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Comment by decasia | Hacker News Reader

It sounds like the answer is pretty straightforward — Mint was acquired and then semi-abandoned for want of providing sufficient revenue/having a sufficiently profitable business model.

The question in my mind is: What is the matter with global banking institutions such that this has to be a third party service instead of a service that a well-organized banking consortium could provide to its clients? I would totally switch my checking account if it came with a good Mint clone.

Is it asking so much for an interface from my bank that can classify transactions, include basic budgeting features, and pull in some data from other accounts?

(I know, I know, it's one of those things that sounds like a pretty simple CRUD app until you look into any of the industry-specific technical details.)

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> Is it asking so much for an interface from my bank that can classify transactions, include basic budgeting features, and pull in some data from other accounts?

Up until a rewrite of their online banking site to have a more modern, responsiveUI, my credit union used to have a pretty good implementation of the first of those. (After the rewrite, those features still exist, but hamburger buttons and poor information density have made it impossible to use them efficiently.) I honestly thought it did a better job than Mint for a time when I was young and did everything, even my credit card, with that one financial institution.

Which brings us to that last one, "pull in some data from other accounts". My guess is that that would be hard to get past senior decision makers, precisely because it would make it easy for customers to keep most their money elsewhere.

> Up until a rewrite of their online banking site to have a more modern, responsiveUI, my credit union used to have a pretty good implementation of the first of those. (After the rewrite, those features still exist, but hamburger buttons and poor information density have made it impossible to use them efficiently.)

I feel like something is not right when the utility of my banks' websites is pretty much inversely proportional to the recentness of their last redesign.

Why should banks be any different from major email providers in that respect?

USAA's checking/savings accounts have most of those features. You can connect external bank and investment accounts. Track home value. Categorize transactions. There's more features, those are just the ones I know about. That said, I still use Personal Capital to track my finances.

Out of curiosity, why do you prefer Personal Capital to USAA?

I think @Richicoder is right. USAA's tools haven't been updated in a while and are a pain to use. Their tech is still really good for a US bank. Personal Capital has been pretty painless (besides the occasional bank/investment syncing issues). Personal Capital's investment and retirement tools are quite nice. The only downside to Personal Capital is their advisors calling to try and sell their service. I eventually blocked their numbers and haven't heard anything from them in years.

A long time ago I used Mint. If I remember correctly, I had tons of syncing issues and problems navigating their UI. I tried USAA for a while, but eventually stumbled upon Personal Capital. I passionately dislike Intuit due to their pricing practices of Quickbooks Online, so I'd never use Mint again ;)

That makes sense and I hope we do see USAA’s tools get a refresh in the future. From a security and privacy perspective, I feel much more comfortable giving USAA access to my accounts/transactions compared to the assortment of budgeting/expense FinTech companies.

It has them, but I have to say it is a _slog_ to use them compared to early-days Mint. If USAA could give them a coat of polish and a speed boost then I'd drop Mint wholesale.

Most major banks support this using Yodlee as the underlying provider for scraping. The reason it isn't more common is because API access to accounts isn't mandated by law except in Europe (PSD2). Banks do not want to appear to be a commodity (even though they are), therefore they fear and revolt at the thought of aggregators on top of their services.

It took the industry a decade or more to agree that some Oath + OFX was the way to go. I can’t blame them though. Originally Intuit and Microsoft were pitching “their own blackbox server” in Bank network to get this done. Nobody, not even the software companies think about the consumer or his/her safety and security from an open standard. So there is plenty of blame to go around - it is not just the bank with their cobol system and overpaid software consultants.

Mint began as a web-scraping service on top of Yodlee, who literally had tech support “visually debug” your session when your connection doesn’t work. So that spinning wheel is not network slowness - it is like someone putting their sandwich down so they can debug. Ok I am exaggerating a bit - but u get the idea

For budgeting and transaction classification, I know PNC has this. I assume (maybe wrongly) that most major banks have something similar.

Speculating for account syncing, but there is a zillion different provider integrations they would have to maintain for something like a mortgage, and such an account would change hands many times to companies with different APIs.

Simple (and perhaps others) offer the features you asked for in the US, except for syncing other accounts.

Simple, like the other commenter mentioned, is by far the best bank-provided budgeting software, and it's not even close with the others. However, their entire philosophy is based around only using their debit card. I love them, but if you'd prefer to use a credit card, Wealthfront and SoFi offer similar less-powerful tools to track different accounts, predict savings, break up savings, and categorize transactions.

Simple blew it when they removed check mailing and then lied about the reason.

What was the reason they actually removed it? The official answer seemed to be a vague hand-wavy "not many of you were using it and it's better if you use our other budgeting tool and write out a physical check anyway."

The writing out a physical check being better is a clear absurdity as opposed to having checks go out automatically for things like rent.

The real reason is that they charge for the paper checks, whereas the automated service was free, and so was a cost center for them.

If they had admitted that instead of trying to gaslight their customers I’d have respected them more.

Ah, that makes sense. While I suppose I'd have appreciated the honesty if they'd just said that, I'd still have moved back to Bank of America anyway. (I never shut down my BoA account even when Simple was my main checking account, in large part because Simple never added the ability to receive electronic bills and so I was having BoA pay a couple bills automatically out of the Simple account!)

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