Mint Receives $14m in Funding But Still Only In The USA Market, Why? | Hacker News Reader

Mint Receives $14m in Funding But Still Only In The USA Market, Why?

crenk.com

Sounds like opportunity calling.

Mint obviously doesn't want to go through the effort of customizing versions of the software for different markets. (Which, in the financial sector I'd imagine is substantial work) My thought is that they feel there is much more market to win in the US without a similar expenditure.

What an enterprising young person should do is - call them up and offer to do the work for them for a single market. You could take the risk in terms of the full cost of development and negotiate a cut of every user from the country in question.

Unless they can see expansion in the very near future, they should jump all over this deal.

Actually I think it goes deeper than this. I've looked into Mint's operating model in the Canadian market, for example, and we have a lot of privacy laws that simply do not exist in the USA. These privacy laws make it practically illegal to do what Mint does (i.e. collect private information, login on your behalf, and scrape your bank's site).

Yodlee and Wesabe are compatible with the canadian market.

I'm pretty sure all Canadian privacy laws can be worked around with a disclaimer. You just need to tell them what you intend to do and get them to sign off on it. IANAL though.

I'm also NAL, but I think privacy laws are the kind of thing that you can't just disclaim away - you may be willing to give up that information, but if it's illegal for them to collect it it's still illegal.

Nothing is illegal to collect, as long as you disclose. Ergo credit bureaus, insurance companies with SIN's etc.

I believe there is a set time when certain things will be frowned upon (That SIN particularly) but we are currently within an incremental period where it isn't right now.

It would need to offer a french version.

A positive is that there are only 5 banks the majority of the population uses in Canada compared to how many in the US?

It would be great if Mint could move into other markets. However, privacy is always going to be an issue with this type of business. However, at what stage do they think it is worth financially to move into a new market? After Series F of funding? or do the investors want a return in a set time frame?

The answer is easy - When the cost to move into the new market is outweighed by the profits that the new market can generate and there is a need to create new profits.

Netflix made $1.36 billion in revenue last year yet is still only in the US market. Why?

Mint accesses your banking information using a service from Yodlee. I don't believe Yodlee has many partners outside the US and am not aware of a similar vendor with EU coverage.

You got it. Yodlee doesn't support non-US banks; Mint's built on top of Yodlee; ∴ Mint doesn't support non-US banks.

(Full disclosure: I work for Wesabe.)

Whoops! Correction: Yodlee does support non-US banks, including some in Canada, UK, Australia, and some Asian countries.

No idea why Mint doesn't do it. I had always assumed it was because they were share-cropping on Yodlee's architecture.

(Full disclosure: I work for Wesabe, but my snooty attitude is my own. ;)

(And yeah, ⌘⌥T is your friend when it comes to the appropriate typography.)

Excellent answer.

Also, thank you for letting me know there is a ∴ character!

I thought my screen was just dirty! What does it mean?

∴ means therefore.

There are good alternatives to mint, too, like wesabe.com

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