June 5, 2009

Mint.com: Personal Finance Management on My Yahoo!

Editor's note: This is a guest post from Lee Sherman, editor of the Mint.com blog. As part of the launch of new open applications for users of My Yahoo! and Yahoo! Mail, we asked all of the app developers to introduce themselves and talk about building their apps on Yahoo!'s open platforms.

One million users already have found Mint.com to be a better way for money management and now they can get Mint right on their personalized My Yahoo! page with Mint’s new Yahoo! app.

After getting the call from Yahoo!, the Mint team was able to develop the app in just six weeks, taking full advantage of the Yahoo! Application Platform (YAP) in order to bring the most important functionality of the Mint.com service to Yahoo! users.

Since the My Yahoo! homepage is the place where users go to catch up on the most important things in their lives, the Mint team was careful not to overwhelm them with all of the detailed information they can get on Mint.com. Instead, the Mint.com app provides an overview of the financial essentials – net cash, budget, categorized spending, Mint.com alerts, and investment performance that users need to get through their busy days.

Security and privacy were also paramount in developing Mint.com for Yahoo!. Mint.com is already secure -- user data is protected by the same bank-level data security used by major financial institutions, no one can move money on Mint, and Mint never collects any personal identifying information. But the Mint team took this one step further for the My Yahoo! app. Since many My Yahoo! users might use the app in public, Mint decided not to display actual account balances or specific transactions. Instead, easy-to-read charts are used in order to provide an overview of a user’s personal finances. For a deeper dive, users just need to click through to the Mint.com website.

The Mint team thinks that extending the Mint.com experience to YAP makes sense for a number of reasons. Many users already go to their My Yahoo! homepage to get the latest news about the economy, so now they can see how their personal economy is doing in the same place. And it is a logical extension of Mint’s approach to personal finance. Mint has continued to make finances more accessible, first by providing a secure connection from any web browser, next by providing mobile access in the form of 2-way SMS and email alerts and an iPhone app, and now by bringing a daily dose of Mint.com to a user’s My Yahoo! page.

Mint remains focused on providing the best user experience possible wherever users need to access their personal finances. Yahoo! users can expect support for additional financial institutions (if your bank isn’t supported now, it soon will be), enhanced budgeting tools, and even more ways to save in the coming months.

Lee Sherman
Editor of the Mint.com Blog

Posted at June 5, 2009 7:50 AM | Permalink

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Posted by: Personal Finance Guru at June 6, 2009 4:25 AM

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