Whether or not it's mint or some middleware, the point is: There're lots of interesting thing you can do with pieces of financial data. There are also lots of

Whether or not it's mint or some middleware, the point is: There're lots of interesting thing you can do with pieces of financial data. There are also lots of security implications. Handing the security problems off to one company (say, mint) and still being able to have access to all the metadata (without the ability to, say, leak your customers' account data) would be dandy. From a consumer standpoint: That's much better than giving all of that secret information to every company that's interested in accessing it.