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This sounds like a great opportunity for Mint clones. Implement automatic import from Quicken and get quite a few customers.

by borisk 16y ago

gacba 16y ago
Beat me to the comment. I was thinking the same thing.
maukdaddy 16y ago
This makes me wonder how fragile parts of Mint's technology are. They couldn't find some way to transfer the data from Quicken? Also, Mint's new Goals feature requires you to have separate accounts. You can't have two goals, save for car and house, both using the same account. Both of these reek of a technology base that is fragile.
- oasisbob 16y ago
  I can't speak to how fragile Mint's technology is internally -- although I think the duplicate transactions showing up in my account for weeks speaks to that -- but it's worth pointing out that acquiring the transactions for a consumer is fragile and fraught with peril. Mint uses a 3rd party called Yodlee for their transactional feeds. Some (most?) of the time, Yodlee acquires their transactions using screen-scraping of Home Banking websites. In theory, OFX could be used as well -- but -- there is no good way to auto-discover a FIs OFX feed via a well-known URI, or otherwise. Quicken uses a proprietary db to link a request for a FI to a URL. This is their secret sauce. I died a little inside when Mint is was purchased by Intuit. By leveraging their Quicken users, Intuit forces banks to purchase a branding identifier (BID), otherwise Quicken won't download or parse OFX transactions. There is no good technical reason for this. It's a classic embrace and extend: Create format (OFX) with industry players. Modify format (QFX) and leverage existing marketshare to force adoption. Make money at both ends. So, yes, one could probably get the data from Quicken. But it makes very little sense to invest time in such a squirrelly method that /still/ depends on Intuit. (Remember the Palm/iTunes fiasco?)

This sounds like a great opportunity for Mint clones. Implement automatic import from Quicken and get quite a few customers.

by borisk 16y ago

This sounds like a great opportunity for Mint clones. Implement automatic import from Quicken and get quite a few customers.

gacba 16y ago

Beat me to the comment. I was thinking the same thing.

maukdaddy 16y ago

This makes me wonder how fragile parts of Mint's technology are. They couldn't find some way to transfer the data from Quicken? Also, Mint's new Goals feature requires you to have separate accounts. You can't have two goals, save for car and house, both using the same account. Both of these reek of a technology base that is fragile.

oasisbob 16y ago
I can't speak to how fragile Mint's technology is internally -- although I think the duplicate transactions showing up in my account for weeks speaks to that -- but it's worth pointing out that acquiring the transactions for a consumer is fragile and fraught with peril. Mint uses a 3rd party called Yodlee for their transactional feeds. Some (most?) of the time, Yodlee acquires their transactions using screen-scraping of Home Banking websites. In theory, OFX could be used as well -- but -- there is no good way to auto-discover a FIs OFX feed via a well-known URI, or otherwise. Quicken uses a proprietary db to link a request for a FI to a URL. This is their secret sauce. I died a little inside when Mint is was purchased by Intuit. By leveraging their Quicken users, Intuit forces banks to purchase a branding identifier (BID), otherwise Quicken won't download or parse OFX transactions. There is no good technical reason for this. It's a classic embrace and extend: Create format (OFX) with industry players. Modify format (QFX) and leverage existing marketshare to force adoption. Make money at both ends. So, yes, one could probably get the data from Quicken. But it makes very little sense to invest time in such a squirrelly method that /still/ depends on Intuit. (Remember the Palm/iTunes fiasco?)