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Mint sweetens the deal with investment tracking

By Angela Gunn, BetaNews

October 15, 2008, 10:09 AM

Personal finance tracker mint.com, which picked up a "Best of Show" Tuesday at Finovate, has released its collection of investment tracking tools from closed beta.

The free personal-budgeting site, which also reports signing up its 500,000th user sometime in the past few days, thus adds a fancier set of financial-planning tools to its previous abilities to parse data from checking, savings and credit-card accounts. Mint CEO and founder Aaron Patzer describes the additions as making the site "more mainstream" -- and increasing its appeal to users over 35.

If you're one of the 500,000, the new tools function much as the old tools do -- once you've given the site the login information it needs to pull data from whichever bank, credit-card and (now) investment accounts you wish to monitor, Mint queries the various financial services daily and hauls over data at the end of each day detailing what your money's been up to.

The site lets you add IRAs, brokerage accounts, mutual funds, 401Ks and the like; at present, 200 different investment types are represented. The 401K management tools have a particularly nice feature for the chronically disorganized job-hopper: Tell the system where your account is and it'll check for other 401Ks you might have forgotten in the process of changing employers.

That 401K feature can save you money, notes Patzer. 401K maintenance fees are higher than most other investment fees -- one-half of one percent of the value, sometimes. Though Mint's still "read-only" as the company describes it, not allowing you to actually buy or sell from the site itself, it now offers an advice center that can tell you whether you'd be financially wiser to put that money into an IRA. The site can also analyze your 401K's performance to let you know if it's gaining value because you're a financial wizard, or just because you keep dumping in more money.

The investment tools went into private beta six months ago, and Patzer estimates that about 100 hours of usability testing factored into the process. End users accustomed to Mint's whizzy graphics tools will not be disappointed; the charts showing how your investments are performing relative to the market as especially clear and easy to parse. The drill-down's impressive as well. A look at the writer's own portfolio drilled down seamlessly to reveal at least one fund that wasn't pulling its weight long before the current crisis. And, as it does with bank accounts, Mint can flag fees that your brokerage firm was hoping would stay "hidden."

And isn't it great to roll out investment-monitoring tools just when most of us are shielding our eyes from the stock market? Patzer says that the current mayhem is reflected in recent site traffic: "Traffic's doubled. There's more checking -- and there's more budgeting."

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By forgie

posted Oct 15, 2008 - 1:53 PM

I appreciate the simplicity and convenience of Mint for tracking credit card spending, but have no plans on adding any loans or investments into my account because it's just not worth the risk of putting all the eggs in one basket. There isn't a single site or name out there that I would trust with all of my financial information except for my financial advisor, and I know where he sleeps.

Score: 0

By preinterpost

posted Oct 15, 2008 - 3:36 PM

You know where he sleeps? Indulge us...

Score: 0

By Angela Gunn

posted Oct 15, 2008 - 1:58 PM

(*cackle*) You've just summarized why I stick with a flesh-and-blood accountant rather than tax software. Things go wrong, I want to be able to wail to the CPA with the law degree, not some software-development team. I guess we all have our tech-life sticking points, right?

Score: 0

By forgie

edited Oct 15, 2008 - 4:13 PM

Sounds like convenience isn't a factor for you. Welcome to the minority.

Score: 0

By Angela Gunn

posted Oct 15, 2008 - 6:21 PM

Ah, but you don't know my accountant :-) . Convenience I have; he makes himself available for questions all year 'round, and he's been managing my taxes long enough that he knows what to ask even if I'm not providing the optimal initial inputs (translation: when my recordkeeping is shabby, he knows my financial habits well enough to ask extremely productive questions).

No, the aspect that puts me in the minority re taxes is my willingness to seek out and pay up front for the best expert system available, which in this case is a human being. Frankly, I don't trust any of the software packages I've seen to have a top-notch understanding of my specific tax situation.

Here's why: Several years ago, when I was freelancing, I compared notes with a friend who was also freelancing but relied on a software package -- I won't say which one -- to run her numbers. Bluntly put, the software was moronic when it came to deductions and expenses. She made about what I did back then but ended up paying in QUITE a bit more; meanwhile, I saved in deductions approximately 5.5 times what I paid my human. When we compared notes, we concluded that the software simply didn't ask her the right questions -- she should have been able to take many of the deductions I did!

So there's my thinking -- though I recognize that my accountant's annual fee is an actual order of magnitude more expensive than a box of QuickBooks or what have you, I feel okay paying up front to get a better return in the end. The sad part is, that really *is* a minority opinion...

(And now you know why BetaNews is never going to ask me to test tax software!)

Score: 0

By preinterpost

edited Oct 15, 2008 - 11:38 AM

(moved)

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By preinterpost

posted Oct 15, 2008 - 10:37 AM

Many regular banks support such aggregation of financial (and even airmile and what not) in their online features.

There is *no way in hell* I would trust a dotcom with this kind of information. Not that there doesn't exist a risk with more established institutions as well but at least there is a chance of accountability that can be enforced.

Score: 0

By poundsmack

edited Oct 15, 2008 - 11:19 AM

mint has made tons! of connections with these banking and financial institutions. everyone they suport has given them the green light to do so. Mint is likely the most secure website I can think of.

http://www.mint.com/features/security/

Score: 0

By preinterpost

posted Oct 15, 2008 - 11:38 AM

I happen to know a thing or two about this industry and secure web sites. If you feel the risk lower than the value you get - good for you. If you work for Mint I'd push more for salary and less for options in the next review...

The prudent thing to do is to minimize or eliminate attack surface - which certainly doesn't include consolidating your finances through a dotcom.

Score: 0

By Niro

posted Oct 15, 2008 - 12:41 PM

"The prudent thing to do is to minimize or eliminate attack surface - which certainly doesn't include consolidating your finances through a dotcom. "

You also have to balance convinience vs security...as they are often opposite of each other. The right thing to do is use a different password for every site you visit...but in reality, who does that?? Nobody can remember dozens of passwords and what sites they used them on.

Same thing with this type of thing...consolidating everything into a single site or application is very convinient, but may be not the most secure thing you can do. Alot of people have quicken or MS Money sync all their statements automatically, right on their PC. Is that more secure then having a company like Mint do it for you? It probably feels better to have it locally...but chances are Mints machines are more secure then yours, so it's arguable.

I wouldn't trust my accounts to a dotcom either, but you can't argue its convinience level, and I can see why people would chose to use a service like that...people give up a small sense of security for convinience all the time.

Score: 0

By preinterpost

posted Oct 15, 2008 - 3:34 PM

Well, that's what I kind of meant by: "If you feel the risk lower than the value you get - good for you"

Then again the current credit crisis shows once again that most ppl are just too dumb to think for themselves. So I say outlaw Mint and anything else that looks remotely like it :))

Score: 0

By swattz101

posted Oct 15, 2008 - 12:35 PM

I haven't looked at mint in quite a few months, since just after the original beta last year, but the main engine is from www.yodlee.com which also runs the back end for most of the account aggregation for major and minor banks across the US. They also run the engine for most of the payment services and funds transfer services for many of these banks.

I understand what you say about attack vector and all, why put all of your information in one place where all an identity thief has to do is compromise your yodlee/mint/whatever password to have access to all of your information.

Due to the industry, these companies have strict procedures and audits. They have to do SAS70 reports and such. We have discussed this a length on the Yodlee forums, (and the Mint forums when I was active) and the CEO and Network Security Offices both assured us that our data was locked up as tight as possible on the intarwebs.

Even so, I am still lobbying for tighter control on account changes. In other words, like some banks, one password to get into the system and see account information, and a separate password, maybe sent via SMS or something to make actual changes and see passwords and greater account detail.

This is getting off track for betanews, but suffice it to say, Yodlee and Mint are in a regulated industry and are as safe as your banks website.

Score: 0

By preinterpost

posted Oct 15, 2008 - 3:31 PM

Yes, Yodlee is powering quite a few bank owned aggregators.

And if you keep up to date about severe data blundering in public and private sectors you'll realize that theoretical and practical compliance are orthogonal.

Measures are often implemented as lipstick on a pig, they require technology and process. Reducing risk and doing it right costs time and money - and I have no doubt where priorities lie for most organizations.

Score: 0

By Angela Gunn

posted Oct 15, 2008 - 1:55 PM

Thank you swattz101 -- that's good information, and I agree that a dual-authentication system would be a good addition. I was interested to hear (yeah, I asked) that Mint.com isn't required to be PCI-compliant, since they only show information and do not engage in transactions. It's counterintuitive on first blush -- whaddya mean no PCI? that's my credit-card balance onscreen! -- but it's an interesting datapoint. (In related news, I am way overdue for a full-text refresh on PCI. Mmm, weekend reading...)

Score: 0

By swattz101

edited Oct 15, 2008 - 2:53 PM

I'm not familiar with PCI, (looked it up and it's Payment Card Industry) even though I do work for a bank. Then again, I work on the network security / user administration side of things, PCI could be audited by a different department. I only deal with the IT side of our FDIC/GLBA/Internal audits.

Anyway, from what you said, and what I read on the PCI Compliance FAQ site, it looks like the Merchants and service providers that RECEIVE payment data for goods or services have to comply. In other words, if you are being paid by credit/debit card, you have to comply. As you said, Mint and Yodlee may store this information, but they are not being paid by these transactions. It may have something to do with the fact that they have other standards and audits that they have to meet. It seems like each section of the financial industry has it's own standards and compliance audits.

Again, I am not familiar with PCI, I am just going by my understanding of what I read in less than 5 minutes after Googling PCI. YMMV ;-)

Score: 0

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