Lifehacker.com recently announced Mint.com has added investment tracking to its list of features. A highly requested and attractive feature, investment tracking should dramatically increase this service provider’s already rapid adoption in the market.
Mint.com is a free online personal finance management application that users can configure to track expenses by aggregating transactions from checking, savings, and credit card accounts. Now that investment accounts have been added, Mint.com is getting closer to a complete personal finance product to compete with the likes of computer-based (as opposed to web-based) Quicken and Microsoft Money. Note that Quicken does have an ASP-based product of Quicken Online, free for 30 days, then $2.99/month thereafter.
Still on my list of things to do is examine the power of Yodlee and its similar free application, Yodlee MoneyCenter.
Now that aggregation is becoming more readily accessible to the masses, one has to wonder what it might do to the perceived value of consolidated reports provided by most financial advisory firms. Will consumers begin to show unwillingness to pay more than a 1% annual advisory fee due to the ability to receive consolidated reports for free elsewhere? Maybe, maybe not. Mint.com and Yodlee still require configuration and maintenance to some degree, so there still is value in avoiding the troubleshooting of free web-based software.
