New site with potential: Mint.com
Mint.com launched at TechCrunch40 on Tuesday. The site claims that it:
… connects nightly to the credit card providers, banks, and/or credit unions you choose to keep your transactions and account balances automatically up-to-date. Mint even auto-balances your checkbook and auto-categorizes your transactions.
I have been looking forward to seeing what the site offers, and though it has launched, I am still looking forward to see what it offers. I signed up immediately after the launch, and I guess I wasn’t the only one. The site got hammered. It was down in a matter of hours. Just today I was finally able to get my Chase checking account linked, but I still have had no luck with my Chase credit card account or my Wells Fargo account.
Has anybody else had any luck? I’ll keep you posted on any further progress I have.
On another note, does anyone know of any security risks that I should worry about by using this site? From the surface, everything is using SSL, but I sure hope my account info is being gaurded safely on their backend. I tend to be overly trustworthy, so please stop me if I am making a mistake here.
20 Sep 2007 Trent
I can’t get comfortable with the idea of giving out my bank and credit card account info – and passwords! – to a site with no proven credibility to date. I’d feel better if they had some sort of certification, or security assurance backed by an outside verification of authenticity.
As with anything new, I would probably wait a year or so to give them time to learn their security vulnerabilities… As with any financial site you run the risk of hackers and some idiot employee leaving their laptop full of SSNs on the seat of their car… but, I’d use the same rule I use when looking for a new car: Never buy a car in its first model year, let them work out the kinks first it will save you a lot of headaches. SSL is good, but as you know, there is a lot more to it than that. As for me, I use Quicken which pretty much does all the same stuff as this site except my passwords and account numbers stay local on my PC.