Intuit unveils new finance platform Turbo

Intuit is launching a new product that aims to turn TurboTax into a year-around financial services tool, and ultimately a more steady source of Inuit's corporate revenues.

The platform is called Turbo, and Intuit says it allows consumers to build a financial health profile based on their verified IRS-filed income, credit score, and debt-to-income ratio. That data is used in two primary ways.

In one, the data is anonymized and used to benchmark consumers across categories including geography, age, and life stage to provide an idea of where they stand financially before doing things like applying for a credit card, loan, or mortgage.

The data is also used by third-party companies -- including current Turbo partners Discover, Honest Dollar by Goldman Sachs, Quicken Loans, SoFi, and TransUnion -- to deliver hyper-targeted offers based on a person's financial situation. Intuit says the data is still anonymized when used by partners and stresses that consumers can opt in or out of sharing their data for offers.

Eventually, Turbo will let consumers use their stored data as an identifier across a range of financial services, enabling things like single-sign-on access and auto-completion of forms to speed up approvals from loans.

"As a trusted steward of financial data, we have unparalleled insights into the financial outlook of millions of consumers," said Dan Wernikoff, EVP and GM of Intuit's consumer group. "There's a tremendous opportunity to enable customers to unlock this data for the mutual benefit of both our customers and trusted financial partners."

This isn't Intuit's first push into the open-platform space. Last December, Intuit opened TurboTax to developers for the first time ever, which effectively paved the way for today's launch of Turbo.

The company previously gave developers access to its QuickBooks accounting software, resulting in a major focus on open platforms and partnerships to score more small business customers. Turbo is Intuit's attempt to replicate the success of QuickBooks but also to transform altogether how consumers use the tax-prep software.

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