Mint's iPhone App: Now With Budgets, Push Notifications, and an Extra Layer of Security
Mint, the popular personal finance site that was just acquired by Intuit, just released a major update to its iPhone application (iTunes link). While Mint's iPhone app was always quite good …
Context & Ripple Effects
This update lands just weeks after Intuit completed its acquisition of Mint, and it is effectively the first proof point that the deal changes Mint's product cadence rather than freezing it: budgets, push notifications, and an added security layer arrive in the iPhone app while the web service stays the center of gravity.
First-order effects
- Mint's existing iPhone users gain budget tracking, real-time push alerts on account activity, and an additional security layer in a single update — no new signup, no migration, which lowers the cost of making the phone app a daily habit rather than a balance-check utility.
Second-order effects
- Intuit's July 2009 confirmation of a new Quicken for Mac release in February 2010 — issued after it publicly denied blogger speculation that the Mac desktop line was being dropped — now pairs a defended desktop franchise with Mint covering the web-and-mobile front end, giving the company a two-track answer to online-only personal finance rivals.
Third-order effects
- Because Mint is confirmed to run as a thin front end on Yodlee's core aggregation technology — the same pattern as YouTube on Flash — the durable battleground is the interface and alerting layer, not the data plumbing, pushing the whole category toward whoever owns the customer-facing experience over shared bank-data infrastructure.
The trend: Consumer money management is shifting from boxed desktop software to native smartphone apps layered over shared bank-data aggregation platforms, with acquirers like Intuit racing to keep the front-end experience ahead of standalone upstarts.