Mint Acquisition Paves Way for Personal Assistant Tools

Personal finance website Mint has been acquired by Intuit, the company behind finance software Quicken. The acquisition price totals $170 million, per the announcement by chief executive Aaron Patzer at the TechCrunch50 conference.

Having launched at TechCrunch40 two years ago, Mint came out of the gates as a potential leader in its space. At the time, personal finance tools on the web were severely limited and the attitude surrounding web-based personal finance tools was more dismal than what we see today. After major changes in the market and the rise of other personal finance and assistance tools on the web, Mint has been able to influence the market and take advantage of consumers’ needs and desires to have more access and control over their own personal finances.

With integrated banking and budgeting tools, Mint has provided a useful way in which to track your incoming and outgoing cash flow. Coupled with personalized recommendations and integration with other financial institutions such as credit card companies and banks, Mint has established itself as a trusted company used for personal finance.

Mint doesn’t necessarily fall under the social networking umbrella with its core features, but one thing we’re seeing from similar finance tools and other web-based personal assistant services is an ability to provide more custom features and recommendations based on the consumer data collected from all of its users. This, along with the accessibility of all the tracking provided by Mint made it a clear acquisition target for a number of companies.

As far as Intuit is concerned, I expect to see some dedicated integration with Quicken and Quicken Online. The ability to have spending history that can cover any and all of a consumer’s spending habits means that Quicken can provide its flagship services on a more automaed and accurate basis. What this does is simplify the input process for consumers, taking away a major time burden that has proven an obstacle for many of its users.

I imagine we will see more acquisitions of services such as Mint, on the finance side and the personal assistant side. There are several initiatives already for data-sharing across services, all of which benefit end users with multiple points of access to various aspects of their life, which makes planning and organizing much more fluid. Institutions such as J.P. Morgan Chase have taken to integrating several personal assistant tools, dedicating resources to the overall ease of use for its customers.

The truth of the matter is many of the personal assistant tools will need to be integrated with banking and cash flow management on some level in order to be halfway valuable to end users, so companies like Mint will continue to be acquisition targets in the near future.