Mint: Financial Management In The Cloud

At the recent TechCrunch40 Conference, where a slew of Web 2.0 startups pitched their products, the one that walked away with the most buzz and the $50,000 prize was Mint. Mint is an online financial management tool, similar to Quicken and Microsoft Money but it takes your financial management up into the cloud. Mint supposedly tracks your information from your various accounts and feeds back to you and suggests a different credit card with a lower interest rate, or a different service to save you money. In addition, it also automatically cateogrizes your information as you enter it, alerts you to upcoming payments, and keeps track of your balances,  but the focus, and (I’m guessing) the business model is on feeding back offers to you to save money. The target market for this service is the 20–40 year old range of folks that are comfortable doing business online, which makes sense given that you need to give the program access to your bank and financial accounts for it to do its thing.

I haven’t tried Mint out at all, but it certainly sounds like an appealing service for the mobile warrior if you’re comfortable with turning over your info to a service like this.