Intuit’s $ 12 billion acquisition of Mailchimp aims to expand focus on small businesses – TechCrunch

At first glance, the $ 12 billion Intuit-Mailchimp deal may not make much sense. But people tend to categorize businesses and in this case they might think of Intuit as a financial software company and Mailchimp as an email marketing company and nothing more. If that’s as far as your point of view goes, the deal is confusing. From a broader perspective, however, there is more to both companies than you might think.

Let’s start with Intuit. If you go to the company’s website and scan the product package, it’s clearly about managing the finances of consumers and small businesses. This latter category appears to be what the company wants to tap and develop with this deal.

Prior to yesterday’s news, Intuit’s biggest acquisition was on the consumer side, the $ 7.1 billion purchase of Credit Karma last year. The deal gave the company’s clients a way to access their credit scores outside of the three major reporting companies: Experian, Equifax and TransUnion. Apparently not happy with this transaction, he set his sights on Mailchimp to throw money on the business side of the house.