OFX is not a replacement for Yodlee. OFX is a passive specification that relies on each data provider writing to the spec. Yodlee uses OFX, but also uses screen scraping and other methods to get data from the many sources not covered by OFX. If Mint dropped Yodlee, many of their data feeds would disappear.
Data aggregation is a messy business. No two companies have the same feed options, nor do any two feeds work the same. And for consumer-facing data, Yodlee is the best.
I spent a couple of years at Yodlee. Your comment is spot-on. Not only are there huge headaches around creating the scripts/feeds to grab the data, but once you have the data there's a significant challenge of normalizing it so that you have some sort of data consistency. And then you have the issue of constantly having to update the scripts as financial institutions make (often undocumented and unannounced) changes to their data.
The Abobe:Youtube / Yodlee:Mint analogy in the article isn't entirely apt since Yodlee effectively provides not only the technology but the content upon which Mint is built. I'd agree with those who say that Mint's position is tenuous from a business perspective b/c of this (and maybe this is why they opted to make their exit). But I certainly can't take away from the fact that Mint built a fantastic product that blows away any other front-end implementations of this sort.
I can only assume that Mint has an iron-clad contract with Yodlee. However, it wouldn't surprise me if Intuit doesn't fully appreciate the importance of having non-OFX data in Mint. They had another data feed product targeted at investment advisers that was killed due to problems with data management.
Yes, I hear you. I worked at a start-up doing insurance quotations on the web... horrible mess of backend stuff to connect to the insurers. The best ones had a responsive XML based interface over HTTPS, others just told us their algorithm for insurance quotes (which we then had to maintain), others gave us a buggy Visual Basic application that was never meant to be the backend for anything. Nightmare to link it all together and make it look like the consumer was getting real time quotes from different vendors.
Those of us who've been around the tech industry will recall that Yodlee started out as a front-end like Mint and migrated into being the back-end provider when that didn't work out.
So, it was a distinct choice on their part to go for the back end and abandon the Mint-like interface.
And they weren't alone in trying to be Mint in 1999/2000. Anyone else remember ezLogin? IIRC they had an exit of around $120m in 2000.
I'm going to guess that Yodlee made the switch around the time of the B2C collapse in Silicon Valley. At the time many companies attempted to redefine themselves as B2B companies believing that to be safer (essentially consumers expected web sites to be free, whereas companies would pay for services).
Also a lot to do with inflow of online ad dollars in finance vertical..look at bankrate.com earnings/stock history.. btw, speaking of minimal functionality required and just doing what is necessary for successful business - look at bankaholic.com which was acquired by bankrate (On personal level Johns Wu might have made near about equal if not more money as Mint.com founders -- given it was profitable company). Also, that is even better story compared to this -- Bankaholic gets millions by paying $0 for WordPress.
Yodlee's current frontend is nothing flashy, but it works extremely well and is very straightforward and stable. Of all the online services I use, Yodlee is among the very best. It saves me many hours of time every week and has dramatically increased my control over my personal finance information. (BTW, it is easy to export your Yodlee data in CSV format for local backup and further use in Excel.)
If jasonfried is right that Intuit will ruin Mint (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=829502), it opens an opportunity for a Mint copycat to use the same Yodlee back-end to fill the gap created.
The problem is that Mint already has a head start, is well-designed, and actively developed. Intuit had nothing like Mint, which made it easier for them to compete. Any Mint competitor will have to outdo them and/or fill a different niche.
Mint is likely going to rot, though, once most of the original people leave. That should give more than enough room to catch up. The hardest thing to fight will probably be the name recognition.
The former stands for a desktop version; the latter is probably known only by a small minority of the total mass-market (it's still a barrier though, I agree)
Intuit has it’s own back-end account aggregation service that it will use instead of Yodlee.
Nooooo. I've used Quicken for Mac and this feature really sucks. They didn't support direct download/connection with Bank of America, but they did with Citi.
Ever since I switched to Mint.com I never looked back at Quicken. In Mint.com, all my accounts synced and it just worked (thanks to Yodlee I assume). With Quicken I had to manually download/import files, and then re-categorize every single transaction (hyperbole). With Mint.com, I only have to fix 1-2 transaction's categories within a month.
I really hope Inuit's backend has improved since then.
An interesting part of the history of bank account feeds is that Intuit was a big part of the original OFX standardization effort. Initially OFX was looking to become a wonderful and well supported standard in North America. However, Intuit tried to turn the screws on the banks by charging hefty licensing fee for supporting OFX, and that eventually that killed the effort to free your bank account information.
I hope the lesson is clear for everyone: if you depend on someone for data, you don't get to charge them--they get to charge you. That goes double for banks who are generally extremely unhappy when they aren't the ones making money in a deal.
That's why Yodlee has a near monopoly. They are the only ones doing a decent job screenscraping from your bank, which is hardly secure or stable especially since some banks actively try to prevent this. This is very expensive and ultimately futile.
On the other hand, there's an opportunity for someone to get the OFX working again by reversing the flow of charges back towards the bank. If you do it well, you too can have a near monopoly and make money while you're at it.
If I recall, it was actually Microsoft who started OFX under the name Marble. They pitched Intuit on the idea, even though Intuit eventually became the dominant partner.
I'd rather have someone like Yodlee provide me with access to my transaction history via SSL in something like JSON until there is an industry standard (and then I'd aggregate them myself from each financial institution). I was waiting for someone else to come along and add a more folksinomical tagging system that you could visualize with something like flot: http://code.google.com/p/flot/wiki/FlotUsage
Data aggregation is a messy business. No two companies have the same feed options, nor do any two feeds work the same. And for consumer-facing data, Yodlee is the best.