Forget software: it’s all about (your) data.

Hyper-growing Financial Management system  provider and Quicken / MS Money challenger Mint recently raised eyebrows announcing their plan to sell anonymized aggregate customer data.  Some reviewers were screaming, we saw bombastic titles like Personal Finance Startup Mint Wants To Sell Your Money Trail – but in reality the news wasn’t earth shattering. You don’t really believe your spending patterns are not dissected – aggregated – analyzed in every possible way and sold by your bank and credit card company, do you? 

So nothing new – but a good opportunity to discuss the role of user data in SaaS business models – and there is more than outright sale of data.

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Tags: aggregate data, benchmarking, business model, data ownership, data privacy, freshbooks, mint, saan, SaaS, xref