![]() But despite a standard format for financial data interchange called OFX (Open Financial Exchange), few financial institutions were offering any way for their customers to extract their own financial data. If the banks had been willing to offer an API, Mint's job would have been simpler. That meant that for Mint to work, it would have to configure its scrapers to work with thousands of different websites, each of which was subject to change without notice. Mint would also analyze your spending in order to recommend credit cards whose benefits were best tailored to your usage, saving you money and earning the company commissions.īy international standards, the USA has a lot of banks: around 12,000 when Mint was getting started (in the US, each state gets to charter its own banks, leading to an incredible, diverse proliferation of financial institutions). Patzer's idea was to create a service that would take all your logins and passwords for all your bank, credit union, credit card, and brokerage accounts, and use these logins and passwords to automatically scrape your financial records, and categorize them to help you manage your personal finances. It occurred to Patzer that he could do even better, which is where Mint came in. So he conceived on an ingenious hack: he wrote a program that would automatically look up every business name he entered into the online version of the Yellow Pages -constraining the search using the area code in the business's phone number so it would only consider local merchants -and use the Yellow Pages' own categories to populate the "category" field in his financial tracking tools. Patzer was frustrated with the amount of manual work it took to track his finances with these tools, which at the time weren't smart enough to automatically categorize "Chevron" under fuel or "Safeway" under groceries. He kept up the business through college and grad school and invested his profits in stocks and other assets, leading to a minor obsession with personal finance that saw him devoting hours every Saturday morning to manually tracking every penny he'd spent that week, transcribing his receipts into Microsoft Money and Quicken. Patzer had grown up in the city of Evansville, Indiana -a place he described as "small, without much economic opportunity" -but had created a successful business building websites.
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