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Big news out of the financial industry today. First reported by Silicon Alley Insider, and more recently confirmed by Mint CEO, Intuit – best known for Quicken, QuickBooks and TurboTax – has agreed to acquire Mint for $170 million.

Mint, the fastest growing free online personal finance service, launched two years ago and has been picking up steam ever since. In 2007, it won the TechCrunch40 and walked away with $50,000. Prior to today’s agreement, it had raised $32 million in three venture rounds.

While Mint was certainly innovative, the key to it’s success can be attributed to doing business the only way it knew how:

“So that’s the Mint story. $0 to $170m in three years flat. While everyone else was doing social media, music, video or the startup de jour, we tried to ground ourselves in what any business should be doing: solve a real problem for people. Make something that is faster, more efficient, cheaper (in this case free), and innovate on technology or business model to make a healthy revenue stream doing it.” – Aaron Patzer, CEO and founder of Mint.com

It’ll be interesting to see how Intuit implements Mint, as it appears that Intuit plans on keeping it’s Quicken online.  Overall, this deal made complete sense for Intuit. It was sitting on a boatload of cash with the prospect of zero growth. If you can’t beat ‘em, buy ‘em.

Your thoughts?

UPDATE:

Some recent updates to Mint’s iPhone app, Editing & Passcode