Intuit’s Mint personal-finance service wants me to know it’s sorry. Again.

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Intuit has, however, made one less-obvious upgrade: switching account synchronization with some big-name institutions from a username-and-password exchange to a more secure OAuth sync in which Mint no longer stores your password. Intuit spokesman Rick Heineman lists other additions in an email: the ability to track cash transactions (added in 2010), a credit-score lookup (2014), and more recent tweaks to its insights and recommendations. Given Mint’s huge potential—and the rapid pace of improvement for other web-based services—that’s an alarmingly skimpy list. Missed opportunities Patzer’s summary of his baby’s stunted growth: “It could be doing much more.” He points in particular to the lack of integration between Mint and TurboTax, saying, “I had a dream that TurboTax would take you about five minutes.” The success of TurboTax, which Intuit zealously defends by lobbying to stop governments from offering their own tax-prep apps, may help explain why Mint has gone neglected. Patzer estimates that TurboTax generates 10 to 20 times the revenue of Mint. Intuit doesn’t break out that proportion—Heineman says, “Anything you have heard from Aaron or others is just speculation”—but its executives have left Mint out of prepared remarks for the company’s last five quarterly-earnings calls. In its 2019 fiscal year, Intuit’s consumer sector (basically, Mint and TurboTax) generated $2.775 billion in revenue, versus $3.533 billion for its small business and self-employed division, which is dominated by its QuickBooks accounting software. As software that people pay for—annually—TurboTax follows a business model that Intuit mastered decades ago. By contrast, Patzer says, Mint’s referral fees for sign-ups through the app yielded “lumpy” income.

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Or, as Patzer says of the app, which he continues to use himself: “It solves a real need.”