Abhishek Tiwari

Yes, that is the recipe for making Mojito or Mint Julep, depending on whatever you are into. No, I am not making this a cocktail friendly blog, it was just my cutesy way to discuss some feature recommendations for Mint, the new personal finance service. I wrote about them few weeks back, when they had launched. I had rave reviews on their offering and encouraged my readers to try them out. No wonder, they won the TechCrunch 40 award.

This post however takes a different angle. I have been regularly using Mint for past month or so. I am what you call the repeat customer, using it twice a week on average. The reason I stuck was due to the fact that I have been looking for such a service for a long time. I had nbeen a Quicken user for sometime but left it while moving to Mac. Apart from their crappy mac UI, their software in general is pretty complex. I couldn’t see myself using it twice a week.

Anyways after using Mint over past few weeks, I have some recommendations (the Sugar and Rum, if you will). Hopefully the team there can digest these and incorporate in a later release. I am not pointing out any obvious bugs here, only feature recommendations as a regular user.

e-Bills and Issue Payments

Like most people, I would like to use Mint as the single consolidated service I go to perform all my personal financial transactions. As of now I use it to monitor my spending across various accounts. However I still end up going to my bank’s site for bills and issuing payments. In other cases I have to go to the utilities or credit card sites for paying balances.

This is an obvious feature. In order to truly become a single service for handling all personal finances, Mint has to incorporate these elements. e-Bills may take time, unless they find a partner network. However issuing payments should be integrated right away.

I would love to see payments on this service, as it can allow me to select, which account to pay from. This is kinda like opening your wallet and choosing, which card to pay with. Only in this case you will have much more information about the cards/accounts, thus assisting you in making a better financial decesion.

Expand Spending Trends View

I love this view as it provides me a great insight into my expenses. It also does a great job of comparing my expenses to past activity. This helps to understand if I am spending more in a certain area compared to past months. However it needs to be expanded further. For example clicking the pie chart should take the user into relevant transactions. This will be very helpful as the users can get in depth understanding of the expense, which factors into the big picture.

The goal of the trend screen should be to offer in-depth understanding of where their money is going. So ideally a user should be able to drill into any level detail they want. The implementation could be like Pivot tables in excel, where clicking on an element of a graph takes you to the relevant data points.

Integrate “Ways to Save” information with spending trends

This is tied to the earlier recommendation and has a potential for elevating the value to the next level. I frequently browse my spending trends to see where my money is going. While monitoring this activity the service can help me save money. For example if I am browsing my expenses on utilities and looking at overall trends, the service should prompt the way to save in this view itself.

As the spending trends view, is a realistic view of my budget in action, it will be great to see ways to optimize it.

Enable tighter relationships between various accounts and cards

I have few bank accounts and multiple credit cards. I use my checking account to pay for the card balances and periodically transfer money to the savings account. Currently these transactions are tagged simply as “Transfers”, which has no value to me whatsoever.

The service should identify that the transaction is around moving money from one account to the other or payment of a known card. This way, it can tie together these transactions and reflect the flow of money in a better fashion. The service can also consolidate this activity down to a single transaction instead of having multiple line items.

Budget and Alerts

Mint can implement this in a very simple fashion. Based on past expense data, it should allow users to set budgets for a particular category. For example, if I spend $500 in restaurants every month, I should be able to set a budget of something lower than that, say $400.

Now by itself it may not have too much value. However combining with the “Alerts” feature can drive tremendous value to the user. The service should notify me on SMS or Email once I am getting close to my budget. For example if it notices that I have already spent $350 for the month at restaurants, it should send me an alert me that I am getting close to the budget.

This can be applied to any categories within the service. This feature really ties into the daily spending process and allows users to make better decisions.

Mobile Phone Access

Many banks are foraying into this space, with WAP sites or downloadable clients. This is probably lower priority for now. However I don’t have to explain the value of having one’s financial information right in their palm. This is something which should be looked at in long term. Offering mobile access will potentially make the service well rounded and will in turn get loyal customers.

So Aaron and team, I hope you guys find this valuable and can incorporate into the service. Hopefully these are good ideas, which will probably drive additional value to the service.

Share This