Village Gamer

Intuit wants to know who will create the next great personal or small business finance application and what will they invent? The company is offering developers the opportunity to use one of its key ingredients to innovate and perhaps create the next Quicken, QuickBooks or Mint.com. For the first time in its history, Intuit is opening the application programming interfaces to its financial data service in the U.S. and Canada by giving third-party developers access to one of the key ingredients that has made Quicken, QuickBooks, Mint.com and FinanceWorks some of the world’s most successful financial management programs.

By opening these APIs, Intuit is creating a unique opportunity for third-party developers to build new and innovative financial solutions that perhaps Intuit hasn’t even thought of. This approach also supports Intuit’s strategy to open its rich data ecosystem to create value for consumers and small businesses by enabling third-party contributions.

“We’re committed to unleashing the power of many to continue creating innovative solutions that improve people’s financial lives,” said Brad Smith, Intuit president and CEO. “Quicken was invented at a kitchen table. Mint arose when its founder got too busy to keep up managing his own money. You never know where the next great idea will come from, but we intend to find out. By reaching out to the developer community, we can help identify and solve important customer problems.”

Intuit’s data aggregation and categorization capabilities are the heart and soul of its financial data service. Invisible to customers, it’s the technology that millions of consumers and small businesses use today to securely and seamlessly collect, organize and manage their financial information through Intuit’s various financial management solutions. These solutions leverage Intuit’s highly accurate data categorization feature to provide deep customer insights and support automated delivery of targeted guidance and offers based on the customer’s unique financial situation.

Opening the APIs to this technology will give consumers and small businesses a broader choice of solutions to share their data with and use. Just as the Intuit Partner Platform already offers third-party developers access to QuickBooks data, this new financial data service will enable third-party technology providers to offer their customers access to their own data from more than 19,000 sources of personal and business banking, brokerage and investment accounts in the U.S and Canada.

“Access to reliable financial data is among the biggest challenges developers face when working to innovate,” said Aaron Patzer, who worked 18 hours a day, 7 days a week to create Mint.com. “These new APIs will accelerate the pace of development we’ll see at startups looking to create new services for both individuals and businesses.”

SaveUp, a free rewards game for saving money and reducing debt developed in California, recently piloted Intuit’s financial data services to aggregate financial information from users who opted into its program.

“Intuit’s service is easy to use and helps our customers securely access their data from just about any financial source you can think of through SaveUp,” said Priya Haji, CEO of SaveUp. “We’re then able to use this information to track our customers’ smart financial actions and reward them accordingly. This data service has helped us build a better tool to help people save more and have fun while doing it. To date, more than $100M in savings and $90M in debt payments have been registered in SaveUp from financial institutions across the U.S.”

Open APIs to Intuit’s financial data service will be available on a limited basis in October through the Intuit Partner Platform, with wider availability in December. To maintain the same strong commitment to data privacy and audit standards that are the hallmark of Intuit’s products and services, Intuit will determine which vendors can utilize its financial data service.

“We’re expanding our platform that, to date, has only provided access to QuickBooks data, to now connect consumers and small businesses with their most important financial data through the third-party apps of their choice,” said Alex Chriss, director of the Intuit Partner Platform. “We can’t wait to see the amazing new experiences third-party developers can deliver using our data services.”

Intuit also expects that popular third-party solutions using this financial data service could be incorporated back into its own offerings to benefit the millions of customers using Intuit solutions today. By combining the best of Intuit, financial institutions and third-party solutions, Intuit is offering a foundational service to more rapidly meet the expectations of consumers, small businesses and those who serve them.