Intuit Snatches Mint for $170 Million

Mint, the startup online personal finance site, has reportedly been sold to Intuit for $170 million.

Techcrunch is reporting that the deal will be announced in a few days.

The deal is remarkable and seems to be driven by not a bit of luck for the Mint team. As one commentator put it, Intuit is paying $170 million for Mint’s 1.4 million “active” users, or $121 per user. A brick-and-mortar bank makes about $30 to $40 on a customer, credit cards not included, which means for a bank to break even on this transaction would take three to four years.

Is it just that Mint had a good URL, and that’s what got it the audience, and then the 1.4 million users? Certainly, it got good reviews, but so did other providers.

But this deal is about perceived value. For Intuit, which has a $9 billion market capitalization, paying $170 million to rid itself of a potential competitor was an easy choice.

In truth, as an old friend of mine pointed out, Mint has had close ties to Intuit from the get-go. Two of its directors are former Intuit execs, and it would surprise us not if Mint was talking to Intuit about a sale for a long time.

So what will be for the remaining online personal finance ventures? They’ll likely find buyers, too, now that the market has set a price per user at $121. Hear that Wesabe?

Additional coverage of Mint’s sale at ZDnet.com, Cloudave, GeekStream, and Entertane.com.