Summary: Mint's founder asserts how important these APIs and reliable financial data is to spurring innovation for personal finance solutions.

Intuit is gearing up to open up its application programming interfaces to its financial data service in the United States and Canada for the first time ever.

The idea behind the open APIs is to spur innovation for developing new personal and small business finance applications from third-party developers.

Essentially, Intuit is offering resources to find what could be the next QuickBooks or Mint.com

The APIs will also offer developers with the opportunity to develop new tailored apps for their respective customers based on data from more than 19,000 sources of personal and business banking, brokerage and investment accounts in North America.

It's important to note that Intuit specifies that technology providers can only create solutions based on data given with customers' permission.

Aaron Patzer, founder of the Intuit-owned personal finance platform Mint, emphasized in prepared remarks about the importance of this kind of information being available to developers as access to reliable financial data is "among the biggest challenges developers face when working to innovate."

"These new APIs will accelerate the pace of development well see at startups looking to create new services for both individuals and businesses," Patzer continued.

The small business software provider asserts that this is a big move for the company as it is touted to be a win-win situation for both Intuit and its customer base. Specifically, customers should win thanks to more offerings tailored to them by leveraging data while Intuit is boasting to be improving the cost for developers seeking to access this data.

The open APIs to Intuits financial data service will start rolling out on a limited basis in October through the Intuit Partner Platform. Up until now, this platform has only offered QuickBooks data.

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Intuit opens up APIs to its financial data service in US, Canada