Three words that explain Intuit's rationale: "Free tax returns".
They are stopping a potentially existential threat to Intuit's TurboTax cash cow.
They are stopping a potentially existential threat to Intuit's TurboTax cash cow.
I'm not seeing how this is much of an argument for them to buy CreditKarma.
The argument for them to buy it is they then get:
- access to all of that credit report information
- access to the savings account customers
- the linked car and driver information
- more free tax customers to try and upsell audit protection and to try and push returns on their debit card to
- mortgage and other loan shopping data from everyone that's used the mortgage comparison
- potentially as much as 13 years of weekly credit data on given individuals
etc.
Just this year they were ordered to make that products slightly easier to find, but they can still do most of their tricks to direct people away from it.
Credit Karma is an existential threat because it makes free filing easy to find.
I suspect after this deal completes, the CK free file product will start having all the same dark patterns and TurboTax's free product.
And Googling "turbotax free" brings the page right up as the top ad return and as the first search result.
This is exactly the problem. They're not nearly 100% free. It's only free if you manage to navigate their byzantine, dark-pattern-ridden series of questions that effectively ask "Do you want to use the results of the last 12 pages you entered and try to save with TurboTax Deluxe or delete that half hour of work?" and confusingly named products like "Guaranteed Free", "Free Edition", "Start for Free" (all not actually free).
TurboTax makes more than a billion dollars every year. Of course they'll want to squash competitors who threaten to harm that cash cow.
Once you are in the paid versions, the upsell push is relentless. But not in the (actual) free edition, at least that was my experience this year.