Mint's Fresh Take on Personal Finance

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Despite the vote of confidence, Mint will need to prove it won't undermine the trust of customers with a business model that may not charge for using the site, but collects referral fees for successfully steering users to ostensibly money-saving services from partners. Mint says it calculates whether a partner's service might save a user $50 or more per year, and if the answer is yes, displays an ad for that product.

Bold Predictions

Most of these partner services are financial, such as accounts and credit cards from the likes of JPMorgan Chase (JPM), Bank of America (BAC), and American Express (AXP). But the site might also display a bundled service promotion from a phone or cable company if it observes from a customer's bank transactions that the user is paying separate bills for phone, cable TV, and Internet service. Mint says its users click on more than 12% of such ads to learn more—a response rate above the norm for online ads. "It's not like we're bombarding you with useless advertisements," says Patzer. "Our goal is to be that trusted financial adviser."

Intuit counters that Mint's sales of other companies' financial products could compromise the value of its software's advice, and that the $36-a-year fee for Quicken Online is a small price to pay for an ad-free site. "We're invested only in your success financially," says group product manager Jim Del Favero.

Comments like those won't deter Mint from making bold predictions. The company says it hopes to sign up 1 million users by the end of 2008, driven by promotions like the one announced Apr. 3 with The Motley Fool, which will feature a log-in box for Mint on its investment advice site. Patzer's challenge will be to avoid undermining Mint's simplicity as he adds features such as a new tool for customers to track their investments against market indices, set to appear by May. "We're still very early on in this online product category," says Forrester's Graeber. "The jury's still out whether consumers will go to third-party sites, or right to their banks' software."

Ricadela is a writer for Bloomberg BusinessWeek in San Francisco.