
  Mint Is Yodlee’s YouTube  - jasonlbaptiste
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/18/mint-is-yodlees-youtube/
======
Flemlord
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.

~~~
papa
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.

~~~
Flemlord
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.

Article: <http://www.fa-mag.com/fa-news/2683.html>

------
jgrahamc
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.

~~~
Aegean
So what made mint successful with their frontend then? Perhaps Yodlee hasn't
tried hard enough for the frontend.

~~~
cdr
Yodlee's frontend was ugly, clunky, and unfocused. Probably still is. UI was
not their strength.

~~~
rg
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.)

------
10ren
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.

~~~
varaon
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.

edit:spelling

~~~
cdr
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.

~~~
10ren
The name recognition of "Intuit" or "Mint"?

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)

~~~
cdr
Both. Mint is by far the best known name in the segment, and now it has
Intuit's name and dollars to push it.

------
felideon
_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.

------
sunir
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.

~~~
Flemlord
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.

------
figital
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>

------
blasdel
Youtube is totally the wrong acquisition analogy.

    
    
      Intuit : Mint : Yodlee  ::  eBay : Skype : Joltid

