Internet Banking Services: Intuit and Digital Insight

Last week, Intuit purchased Digital Insight, which provides banking services to approximately 1700 mid-sized banks. Together, both companies will serve more than 5,000 financial institutions, nearly 25 million consumers and nearly 7 million small businesses. The acquisition will combine our customer-driven innovation with Digital Insight's best-in-class distribution and application service provider model. (I am looking forward to learning from them -- especially about ASP operations).

Why the purchase? One reason is to try to sell functionality of our record-keeping software as a service through banks, letting small businesses create, send, and get paid for invoices, all online at a bank's site. With millions of QuickBooks customers, we think we have some insight inot small business' needs. We admit, though, there's always more we can learn. (Any suggestions on how to gain more insight into their needs?)

We learned from our tax return business how quickly packaged software can move to a Web service. Last year for the first time, more people used the online version of our Turbo Tax web service than the desktop version.

Like a lot of companies, especially in the small business space, we are looking at how we can leverage the web better. Today's Internet banking's customer base consists of 35 million households and is growing at a double-digit clip... and becoming more and more mainstream.

So, we are doing our research on this growing industry...doing our research about the evolving Internet banking industry..... Any advice for us? Any treands you suggest we follow? Any resources we can learn from? Any research you think we should do?

Comments

[Prasad]

Thanks for the info scott. Very interesting.