Personal finance intelligence is big business. Mint.com sold for $170!

TechCrunch have announced that Intuit will acquire Mint for $170 million.  Mint.com launched 2 years ago and provides a free online service which aggregates your bank account information into one more manageable interface.   Mint earns commission based on recommending financial services products to it's users that can offer genuine savings to them.  Because Mint are independent of these suppliers and have access to your entire financial portfolio they are able to analyse your expenditure and offer cutting edge ways to manage your money, track expenditure and save better. 

Their huge growth in users might have been helped by the global economic downturn but we think that this growth will continue as more personalised finance services become available to consumer and business alike.   Gone is the day when it was impractical and too time consuming to hold bank accounts with different institutions.   Mint.com solve that problem. Mint enables users to access multiple accounts via one online interface, with just one password.  It collates all of the account information in a meaningful way, drawing important conclusions such as 'can i afford to buy that new car?'.    Mint.com educates consumers by analysing their financial portfolio and offering appropriate savings products.  They give you choices. Intelligent, worthwhile, independent choices.   

90% foreign currency exchange in the UK moves through the main banking institutions.  Why is this?  Perhaps because there hasn't always been a choice. Or if their has been a choice it was too much effort or  too time consuming  to be worthwhile.  The sale of Mint.com proves that individuals and small business are looking again at how they bank and questioning how things have always been done.  Here at PeepEx we wan't to give people and business's a choice, to empower them with the information they need to make the most intelligent and profitable choice at that.   We're not going to change the world, but we can offer people choice and real world savings on their currency exchange. 

We're in the Guardian today!

After attending Minibar last friday, We got talking to Victor Keegan from the Guardian.  He was very enthusiastic and interested in what were doing here at Peepex.    Comparing us to Zopa but for currency exchange.  Vic was kind enough to write about our meeting in todays Guardian in his weekly column.    Please go and buy the guardian today if you can or read it here.

We also met Todd Veri from Midpoint and Transfer,  who are also developing a peer to peer currency exchange platform.   It's great to see other people in the same space, it's a huge market and other great companies such as Midpoint can only help build awareness of the huge potential savings consumers can achieve by not using their banks.

The team here at Peepex are really excited about our product and it's great to see other people excited too.   We have had enough of being ripped off by banks and I think a lot of other people are too.   These old tired institutions can't compete with small agile,  innovative and low cost companies such as ours.  The retail sector embraced online in the early days of the web with some incredible success stories (Ebay, Amazon et al) but the financial services sector has been dragging it's heals for years.   But perhaps now we're ready for change, the technology has matured, people are comfortable shopping and banking online.  Perhaps now we can start to rethink how we bank and how we exchange currency?

Victor's article concludes "I wouldn't be surprised if several world-class companies emerged from the startups I encountered that night", we intend to be one of those.

A new way to exchange money

Over at www.peepex.com were trying to change the way you exchange currency.  Were going to launch a P2P (peer to peer) currency exchange platform that will give you huge savings compared with your banks rates.