Mint Makes a Quick Mark on Intuit

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Quicken boasts 10 million to 12 million customers and brings in about $100 million a year in revenue, according to Intuit. But Intuit hasn't managed to attract younger users to the brand while Mint has garnered more than 1.5 million users since its 2007 debut. Intuit also sells QuickBooks accounting software and a tax preparation package called TurboTax.

Quicken Online failed to thwart Mint

During the TV interview, Patzer got in a dig at Quicken, whose cumbersome operation he has said helped inspire him to create Mint. Quicken appealed to an "anal-retentive-type personality who wanted to make sure everything was penny perfect," he said. Patzer, who took charge of Intuit's personal finance business after the acquisition closed last November, said the company plans to combine Intuit and Mint software code into a single "code base" that could run on a PC or in the cloud, letting users switch between the two modes. Future desktop versions could use Adobe Systems' (ADBE) Air, Microsoft's (MSFT) Silverlight, or open-source HTML 5 technologies to pull information from the Web while running on a user's desktop, he said.

Meanwhile, Quicken Online will be dropped. Intuit introduced the Web site at the beginning of 2008 in order to compete with Mint. Quicken Online never took off and Intuit said after acquiring Mint that it would stop promoting the site and instead steer new Web users to Mint. At the time, the company said it planned to keep the Quicken Online brand alive as a service for desktop Quicken users to get alerts and updates about their investments. Now Mint will be the primary source of that information while connections between the desktop and Web products are developed.

Mint is expanding its purview as well. Patzer said Intuit plans to launch a Mint feature later in 2010 to help users manage their mortgages and determine the best time to refinance.

Down the road, there's scope for Intuit to create a "Mint for health care" product that lets consumers track their medical spending, Patzer said. Health-care software is a new area of investment for Intuit. In 2009, the company began offering customers of UnitedHealth Group (UNH), Cigna (CI), and Medical Mutual of Ohio software called Quicken Health Expense Tracker that lets consumers decipher insurers' "explanation of benefits" documents and see how much they owe vs. their deductibles. Insurers pay Intuit for the software, which is free to members of those plans and which has reduced the number of customer service calls the plans receive, Intuit President Peter Karpas says in an interview. Intuit also sells Quicken-branded accounting software for doctors.

Ricadela is a writer for Bloomberg BusinessWeek in San Francisco.

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