a wireless interface to any bank.
Mint has some serious technology behind it, so we have four patents that we are filing. One of them shows you exactly where your money goes, so it categorizes and classifies all your transactions. 60 seconds ago I was adding my accounts and now I can see how much I spend on shopping, how much I spend on food and dining, business services. I can see how much I have spent on Adwords in the past two months, I can see how many times I have gone to Amazon. I can dive in and compare how much I spend on restaurants versus groceries – Mint’s really smart, it does it all automatically for you. No work required. You can dive into the transaction level detail, and you see all of your accounts, all of your credit cards, all your debit cards – all in one place. So if I want to see all of my business services transactions they are right there categorized for me. If I want to see all my Amazon purchases they are right there. So knowing where your money goes is just the beginning, Mint can actually help save and make you money.
So if I click on the ways to save tab it found $1800 in savings that are personal, unique, just to me. So it will give you a bank account with more interest or it will find the credit card that is perfect just for you. So it sees that I’ve got this Capital One card, I’m paying 15% interest on it, not earning any rewards, it notices that I spend quite a lot in restaurants, so it shows me a card that gives me 5% cashback on restaurants, with zero percent interest, that would mean $1500 cashback, in my pocket at the end of the year. If you do a lot of travel it will find the right miles card for you, if you spend a lot on gas it will find you the perfect gas card for you. It finds a lower rate on your monthly bills, phone, cable and internet, wireless plans. So here’s something interesting, it sees that I’m paying $45 a month for Vanage, and that price just went up, it turns out there is actually a promotion from Vanage I can take advantage of to pay half that price. So without searching for it Mint finds you the best interest rates, the best prices on all the things that you buy most. So any ad, any offer that you see on the system is one that is calculated to actually make you money – it’s pretty revolutionary, no-one has ever done that before, the ads make you money. We have two patents on that.
So in six minutes we set up Mint, saw exactly where our money went, got alerts for the things that were important and found thousands of dollars in savings opportunities. Mint is so easy to use you will actually use it.
One last point – at Mint we have a big audacious goal – the savings rate in this country is actually now negative. We think that if people know where all their money is going, if they get alerts that protect them from bank fees, if they find ways to optimise their personal finances automatically without searching, we think that we might just be able to change that.
Thank you.
