A Farewell to Mint

Plus, a bullish case for PayPal.

Number of the Week: $265 billion (explanation below)

A Farewell to Mint

FIN readers probably know that, at the end of this year, Intuit plans to shut down Mint, arguably the first major fintech company; it launched in 2006, years before the term “fintech” became broadly used. The strategy seems to be to move Mint users into Credit Karma, a different fintech site that Intuit acquired in 2020. The sites aren’t equivalent, however, and Credit Karma seems to be going through some convulsions (more on this below), but first it’s worth recognizing how thoroughly Mint changed the landscape of financial technology.

For decades, a certain kind of mathematically-minded person of some means has searched for ways to organize documents to understand their financial situation. To this day, there is a receipt-scanning website called Shoeboxed, which refers to the old-fashioned method of saving all receipts and statements in a shoebox. Later, spreadsheets became a great tool, because they could do the math after being manually updated when new statements arrived.

What made Mint revolutionary was that, after a user initially entered information for bank accounts, credit cards, mortgage, etc., the site would automatically update as money went in and out. It was as close to real-time financial monitoring as is technologically possible. Moreover, Mint built budgeting tools to project, for example, how much a parent needed to save monthly in order to raise enough money to pay a child’s college expenses.

Millions of Americans found Mint life-changing.