Intuit Archives - Page 11 of 12

Intuit Uses Real-Time Twitter Feed in Banner Ad on VentureBeat Blog

By Jim Bruene Posted on April 9, 2009
Categories: Advertising & Promotion, Barclays, Intuit, Twitter

Intuit’s TurboTax unit has long pushed the envelope in promoting its brand through social networks. Its Vanilla Ice YouTube promotion two years ago (previous post) is still one of my favorite financial user-generated-content (UGC) promotions.

But UGC promotions take a lot of planning and support, and unless they go viral, they may generate just a few thousand views and little new business (see note 1).

Intuit’s use of a real-time (note 2) Twitter feed in a banner ad (see at VentureBeat, screenshot below) is so much better than a YouTube promo in a number of ways:

Much more cost effective: It costs Intuit virtually nothing to post its Twitter stream to VentureBeat (other than the advertising expense). Intuit is already broadcasting on its Twitter channel for other reasons. This is just a repositioning of that content.
When Intuit answers a question within its stream (@ replies), it creates moderated “user-generated micro-content.” The newness of the content creates more interest and attention than a static banner ad.
The company jumps on the Twitter-bandwagon, a good way to generate press mentions.

Bottom line: This approach works only if you are creating an interesting stream of Tweets. TurboTax, during the early-April tax return mania, is a great example. Other financial companies can mimic the approach, and you’ll probably want to run a contest or do something innovative to keep your Tweets lively.

VentureBeat home page (9 April 2009)

Landing page at Intuit’s TurboTax Twitter page @turbotax
(link, 9 April 2009)

Notes:
1. But if you have a huge budget, the payoff can be great. According to Jeffry Pilcher’s Financial Brand post today, Barclaycard’s Waterslide promo, referenced on the UK homepage, generated more than a million views on YouTube. Barclay’s TV ad is here, the YouTube page is here and the Web-based game, here.

2. It’s a “speeded-up” real-time feed. The banner ad cycles through the five most-recent Tweets (all of which were posted yesterday). Each one is on-screen for several seconds, making it look like there is much activity.

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Mint, Quicken Online Release Registered-User Totals

By Jim Bruene Posted on February 20, 2009
Categories: Intuit, Metrics & Market Research, Mint, Personal Financial Management

mint_logo We’ve regularly cited third-party estimates of website traffic to Mint and other PFMs. More often that not, we’ll get a comment or email taking us to task for using such inexact and/or irrelevant data. But we believe that website traffic, even a rough approximation, is a leading indicator of success.

Luckily, we now have better metrics for the two online leaders. In response to what appears to be a truth-in-advertising query from Intuit’s general counsel (see note 1), Mint disclosed its registered-user count (note 2), which has been growing at an average of 17% per month in Q4 2008 and so far in this year.

As of yesterday, Mint had 934,000 users, double third quarter’s end-count. That’s 3,400 new registered users per day (seven days a week), almost 25,000 per week. The company should pass one million before St. Patrick’s day.

While this growth in registered users is impressive, what’s truly astonishing is that 70% of the registered users, 680,000 so far, have entered at least one bank or credit card username/password in order to automatically download transactions into Mint.

In response to Mint’s disclosure, Quicken Online reported its 650,000 registered users, currently growing at a 45,000-per-week clip. If that continues, they’ll pass one million before the April tax deadline.

It looks like there’s quite a battle shaping up between the two leading online personal finance specialists. And don’t overlook the banks. Both Bank of America (2.5 mil as of April 2008) and Wells Fargo (1 mil as of Nov 2008) have more online personal finance users at this point.

What it means: Account aggregation, left for dead a few years ago, is making a fearsome comeback. The three biggest players, Bank of America, Mint, and Quicken Online, now have more than 4 million registered users, approximately 4% of all U.S. banking households (note 3).

Table: Mint Registered Users by Month

Month-End	Registered Users*	Monthly Gain	Month/Month % Gain
Aug 2008	404,000	—	—
Sep 2008	458,000	54,000	13%
Oct 2008	544,000	96,000	21%
Nov 2008	606,000	62,000	11%
Dec 2008	720,000	114,000	19%
Jan 2009**	864,000**	144,000**	20%**
Feb 2009***	934,000***	—	—
Avg gain/mo	—	94,000	17%

Source: Mint, Feb. 2009
*Registered users are anyone who has signed up with email address
** Through Jan 25 (per Mint letter, 28 Jan)
***Through Feb 19 (per TechCrunch post, 19 Feb)

Notes:
1. Intuit’s letter to Mint here.
2. Mint’s response here.
3. Yodlee provides the aggregation engine for both Bank of America and Mint.
4. For more info, see our Online Banking Report on Account Aggregation and Online Banking Report on Personal Finance Features

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Online Personal Finance Traffic Soars; Mint Passes One Million Unique Visitors

By Jim Bruene Posted on February 9, 2009
Categories: Geezeo, Intuit, LendingTree, Mint, Personal Financial Management, Thrive, Wesabe

January is always a great month for personal finance. Consumers working off holiday spending binges and/or attempting to live up to New Years resolutions naturally find their way to personal financial management sites. It’s especially pronounced this year as consumers try to better understand their spending and manage for the downturn.

So it’s not surprising to see that traffic grew by 300,000 unique visitors in January (+20%) compared to December. Total traffic was up 4.5-fold at sites open for a year or more (see Table 1). Including the class of 2008, total traffic was 2.0 million, a five-fold increase from a year ago.

Highlights:

Mint had another great month, increasing site visitors by about 200,000, a five-fold increase in the past year. Mint’s gain in January was more than that total traffic of all nine 2008 newcomers combined. Mint had a 60% market share of the total of 1.8 million visitors in the category, about the same as December.
Geezeo continued its wicked pace, growing 30% during the month, and posting a 12-fold increase over a year ago.
Quicken Online, which launched in January 2008, more than doubled visitors to 150,000 compared to December. However, traffic at Quicken is hard to compare to other sites due to the massive traffic at its parent site: for example, <quicken.intuit.com> received 1.2 million visitors and <intuit.com> website had more than 10 million.
Wesabe was the only site, of those open for a year or more, that turned in a traffic decline, falling more than 30% in the month. However, keep in mind the Compete estimates are derived from an online panel and are not always accurate, especially for sites in the low six-figures or less. The company said that it had record page views in January. That includes both U.S. traffic, measured by Compete, and international visitors.
BudgetTracker also turned in amazing results, nearly doubling its traffic to an estimated 27,000 visitors.
Of the 2008 startups (see Table 2), Thrive was the only one showing strong growth, increasing 50% over the previous month. On Friday the company was acquired by Lending Tree for an undisclosed amount.

Table 1: Traffic at online PFMs launched more than one year ago

	Jan 2009	Dec 2008	Jan 2008	YOY Chg
Mint	1.1 mil	890,000	200,000	5.2x
Geezeo	220,000	170,000	18,000	12x
Yodlee	120,000	100,000	84,000	44%
Finicity/Mvelopes	100,000	71,000	91,000	10%
Wesabe	89,000	140,000	56,000	60%
BudgetTracker	27,000	14,000	15,000	86%
Buxfer	22,000	15,000	13,000	78%
PearBudget	12,000	7,600	4,200	3x
ClearCheckbook BudgetPulse	11,000 8,200	9,100 4,300	4,600 2,200	2.3x 3.6x
Total	1.7 mil	1.4 mil	490,000	4.5x

Table 2: Traffic at the online PFM class of 2008

	Jan 2009	Dec 2008	Month Chg
Quicken Online	150,000	53,0 00	1.8x
PNC Virtual Wallet	41,000	45,000	(9%)
Rudder	39,000	61,000	(35%)
Thrive	21,000	14,000	52%
Scred	2,600	630	4x
Expensr	2,500	3,700	(32%)
RateSurfer	2,100	3,600	(41%)
Expensify	1,400	600	2.5x
Banzai	1,300	1,500	(15%)
GreenSherpa	400	ina	—
iThryv	210	2,100	(90%)
Total	260,000	185,000	41%

Source: Compete, 7 Feb. 2009; estimates of monthly unique visitors from the United States

*The percent changes were calculated from the underlying data set and due to rounding of the monthly traffic figures; the percentages may look slightly off

Note: For more information on the market, see our Online Banking Report on Personal Finance Features and Online Banking Report on Social Personal Finance.

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Finovate 2008 Quicken Online

By Jim Bruene Posted on October 14, 2008
Categories: Finovate, Intuit

Finovate 2008 kicks off with a demo of Intuit’s Quicken Online. The presenter is Todd Stanley VP/general manager of Quicken Online and Barron Ernst, product manager.

Quicken Online, the online version of the popular desktop personal finance manager, was launched in January 2008. One notable difference between Intuit’s strategy and other online PFMs, is that Quicken Online costs $3/mo. The vast majority of competitors are ad supported and free of charge.

What’s new
Intuit is removing the fee from Quicken Online; it is now free of charge, which means, of the major online personal finance companies, only Mvelopes/Finicity charges a fee.

The new user interface will be available Oct. 30.

Introducing more mobile integration.

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Intuit Launches Quicken Beam: Free Text-Message Alerts & Balance Inquiry

By Jim Bruene Posted on August 25, 2008
Categories: Intuit, Launches, Mobile Banking, Personal Financial Management

Intuit joined the messaging race with the beta release of Quicken Beam. The free service sends users text-messaged balance-and-activity alerts from most U.S. bank, credit card, and credit union accounts. Users may also query the service for balance plus last five transactions by texting “Bal” to the short code 636363.

Currently, the service runs independently of Quicken and can be used by anyone free of charge. According to the official press release, the service was developed in Intuit Labs.

What’s innovative
It’s not a new feature. Quicken Online (see second screenshot below), along with most major banks and personal finance specialists (Mint, Rudder, Wesabe), already supports text-message alerts (see note 1). But this is a relatively low-cost way to hook users early on with an extremely simple service, then migrate them to more robust Intuit services later on (Quicken, QuickBooks, TurboTax).

And the Quicken stamp of approval means a lot when turning over your log-in credentials to a third party. If you want to talk to the company about Quicken Beam, Intuit will be demo’ing the latest features of Quicken Online at our Finovate Conference in October.

Financial institutions that lack text-message support might consider linking customers to Quicken Beam. Yes, you are turning customers over to another financial provider, and yes, your compliance folks will hate it. But customers are going to do it whether you want them to or not. You might as well get credit for making a solid recommendation. And realistically, using Quicken Beam is unlikely to hasten anyone’s exit from your bank or credit union.

Qucken Beam homepage (25 Aug 2008)

Text messaging in Quicken Online (25 Aug 2008)

Notes:
1. Geezeo really differentiated itself with mobile capabilities in its May 2007 launch.

2. For more information, see our Online Banking Report on Personal Finance Features.

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Small Business Networks from American Express, Capital One, Advanta, Bank of America, QuickBooks, and HSBC

By Jim Bruene Posted on June 26, 2008
Categories: Advanta, American Express, Capital One, HSBC, Intuit, Small Business, Social Media, Social Networks

Earlier this week, Visa launched its Facebook Business Network. While the first to use Facebook, several other major financial institutions have opened small biz networks on the Web in the past six months:

Advanta’s Ideablob launched last September at DEMOfall (previous post here). It’s a unique website with monthly contests awarding $10,000 to the best idea, as voted on by users. It’s an intriguing concept with decent traction, almost 30,000 unique visitors last month according to Compete (see chart below). (Full disclosure: I just realized I’m wearing an Ideablob t-shirt; schwag can still pay off!)
American Express’s OpenForum: As the name suggests, it’s a business forum and resource directory, not unlike Bank of America’s (see below). American Express has added posts from several prominent bloggers such as John Battelle’s Searchblog and Anita Campbell’s Small Biz Trends to keep the site fresh. The site has 5,400 members and monthly traffic of about 11,000 unique visitors, up threefold from a year ago.
Bank of America’s Small Business Online Community, a general forum and resource directory, launched in October 2007 (see original post here). It’s primarily a forum, with some additional articles on the side. Total membership is just under 15,000.
Capital One’s Slingshot, launched in February, is primarily a business directory. But it does aim for community involvement with user-submitted business reviews and comments on certain topics.
HSBC’s (UK) Business Network: Another forum-and-blog site similar to AmEx’s OpenForum. So far it appears lightly used, with just six blog entries this year and 270 member profiles.
Intuit’s Quickbooks Group: Although not a financial institution, the Quickbooks site is a good example of an active community with more content, including ten blogs, and as much traffic as the others combined (not including BofA which is unknown) with nearly 90,000 unique visitors, almost double the number a year ago.

Unique website visitors in May 2008 (source: Compete)

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Put Your Bank in Apple’s iPhone 3G App Store

By Jim Bruene Posted on June 10, 2008
Categories: Apple, Intuit, iPhone, Mobile Banking

I’ve written about how the iPhone could change the way consumers use mobile phones to access data (see note 1). But this slide from the Steve Jobs keynote yesterday at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), says it much better:

In case you can’t read the slide, it says that 98% of iPhone users use the built-in Safari browser, 94% use email and 90% use text messaging. That’s an amazing level of usage for what used to be considered “advanced” smartphone features. So far, the impact on ecommerce companies has been relatively small, with just 6 million users worldwide. But with Apple dropping the price by 50% to $199, there will soon be 10, 20, or 30 million Americans connecting to the Web via iPhone. If 90%+ use the browser and messaging, it will have a major impact in online/mobile banking usage.

New App Store
And to help those millions of new users find useful things to do on their phone, Apple is building a new App Store, accessible directly from the main deck of the iPhone once users download the 2.0 software in July. The App Store will include thousands of applications optimized for the iPhone that can be downloaded over the air.

Some will have a cost, with the developer keeping 70% of the revenue, but most are expected to be free. Since there is NO COST to list your app in Apple’s App Store (see update below), financial services companies should rush to get their app loaded as close to the July 11 launch date as possible.

So far, only two banks, Bank of America and Germany’s Postbank, have included their apps in the current online applications directory (here). A number of other financial apps are listed including Wesabe, Buxfer, and the latest, QuickBooks from Intuit (see inset right and screenshots below). Expect many more in the months and years to come.

Update 11 June: Important clarification from commenter “gerontius” (number 3 below). The current app directory includes webpages optimized for the iPhone. The new App Directory will include “native” apps that run directly on the iPhone operating system. That makes the bar quite a bit higher, depending on what you want to do.

Bank of America Bank of America on iphone Buxfer Buxfer on iphone

myBudget myBudget on iphone Postbank Postbank ibanking on iphone

Wesabe Wesabe on iphone Yodlee Yodlee on iphone

Note:

1. For more info, see our Online Banking Report on Mobile Banking

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Quicken Draws a Line in the Sand, Places $36/yr Value on Online Personal Finance

By Jim Bruene Posted on January 10, 2008
Categories: Intuit, Mint, Personal Financial Management

The two dozen online competitors of Intuit's Quicken can breathe a sigh of relief today. The 800-lb guerilla has done them a favor, levying a monthly fee for its new online-only option, Quicken Online (press release here). While the $2.99/mo fee, after a free month, is reasonable, it's much different than FREE. Look for the websites of the competition to trumpet the $35.88 annual savings very soon.

Intuit could easily have offered its online option free of charge. While that would cannibalize its packaged version, the overall impact to its bottom line would have been insignificant (note 2). And a free Quicken would have made it much harder for Mint, Wesabe, Geezeo, Buxfer and others to gain a footing (note 1).

My guess is that Intuit doesn't feel too threatened by the startups, yet. The security issue is extremely difficult for a new company to overcome. Intuit is one of the few tech companies with a brand that has trust levels on par with a financial institution. Millions already entrust their entire tax return, which has far more personal info than an online bank account, with the company.

Intuit will allow the startups to build a following, then acquire the promising ones and convert their users to Quicken Online. All for less than the cash it would have foregone by offering Quicken Online free.

We'll compare and contrast Quicken Online with the startups in an upcoming Online Banking Report (previous reports here and here).

Notes:

1. A few hours before Quicken Online went live, Mint issued a press release trumpeting its 100,000 registered users. That's an impressive number for a company that went live in September (previous coverage here). However, assuming 20% to 25% of those are active, there are still more than 500 times as many Quicken desktop users.

2. Intuit's fiscal 2007 pre-tax profit was $670 million.

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Intuit’s Quicken Online to Launch in January

By Jim Bruene Posted on December 20, 2007
Categories: Intuit, Personal Financial Management

Intuit has been beta testing a fully online version of its flagship product Quicken since September. According to Eileen Ambrose, writing for the The Baltimore Sun (here), the product will launch Jan. 8, 2008, at a price of $2.99/mo (note 1), $12 more than the entry-level, packaged version ($24 at Amazon), but $8 less than Quicken Deluxe ($44 at Amazon).

Intuit is already advertising it on Google when searching "quicken online." Below is a screenshot of the landing page (here):

The service is still in beta and requires an "application" to use. Interestingly, one of the requirements listed in the FAQ is that beta testers must allow Intuit to download data from their bank account nightly. So obviously, account aggregation is a key component, not that that's a surprise. Automated account downloading is now "table stakes" for online personal finance.

We'll look at the service in detail after we've had a chance to use it.

Note:

1. Intuit's ad on Google says (below), "Sign up for the new Quicken Online Free!" which sounds like a lot less than $36/yr.

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Online Personal Finance Heats Up: Part 2

By Jim Bruene Posted on September 11, 2007
Categories: Digital Insight, Finovate, Intuit, Personal Financial Management, Yodlee

One of the biggest themes at our upcoming FINOVATE 2007: DEMOing the Future of Online Finance (here) is the interesting developments in the online personal finance space (see lineup below).

As we mentioned last week, the race to add personal financial management (PFM) features to online banking sites is just getting started. To some extent, every bank and credit union supporting online banking already offers extensive personal finance functionality. Think back on how the average person managed day-to-day finances prior to 1997: telephone calls, ATM slips, or in my case, the moment of terror once per month when opening the monthly bank statement.

But now that everyone offers base level PFM, the new race is to provide advanced features to hold on to customers, attract new ones, and potentially cross-sell complimentary products such as debt consolidation, mortgage refis, insurance and so on (see note 1). We also hope to see some fee income from the new features, either through elevated checking account fees, or with premium online banking surcharges (note 2). The latter appears unlikely to happen in the United States unless Bank of America starts charging fees.

At FINOVATE we'll see demos from five key players:

Two industry veterans, both two-time OBR Best of the Web winners, will be launching significant new versions this fall: Digital Insight (Intuit) and Yodlee
Two "class of 2007" new startups: Jwaala (coverage here) and Mint (coverage here)
And Geezeo, which recently changed its name and moved aggressively into personal finance (coverage here)

Digital Insight (Intuit)
One of the most intriguing acquisitions in online banking in the past ten years was Intuit's purchase last year of online banking platform provider Digital Insight (see coverage here and here). Everyone expected the merged companies to push hard on personal finance, the core of Intuit's much-admired brand. I've had a chance to see the Personal FinanceWorks and Small Business FinanceWorks demos several times and came away impressed. Combined with the depth of Digital Insight's client base, these products have a chance to become the online banking standard within a few years. Intuit is a two-time OBR Best of the Web winner with its Web-based tax services.

Yodlee
Yodlee used to be known as "that account aggregation company." But over the years they've worked hard to shed that image and morph into a full-service financial tools provider. The company offers account-opening tools, bill payment services, personal financial management, long-term archives, and, yes, account aggregation, although it's now more integrated with the company's other services, especially its MoneyCenter personal financial manager. MoneyCenter is the engine behind Bank of America's MyPortfolio which helped Yodlee win its second OBR Best of the Web (see coverage here).

Notes:

1. For more info on online personal finance, see Online Banking Report #132/133 and #142/143.

2. For more info on premium online banking pricing, see Online Banking Report #109.

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Someday, Maybe You Will "Wesabe" Verizon Before Signing that Two-Year Contract

By Jim Bruene Posted on May 31, 2007
Categories: Intuit, Personal Financial Management, Wesabe

You know you have it made when your company becomes a verb. Everyone on the planet knows about Googling. Then there is MapQuesting directions to the party, Yelping the best Thai food South of Market, and in financial services, Zillowing the house down the street. Someday, you may Wesabe your wireless provider to see how much users spend there and how they rate the experience.

At least that would fit the vision of Wesabe co-founder and CEO Jason Knight, who I caught up with over coffee yesterday in Seattle as I was putting the finishing touches on a report on Wesabe and other so-called "social personal finance" companies (note 1).

I came away with a new respect for what Wesabe is trying to do. They are not so much looking to be a Web-based Quicken, as I assumed; but more a Quicken/Google mashup, delivering consumer insights by finding meaning in millions of consumer purchases. Overall, it's more like what Google does with a billion Web pages, than what Quicken does with a few thousand transactions (for each user).

But unlike Google, which can crawl websites at will, Wesabe must convince consumers to open up their spending files to the equivalent of a search engine crawl. To do that, Jason says that Wesabe "must make financial information interesting (to its users)" while also making it drop-dead simple to upload data to Wesabe.

No easy task. But Wesabe seems to have a head start on making that happen. More on that in our full report (see note below).

Note:

1. Our next Online Banking Report, Social Personal Finance, will look at the entire sector. You'll find it here next week. It will include a detailed look at Wesabe and Lending Club, which is catering entirely to Facebook users (see post here), and what banks should do to compete and/or partner with this new type of financial provider.

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Intuit Scores Viral Hit with The Tax Rap

By Jim Bruene Posted on April 18, 2007
Categories: Google, Intuit, Net.Finance Conference, Tax Prep

At WBR's Net.Finance conference yesterday, Jon Kaplan, head of Google's Financial Services Group, showcased ways to work with Google that were NOT related to search. He showed some cool and free ways to showcase your brand on Google Earth, Google Gadgets, Google Calendar, and more. We'll look at those in future posts, but by far the most entertaining example is Intuit's refreshingly creative TurboTax Rap promotion.

The company sponsored a contest that ended on the traditional U.S. tax day, April 15, that offered a top prize of $25,000 to the best YouTube video featuring TurboTax. Intuit also gave the first runner-up $5,000 and the third place video $1,000. And anyone who uploaded a video entry received a free copy of TurboTax. Intuit hired 1980's rapper Vanilla Ice to do the intro and announce the winner.

To promote the contest, Intuit created a special-purpose website (see screenshot below) and built a YouTube page (see below). The winning entry, showcased on Intuit's YouTube page, has more than 250,000 views. That's enough to put it on YouTube's most-viewed page (currently, it's number 13 on this week's most viewed), which really turbocharges the viewership. In comparison, the two runner-ups have less than 9,000 views.

This is brilliant work by Intuit. Although it was a costly promotion, it was still less than a major print buy and more importantly, it introduced the TurboTax brand to a whole new group of younger customers who'll be buying tax software for many decades. It will be interesting to see if Intuit makes this an annual event.

YouTube page <youtube.com/thetaxrap>

Website home <turbotax.intuit.com/taxrap>

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