This b-school case study strangely appears to ignore the customers. User and customers are different things for these companies. Mint found a way early on to sell the data it had to financial services companies that wanted to target users. While Mint had to figure out how to take care of users (since they were the product offered to the customers), their ability to find customers (i.e. companies that paid them) set them apart from other solutions and enabled them to make money.

"And finally, it is unclear if the services of Mint or Wesabe were actually making a difference for personal finance"

Amen to that. As well as Mint did, it's still not enough to change Americans' bad fundamental financial habits (speaking from personal and professional experience working on pf apps). There's still plenty of room for PF apps and I'm encouraged to see new solutions that focus on saving or debt reduction.

I never really got the sense that Wesabe was really trying to be successful. I know that sounds odd but the web site was always in disarray and what was being offered was not compelling. It seemed like there was a lot of focus on providing universal bank APIs which sounds cool but is a different business.

Whereas Mint was simply QuickenWeb done (mostly) right.