5 ms·

seems like their mistake was ignoring yodlee and trying to make their own stuff...which lost them a lot of traction. had they launched with yodlee, Mint would

by vaksel 16y ago

seems like their mistake was ignoring yodlee and trying to make their own stuff...which lost them a lot of traction. had they launched with yodlee, Mint would have been nothing more but a "better designed wesabe" seems to me like they should have spent the cash to subscribe to yodlee, and then spent their effort building their own version like they ended up doing.

christonog 16y ago
Yeah, but it's a case of "shoulda, woulda, coulda." In retrospect, it was an easy decision. But, if it were your startup, would you have tied yourself to a single, almost bankrupt, vendor? I don't think I would have. Though it is better to buy software rather than build in most cases, there didn't seem to be alternatives rather than rolling out their own solution.
sandipc 16y ago
yes, but even before Mint, there was Yodlee MoneyCenter... so you could say that Mint was really nothing more than a "better designed MoneyCenter"
- nileshtrivedi 16y ago
  Yodlee MoneyCenter was a surprising discovery for me. Sure, I had head of them because of Mint, but I didn't know that they supported most Indian banks. I've been using them for some time and quite satisfied with it.
oasisbob 16y ago
I'm not sure I agree. Some perspective: Mint sucked at supporting the long-tail of financial institutions when they were using Yodlee. Wesabe decided to not use Yodlee in the beginning, but it seems certain Mint recently did the same. Mint announced vastly expanded FI support on May 5th. I suspect this is when they made the Yodlee -> Intuit conversion. (FWIW, I consider this a matter of fact: Mint's crawler now originates from cc.intuit.com.) Following this conversion, my small (~$150mil) credit union was supported by Mint for the first time, along with 200+ other FIs which use the same core+online banking system. To this day, Yodlee MoneyCenter doesn't support my account. The puzzling thing is that the 200+ FIs I refer to would seem trivial to support: that particular core stack has a sane OFX 1.0x interface accessible over the web. Wesabe always struck me as focusing more on OFX, and I know they supported some of these CUs when Mint didn't. Mint scrapes the OFX file from the online banking interface, a design decision I never fully understood.

by vaksel 16y ago

christonog 16y ago

Yeah, but it's a case of "shoulda, woulda, coulda." In retrospect, it was an easy decision. But, if it were your startup, would you have tied yourself to a single, almost bankrupt, vendor? I don't think I would have. Though it is better to buy software rather than build in most cases, there didn't seem to be alternatives rather than rolling out their own solution.

sandipc 16y ago

yes, but even before Mint, there was Yodlee MoneyCenter... so you could say that Mint was really nothing more than a "better designed MoneyCenter"

nileshtrivedi 16y ago
Yodlee MoneyCenter was a surprising discovery for me. Sure, I had head of them because of Mint, but I didn't know that they supported most Indian banks. I've been using them for some time and quite satisfied with it.

oasisbob 16y ago

I'm not sure I agree. Some perspective: Mint sucked at supporting the long-tail of financial institutions when they were using Yodlee. Wesabe decided to not use Yodlee in the beginning, but it seems certain Mint recently did the same. Mint announced vastly expanded FI support on May 5th. I suspect this is when they made the Yodlee -> Intuit conversion. (FWIW, I consider this a matter of fact: Mint's crawler now originates from cc.intuit.com.) Following this conversion, my small (~$150mil) credit union was supported by Mint for the first time, along with 200+ other FIs which use the same core+online banking system. To this day, Yodlee MoneyCenter doesn't support my account. The puzzling thing is that the 200+ FIs I refer to would seem trivial to support: that particular core stack has a sane OFX 1.0x interface accessible over the web. Wesabe always struck me as focusing more on OFX, and I know they supported some of these CUs when Mint didn't. Mint scrapes the OFX file from the online banking interface, a design decision I never fully understood.