Mint: late-stage adversarial interoperability demonstrates what we had (and what we lost)

In 2006, Aaron Patzer founded Mint. Patzer had grown up in the city of Evansville, Indianaa place he described as "small, without much economic opportunity"but had created a successful business building websites. He kept up the business through college and grad school and invested his profits in stocks and other assets, leading to a minor obsession with personal finance that saw him devoting hours every Saturday morning to manually tracking every penny he'd spent that week, transcribing his receipts into Microsoft Money and Quicken.

Patzer was frustrated with the amount of manual work it took to track his finances with these tools, which at the time weren't smart enough to automatically categorize "Chevron" under fuel or "Safeway" under groceries. So he conceived on an ingenious hack: he wrote a program that would automatically look up every business name he entered into the online version of the Yellow Pagesconstraining the search using the area code in the business's phone number so it would only consider local merchantsand use the Yellow Pages' own categories to populate the "category" field in his financial tracking tools.

It occurred to Patzer that he could do even better, which is where Mint came in. Patzer's idea was to create a service that would take all your logins and passwords for all your bank, credit union, credit card, and brokerage accounts, and use these logins and passwords to automatically scrape your financial records, and categorize them to help you manage your personal finances. Read the rest