While we don’t monitor third-party account aggregators like Mint, Wesabe and Cake Financial nearly as closely as we do our financial institution coverage groups, we do like to keep an eye on developments among those popular personal finance services. We receive a number of periodic emails from aggregation services where we’ve established accounts - financial summaries, account alerts, new discussions, etc. We had one in our inbox recently from Mint saying how much they’ve missed our visits and encouraging us to check in. While this was definitely not a unique or surprising communication, we found this interesting in light of a few trends among aggregators and financial services in general.

To entice us back, the email mentioned how Mint continues to roll out new features, notably for investment and retirement accounts. Improving the retirement planning insights available through Mint definitely doesn’t hurt in building and maintaining a user base. But in particular, these new developments speak to the issue of actually turning a profit from a free aggregation service.

Where Mint actually makes money is from sponsors, who pay when they gain new clients through Mint’s unbiased recommendations. And we’d say there’s a decent chance users will take advantage of new retirement account offers. For instance, the IRA Rollover Advisor functions much like Mint’s signature Ways To Save comparison tools. It compares features and special offers from different IRA providers and estimates the financial benefit of a rollover. The key difference is that the IRA Rollover Advisor can return a much more eye-catching number than Ways to Save - over $60,000 of additional cash at retirement, rather than just $50 of savings for a new credit card (based on the defaults we see with our accounts). Those kinds of numbers should definitely get users thinking about retirement, and specifically about those sponsors.