The Problem with Dashboards

 The personal finance dashboard has become a well-recognized tool since Mint appeared in the late 00s. That said, it is not the powerhouse that I think many expected it to be. My view on this is informed mostly on the information coming from Mint and the new competitors in the space.

Mint boasted ~15 million users in its marketing materials in 2023. All indications were that the company really had 3-4 million active users (people who accessed their accounts on at least a semi-regular basis). That is a big gap! Many other budgeting and personal finance apps were built in Mint's wake but few ever achieved this scale. Mint was shutdown by Intuit in early 2024 and so there has been a scramble to collect those customers by new and existing players in the space.

January data on SimilarWeb indicates a surge in visits to Mint competitors with Monarch Money, a company founded in 2018-2019 by Mint's former head of product as one of the winners with 3.9 million visitors.

Here the problem...

1. Information is not knowledge - A dashboard full of data is more convenient than a bunch of different platforms that need to be visited one at a time. But, a read-only database of information is not necessarily actionable not is it really any easier to use given the lack of context generally associated with the information presented.

2. DIY - Most budget and personal finance apps fall short for the truly motivated who DIY this with excel. The general flexibility and usability of (still) the best business software created is far superior when the goal is to aggregate data and manipulate it within a closed environment.

3. Work - This is a lot of work. In essence, though there may have been some growth in the overall number of customers using personal budgeting and finance apps over the last 10-15 years since Mint was launched, I don't think anyone would argue that we've seen a significant adoption of these platforms. They are too much work, which is why there was such a huge gap between the number of users at Mint and the active users. I had an account at Mint but I never used it. Once in a while I would go back in to look at what it said and the mere idea of trying to update made me close it back down. I think that for the wealthy, the HNW families as they're called in the finance world, these dashboards are just another set of to-dos that are ultimately not particularly rewarding. 

And why should an interest in personal finance to high financial literacy be the bar? Most people want to do their jobs or sit on social media, or be with their family, etc. The idea that you cannot be financially efficient and successful without being educated and engaged seems like a bar that is too high for many, particularly when the idea is that you have to spend at least a few hours every month slogging through this information even when aggregated.

Dashboards are one step forward but one step too few to be really useful. The user statistics bear that out I think.