Money made of Mint (.com)
The best way to start this expose is with a “Marie Claire” phrase like : How has internet changed the way we trust?
Out of common sense I will jump to the conclusion : a lot, and it has transformed Trust into a peer-to-peer thing.
Attention! This is not about the good old buzz-path of word-of-mouth. Peer to peer means that I use your resources-without-knowing-you and without-you-knowing that I use your resources.
Personnaly I am furious with this and I have jotted-down some cases to share
- We blog, tweet AND keep a secret diary for mother’s shake
- We start-up business based solely on V-teams (“Time” magazine’s best practice for creating a LILO company- Little In Lots Out)
- mWe umble-jumble generalities to colleagues and chat our PRO projects to your sexy-Sue73 on IRC
But I guess that’s my problem. With a Woody Allen film I will get over this social drama.
Some other smarter guys turned this into business. And created mint.com, a tool for managing online your financial assets, all of them. Aaaall you do is enter aaall your bank accounts data and they happily process. You never enter personal identification data. Well, sort of. Well is some countries. Well. (and that’s where Trust becomes like marriage : potentially outsourced to lawyers)
And then you announce how much you spend on life issurance, dippers and anchovies and they propose scenarios.
Does it sound familiar ? Does it sound Facebookish ?
If Facebook studied your Love, Mint.com studies directly your Money.
If Facebook is a $4b company by only having the potential to study your preferences patterns, Mint.com is a $?b company for having ready-made your spending patterns.
Peer-to-peer trust can make miracles for the little ? mark above. Alleluia.
JEALOUS Georgia.
PS: the anchovies are stolen, too stinky to be replaced with another example! thanks
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Tags: asset management, big-babol, chlorofyllo, love, mint, money, peer-to-peer, start-up, trust
I haven’t used Mint before, because it was US-only last time I checked, but I do think it’s a very, very good idea. The internet has opened up an opportunity for becoming smarter through collaboration, and as every recession since the beginning of capitalism has shown, most mistakes are made by people that operate only in their self-interest. Or that don’t have enough information about their peers to make the right decision.
As far as peer-to-peer is concerned. Already, things like processing power and bandwidth far exceed what most people use. So, I think a responsible kind of “sharing” is very feasible today. The most famous and ethical example of this is folding@home.
You could argue that, in the Western world at least, people are affluent enough to share their investment decisions as well.
I was seriously tempted to try mint as some of the services seem sensational. But I still am sceptical if I get any smarter or more proficient in managing my finances. Not because it is a hosted online service instead of a genie-in-a-pc one.that’s natural and it is not was modern Trust refers to.
I am sceptical because mint is placed as an intermediate in a traditionally intimate relationship : customer – banker. I believe that the customer has much more negotiating power when he has one trusted counsellor per bank and not one to interface everything. Is who do you share your information with a matter of education? culture? financial status? personality? I both agree and disagree with your last remark. For me it is more a matter of engraved influence pattern. For exemple pure enterpreneurs act on guts, their children are more in dialogue in their decision making, their children start to replace dialogue with indiference, etc until it breaks.
Peer-to-peer and distributed computing is truly fascinating and deserves a bunch of posts .! folding@home is cool, didn’t know it.
I don’t know Mint.com (at all, really), so I’m not the best to advise you on this.
I know that the rise of internet-based software is due to three reasons: 1. the technology is there, 2. it’s a very interesting way to generate income for companies (and prevent software-piracy), and 3. my own view of it, that it actually leads to better software, as bugs get fixed quicker and you get the advantages of peer-2-peer / distributed / whatever decision making, which I think is light years ahead of the concept of software-on-your-PC or “isolated computing.”
As far as the so-called exclusive relationship between customers and banks is concerned. Not everyone enjoys a good (financial) education and most people, I think, don’t have a clue about what their options are financially. They instead trust the advice of a banker, perhaps, whose interest it is to make money for the bank / fund, not necessarily you. And that’s how many problems happen.
I think the analogy works between better software because it’s distributed, and better (financial) decisions because they are distributed. Whether that works in practice at Mint.com, that I cannot say.