Personal finance site Mint eyes U.K., Canada for international expansion

aaronpatzerheadshot1Mint.com, the personal finance site that has racked up 1.4 million users in the U.S., might expand up north and across the pond early next year, according to its founder and CEO Aaron Patzer.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based startup tracks personal checking accounts, credit card spending and retirement portfolios to help users manage their finances. It recently raised $14 million in a third round of financing and launched features this week advising employees on how to roll over their retirement savings when switching jobs. The company is one of Silicon Valley’s bright lights at a time when the IPO market remains cloudy and other consumer-facing companies have struggled to eke a living out of advertising.

“Canada and the U.K. would definitely be the first. I would like to say early next year,” said Patzer.

Growing internationally may be a little more logistically difficult for a company like Mint than it is for other consumer-focused companies, since the startup will have to weave its way through a variety of domestic banking laws and different financial partners to reach customers overseas. (You’d have to reach out to Barclays or Royal Bank of Scotland to work in the U.K., not Wells Fargo, for example.)

The company may also launch products involving credit or FICO scores and move into the small business market.

“Eventually we’ll get into loans, debt consolidation and mortgage payments,” he said. “We want to be able to say to customers: We know you’ve got excellent credit, you could qualify for a loan at 5.74 percent that would reduce your debt payments by this much.”

Because Mint earns revenue by charging banks to promote their offerings to users, moving up the ladder into higher-ticket financial products could also boost the value of the share Mint skims off the top.

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About the Author, Kim-Mai Cutler

Kim-Mai was born and raised a stone's throw from Apple headquarters in Cupertino by a devout Hewlett-Packard family. After attending UC Berkeley, Kim-Mai worked for Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires in New York, Los Angeles, London and Buenos Aires. Follow her on Twitter at @kimmaicutler, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.

  • I'd definitely use Mint if it were available in Canada.
  • George H
    Kind of impossible isn't it? Since they license the technology to aggregate and login to all your other accounts through Yodlee. Yodlee doesn't do UK or Canada.

    I always find it amazing that no reporter ever gets that Mint is just a UI on top of Yodlee and that they don't have much technology or data. Quicken at least owns the competing technology to Yodlee.

    Great for mint though to get this hype and are able to build a better UI than Yodlee can for themselves. I feel bad for Yodlee for not being smart enough to slap a better UI on their own product.
  • kebseb
    George, Are you sure about this? I thought Mint created it's own screen scraping technology. Didn't know it was a UI on top of yodlee
  • TW
    Actually I think Yodlee does support the UK. I used it from here for a while, although hated its interface. And I think other UK mint-clones like Kublax use the Yodlee service as well.
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  • This article is so well put together and will be very helpful to people.