

Mint Receives $14m in Funding But Still Only In The USA Market, Why? - insomniamedia
http://crenk.com/mint-receives-14m-in-funding-but-still-only-in-the-usa-market-why/

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run4yourlives
Sounds like opportunity calling.

Mint obviously doesn't want to go through the effort of customizing versions
of the software for different markets. (Which, in the financial sector I'd
imagine is substantial work) My thought is that they feel there is much more
market to win in the US without a similar expenditure.

What an enterprising young person should do is - call them up and offer to do
the work for them for a single market. You could take the risk in terms of the
full cost of development and negotiate a cut of every user from the country in
question.

Unless they can see expansion in the very near future, they should jump all
over this deal.

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potatolicious
Actually I think it goes deeper than this. I've looked into Mint's operating
model in the Canadian market, for example, and we have a _lot_ of privacy laws
that simply do not exist in the USA. These privacy laws make it practically
illegal to do what Mint does (i.e. collect private information, login on your
behalf, and scrape your bank's site).

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run4yourlives
I'm pretty sure all Canadian privacy laws can be worked around with a
disclaimer. You just need to tell them what you intend to do and get them to
sign off on it. IANAL though.

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JimmyL
I'm also NAL, but I think privacy laws are the kind of thing that you can't
just disclaim away - you may be willing to give up that information, but if
it's illegal for them to collect it it's still illegal.

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run4yourlives
Nothing is illegal to collect, as long as you disclose. Ergo credit bureaus,
insurance companies with SIN's etc.

I believe there is a set time when certain things will be frowned upon (That
SIN particularly) but we are currently within an incremental period where it
isn't right now.

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halo
Netflix made $1.36 billion in revenue last year yet is still only in the US
market. Why?

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pmikal
Mint accesses your banking information using a service from Yodlee. I don't
believe Yodlee has many partners outside the US and am not aware of a similar
vendor with EU coverage.

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codahale
You got it. Yodlee doesn't support non-US banks; Mint's built on top of
Yodlee; ∴ Mint doesn't support non-US banks.

(Full disclosure: I work for Wesabe.)

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maukdaddy
Excellent answer.

Also, thank you for letting me know there is a ∴ character!

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aaronz3
I thought my screen was just dirty! What does it mean?

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itodd
∴ means therefore.

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boredguy8
There are good alternatives to mint, too, like wesabe.com

