Citigroup, Microsoft Said to Take on Intuit, Mint.com
Sept. 25 (Bloomberg) — Citigroup Inc. has formed a venture with Microsoft Corp. to compete with Mint.com, the personal- finance Web site that Intuit Inc. agreed to buy last week for $170 million, people familiar with the matter said.
Context & Ripple Effects
Intuit moved first: last week it agreed to pay $170 million for Mint.com, buying the fastest-growing consumer brand in web-based personal finance. Bloomberg now reports — via unnamed sources, so still unconfirmed — that Citigroup and Microsoft are answering with their own joint venture aimed squarely at Mint.
For Microsoft this fits a familiar playbook of alliance-building against rivals: it took a $240 million stake in Facebook back in 2007, watched Google and Salesforce.com weigh their own anti-Microsoft alliance that same year, and has since edged toward cloud-based applications while keeping its licensed software core. A bank partnership puts it inside consumer finance without building a bank.
First-order effects
- Citigroup gains a consumer-facing personal-finance product built on its own transaction data — directly attacking the aggregator position Intuit just paid $170 million to acquire through Mint.com.
- Mint and Intuit inherit a rival backed by one of the largest US bank brands plus Microsoft's distribution muscle, before Intuit has even closed the deal.
Second-order effects
- Other large banks now face the same choice Citigroup made: partner with a software vendor to keep customers' financial data in-house, or cede the relationship to independent aggregators like Mint.
- Intuit's Quicken franchise — desktop software sold by license — gets a second flank opened against it, forcing it to defend both the legacy product and the newly acquired web asset.
Third-order effects
- If bank-plus-software ventures become the standard response, the defining battle in online personal finance shifts from user acquisition to who controls the underlying account data: the banks that hold it or the aggregators that surface it.
The trend: Consumer finance is consolidating around data control, with banks and software vendors forming alliances to counter aggregator acquisitions like Intuit-Mint.