Just a quick primer, Credential Vaulting in its simplest terms is storing your private authentication information, you know -- the something you know, something you have, something you share bit, right? Well, storing that with someone you trust is credential vaulting. And I really don’t know if I trust the guy from Mint.com so much, but I do trust Wachovia, Fidelity, PayPal, etcetera, after all, I already have relationships with them, and I kinda HAVE to trust them because they kinda had to trust me to give me the money and accounts that they did. Whether or not they should, well, that’s a different story, and that’s part of the digital persona and portable prosumer profile I’ll blog about later…
Anyway, for each of my financial relationships I have an account user name and password that I use to sign in to them on-line. I’ve been doing this as I’m sure you have for quite some time now. Like since my early adoption of electronic BillPay back in the 90s when I first attempted to realize a “cash-less” Frank. As good as it was, Sears’ Prodigy and BillPay USA weren’t all that. But they did MOSTLY worked, and once you figured out the latencies of mail-enabled physical check payments it seemed to work okay... Even in ’91!
Ok, so, what’s his name at Mint.com realized that a big problem with most 2nd or 3rd party offerings for financial services is the whole trust and integrity thing and stealing from the playbook of FaceBook he realized he didn’t actually NEED your Personally Identifiable or Controlled PCI or HIPAA information to do what he needed. And since he didn’t want to wait for the banks to come up with simple solutions that were elegant and infinitely more attractive and usable than what was out in the marketplace by proprietary software producers like Microsoft and Intuit with their Money and Quicken products, he took matters into his own hands and created the future he wanted.
