Transcription - Robert Scoble interviews Aaron Patzer

September 17, 2007

Robert Scoble interviews Aaron Patzer

RS – So who are you?

P – I’m Aaron Patzer, founder of Mint.com

RS-Yeah, where are we?

AP-We’re at the TechCrunch 40 Conference

RS-You’re my first interview

AP-Yeah, well you’re my first interview too, this will be great. So Mint is a free personal finance web app and today I’m going to do a demo, basically set it up from scratch. And well the reason that I started Mint, just to give a little background is well, I don’t know if you’re like me but I’ve got 4 credit cards, a debit card, a couple of savings accounts and it’s really hard to keep track of all this stuff. I tried Quickend, I tried Microsoft Money, I tried my own Excel spreadsheets, it got, I just got tired of it basically.

RS-Keeping track of what to pay?

AP-Exactly, when to pay it, and you’re getting hit with bank fees. So Mint is a revolutionary way not just to manage your finances without the work, but to actually save and make real money, so ‘m gonna show everyone here who is watching, where to find a thousand dollars and if the internet is co-operating we can do it in about 6 minutes. So you sign up from scratch, this is our beta site so it will have a new home page starting – tomorrow.

RS-So this is basically what you’re gonna do on stage tomorrow right?

AP-Yeah, basically. With a little bit better internet connection. It connects up to 2000 banks, 1500 credit card, pulls in all of your information. It’s also completely anonymous so we’re gonna set up a TechCrunch demo. It doesn’t ask for your name, or your address, or your social security number or anything like that so we actually don’t know who you are.

RS-Really?

AP-Yeah.

RS-Cause you would think in a personal finance site you would know quite a bit of information about who I am and where my credit card bills are supposed to go and stuff like that.

AP-We know about your financial information, but not about you.

RS-Interesting

AP-So I am going to add my Capital One business card, I’m gonna add my Capital One personal card.

RS-So what do you need to know before you sit down?

AP-So all you need to know is the same username and password that you have for your online bank and you just type it in.

RS-So it works with credit cards?

AP-Yes, credit cards, credit unions all of those

RS-Does it work with like PGNA bills and stuff like that?

AP-Not yet.

RS-So this is mostly for your financial..

AP-It’s mostly for your finances but it does do bill reminders through email and through text message, so I’ll show you what that looks like. So right now I am adding three of my accounts simultaneously, these are my actual accounts, see so you get to see my finances. It’s a pretty comprehensive database so if you search for B and you have a National Cattleman’s card – seriously, we’ve got you covered. It takes about a minute to set up and you can see my Capital One card has gone through, I owe about $2000 on one and only $8 on the other. By contrast Quickend to do the same thing takes 29 screens and about an hour. So Mint is significantly faster, as it’s going you can see here your most frequent merchant on my business card is Google Adwords. Then we’ll continue and we will continue and it will continue adding my checking account in the background.

RS-How come it takes so much time with Quickend and some of these other things?

AP-Well they make you go through and set up primary checking account, enter your pay check, they ask you to rename all of your accounts, they ask you to confirm a bunch of stuff it’s just not a good intuitive flow, and you have to add each of your accounts sequentially, whereas Mint you can add them all simultaneously basically.

RS-Do I see advertising on the side or?

AP-You don’t see advertising yet, I’ll show you how we make our money in a minute.

RS-Ok

AP-So on the overview page you can see all of your accounts, my checking account hasn’t quite come through yet, how much debt you have. The alerts show you the highlights so I only have $400 remaining on my Capital One card. You can get alerts through email or SMS, so a low bal..

RS-Yeah, it’s pretty cool stuff

AP-You can get a low balance alert so instead of bouncing a cheque Mint will tell you when you have reached a low balance. They’ll send you a credit card bill reminder, say three days in advance of when the bill is due, it’ll tell you if you have unusually high spending so it’s not just to prevent bank fees it’ll say “Hey you’re spending three times more than you usually do on restaurants this month”

RS- Interesting. So can you use it as a budgeting tool then?

AP-In that way you can but you know the truth is that budgets aren’t fun so you have to make it easy and intuitive. So Mint has some serious technology behind it we’re filing 4 patents on the technology. We have one a system that automatically categorizes and classifies your transactions with about 90% accuracy, Quickend is about 40% accuracy, so you don’t really know where your money goes. You’ll see a big pie chart of your spending so you’ll see a breakdown of how much you spend on gas, groceries, shopping all of that stuff.

RS-Well that’s really cool. What’s the most surprising thing you’ve learned by building this?

AP-Well I’ll show you on the ways to save page, which is basically a way to optimise your finances, it’ll find a bank account with a better interest rate. People have a lot of opportunity to optimise their financial relationships, so hey you’ve got $20,000 in a BMA account, it’s not earning any interest, you’re paying all these banks fees, Mint might suggest moving to ING or HSBC, you’d make $900 more in interest. In our beta period in the last three weeks alone we’ve found about $5 million in savings opportunity’s for people.

RS-Wow, and how many people actually take advantage of this?

AP-Well we are working out all the stats, cause the service has basically been in private beta for three or four weeks now, but we’ve got a lot of feedback from people who are like “I had no idea that I wasn’t getting rewards on my credit card, or I was paying too much for phone, cable and internet”. It finds lower rates for everything. Here’s the breakdown on spending, two minutes ago I was setting up my accounts and I had no idea where my money was going and now I can see how much I spend on shopping, business services, food and dining, I can see my Google Adwords purchases, how much I have spent on Amazon in the past three months – this is me taking the team out to lunch. You can dive in and see, you know, what the breakdown is between restaurants and groceries.

RS- And this is all web based?

AP-It’s all web based. It’s completely free, live basically for the first time I’m on Scoble. Yeah, so this is great.

RS-So you’re launching today, or tomorrow?

AP-We’re launching tomorrow at 9.00

RS-This tape will probably go out later this week or next

AP-Right

RS-So it will be past history

AP-I’ve got a full seven minutes to get through all of this so it will be fun because it’s amazing how fast you can get your finances under control with Mint.

RS-What have your beta testers being telling you? What have they found interesting in the service cause one of the reasons I wanted to interview you was somebody already said “You gotta see Mint” and it’s one of the hotter things here at TechCrunch.

AP-I think a lot of people like the design. It’s very intuitive, it’s very simple, it’s basically personal finance in, you know, five tabs where as if you get a product like Quickend or Microsoft Money, it’s more of accounting software where you have to balance your cheque book, you have to enter a lot of data, you have to categorize a lot of data – Mint does all that for you. So with Quickend four to five people quit within a month because it is too difficult, and with Mint the idea is to do everything for you. So you can see all your accounts are together. If you want to see how much you spend on business services you see all the transactions, they are all categorized. If you want to see how much you spent on an individual merchant, you can see Amazon and what your purchase history is, how much you spent per month. So knowing where your money goes this is really just the beginning of the process.

RS-Now does Mint talk to Amazon and watch me spend money, or do I have to come here and enter my data in manually?

AP-You don’t have to enter any data in manually, so this purchase came from your credit card, so we don’t know what you bought on Amazon, which is probably a good thing.

RS-So it’s just a ….

AP-Just a credit card, right. We sort of turned the garbage looking bank transactions into something readable.

RS-This really rocks

AP-Now knowing where you money goes is just the beginning.

RS-Right

AP-In sort of a salesy way I’ll say that, but Mint actually helps find more money for you. So you can see that Mint found nearly $2600 in savings that are unique just to me, so I’ve got a Capital One card, it’s not earning any rewards, if I switched to a Miles card I would make $1300 in rewards, it’s what they have calculated. Here’s my checking account – I’ve got a Fifth Third bank account, it knows that I’ve got $23,000, it’s not earning any interest, if I switch to ING I’d make 4% that works out at $900 per year. It finds, you know the credit card that is right for you. If you travel a lot it will suggest, you know a Miles card, if you spend a lot on groceries and gas it will give you a card that will give you 5% back in those categories. It rank orders then so that the only offer or that you see on Mint is basically one that we calculate will make you money which is pretty revolutionary, no-one has ever

RS-So this is an advertisement I’m looking at?

AP-it’s kind of advertising

RS-So somebody is paying you an affiliate fee?

AP- We don’t always get an affiliate fee we basically have all of the major banks, all the major credit cards in there and sometimes it’s the best price for the user, cause it depends on your unique situation, sometimes it’s not so sometimes our guys end up on top and we get paid sometimes they don’t. We give you the best price, the best interest rate regardless.

RS-So can I look at the site through a mobile phone?

AP-Yes, actually it looks great on the iPhone, cause it will work in safari, it will work in Firefox it will work in Ieso, you know instead of a desktop product that is locked to Windows and with the Quickend users are always complaining. With Mint you get it on any platform or with text messages to your mobile phone.

RS-Great, cool. Anything else I need to know about it? What was the hardest part to build? What was the breakthrough?

AP-Well there were two things, we have two patents on the system that finds the better phone, cable, internet, better interest rate, better bank account for you. And the system of automatically classifying and categorizing your transactions because there are 14 million merchants out there and it’s not easy, an easy problem, so it’s PAT pending as well.

RS-Thank you very much and we can get it at Mint.com

AP-Mint.com – it’s free, 5 minute set up

RS – Thank you