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Note that this is just my gut opinion on it, imagining the nightmares I've seen in healthcare integration and contrasting that with what I see as an end user of

Note that this is just my gut opinion on it, imagining the nightmares I've seen in healthcare integration and contrasting that with what I see as an end user of Bank integration. I've not actually seen the business deals and effort in the backend as a developer in the latter case, but as an end user of Mint I've seen missing integrations that hint strongly at the difficulties they must experience. I think the reason why is because it's a pretty large integration undertaking. To compete with Mint at this point, you'd have to offer similar levels of integration with banks, credit card companies, investment companies etc... The problem is that there are literally tens of thousands of these companies, each exposing their own APIs and each with their own unique caveats as to data they require, throttling limits, back-room deals for access, hesitation to even let people access their systems etc. For an anecdotal end-user example, I have an account with one provider who refuses to cooperate with Mint in integrating - ECSI. This is a small lending company for student loans, one of thousands of such companies. They decided for reasons that are not publicly available to not even allow Mint to integrate with them anymore, after having let them do so for the first couple of years. What sorts of negotiations were occurring in the back end between these companies, and what caused it to fall apart? The public doesn't know, but needless to say there was some level of custom integration effort for them, some level of business negotiation, and then finally something fell apart and made customers mad as a result. Now, all of this integration work and business negotiation had to happen between Mint and ECSI - and that is just one of the tens of thousands of companies out there. It is a very tall order to ask a new company to come forward and make that much upfront work in order to get on par with Mint so that it can start competing. The real fight that would make more innovation in the field would probably have to start with getting companies to standardize and expose their APIs without (or with common and well understood) strings attached. If this happened - as has been struggling but slowly improving in the Healthcare field - it'll become more feasible for a company to realistically compete with Mint. And then you can get to those enhanced features that Mint suffers for want of. (however, at that point Mint's significant engineering force could be redirected from integration efforts to these same features, and then you'll find yourself fighting against a much larger machine now bent on feature improvement)

antonpug 13y ago
It's hard. But it's possible, and there are significant earnings that could be realized in that space. I think that if hypothetical "BetterMint" offered excellent features and something truly innovative, people would be willing to pay for it.
- EdgarVerona 13y ago
  I totally agree that it would be possible, but very difficult to get properly funded. I have to admit that I'm not sure that I'd pay for it either, unless it truly gave me something special that I couldn't already deduce myself from the kind of data Mint gives. I can't envision exactly what kind of feature would drive me to pay for it, but I don't doubt that there's something I'm not currently able to imagine that would motivate me as such.
AsymetricCom 13y ago
So in effect, by cornering the market and developing many layers of cruft internally to deal with the various APIS, they've effectively stopped technology advancement in the personal finance space. Meanwhile, quantum networks and computing is being rolled out to big institutional investors. The only way for people to regain any semblance of control (and transparency) of their financial situation, there has to be an FOSS initiative to build these tools openly, and to keep them on a license that prevents huge financial institutions from coopting public commons software. The fact that Mint can't seem to tally a month is indicative of deeply failed architecture, probably governed by business instead of engineers. If that doesn't scare you, well, perhaps you are already in debt up to your eyeballs, and as they say, if I owe you $1,000 it's my problem, if I owe you $1,000,000 it's your problem. There is NO WAY for a startup to tackle the problem and make meaningful advancements in any metric except maybe a nice zero-sum race with Mint. At least not that I can see. No one is going to fund a startup deving under GPL2 and no startup staying private with their technology will be able to out-compete Mint's headstart, because any advancement you have with the banks is Mint's for free. With a open technology is everyone's (including mints) and any advancement they make is also yours. You've effectively changed the game from managing information logistics/frameworks to customer support. You are playing a high-level game when you write financial software for profit. The only way to win the game this old, is to not play inside its rules. FOSS. The quickest and most assured way to guarantee your failure would be to accept startup funds with any strings attached, because as soon as you do, you're now subject to the rules of the game.

antonpug 13y ago

It's hard. But it's possible, and there are significant earnings that could be realized in that space. I think that if hypothetical "BetterMint" offered excellent features and something truly innovative, people would be willing to pay for it.

EdgarVerona 13y ago
I totally agree that it would be possible, but very difficult to get properly funded. I have to admit that I'm not sure that I'd pay for it either, unless it truly gave me something special that I couldn't already deduce myself from the kind of data Mint gives. I can't envision exactly what kind of feature would drive me to pay for it, but I don't doubt that there's something I'm not currently able to imagine that would motivate me as such.

AsymetricCom 13y ago

So in effect, by cornering the market and developing many layers of cruft internally to deal with the various APIS, they've effectively stopped technology advancement in the personal finance space. Meanwhile, quantum networks and computing is being rolled out to big institutional investors. The only way for people to regain any semblance of control (and transparency) of their financial situation, there has to be an FOSS initiative to build these tools openly, and to keep them on a license that prevents huge financial institutions from coopting public commons software. The fact that Mint can't seem to tally a month is indicative of deeply failed architecture, probably governed by business instead of engineers. If that doesn't scare you, well, perhaps you are already in debt up to your eyeballs, and as they say, if I owe you $1,000 it's my problem, if I owe you $1,000,000 it's your problem. There is NO WAY for a startup to tackle the problem and make meaningful advancements in any metric except maybe a nice zero-sum race with Mint. At least not that I can see. No one is going to fund a startup deving under GPL2 and no startup staying private with their technology will be able to out-compete Mint's headstart, because any advancement you have with the banks is Mint's for free. With a open technology is everyone's (including mints) and any advancement they make is also yours. You've effectively changed the game from managing information logistics/frameworks to customer support. You are playing a high-level game when you write financial software for profit. The only way to win the game this old, is to not play inside its rules. FOSS. The quickest and most assured way to guarantee your failure would be to accept startup funds with any strings attached, because as soon as you do, you're now subject to the rules of the game.