Mint: ‘Don’t Count Us Out on Payments’
I found myself at a table during lunch yesterday with Mint’s Aaron Forth, the Intuit unit’s vice president-product, soon after his demo at FinovateSpring, at which he pitched Mint’s advertising products for banks. Our conversation naturally gravitated to the demos of the day, and we both agreed that some of the demos offered same-old-same-old new technologies or products. However, Forth said — and I agreed — that the payments space is remarkably dynamic today. I thought it was surprising that Mint hasn’t pursued a payments strategy, rather apparently reverting to an advertising-centric business model, I said.
“Don’t count us out on payments,” Forth responded.
He explained that Intuit has all the disparate elements to turn Mint into a compelling payments play. Much of those elements are in the legacy Digital Insights unit, but Intuit has also added more pieces to the payments puzzle through acquisition, an example of which is Echo. I asked Forth whether it was difficult to bridge together all these elements within Intuit, perhaps because of internal red tape. Forth dismissed this challenge. It was more a matter of it taking time for 30 Mint employees in San Francisco to bring all these elements together.
