Intuit’s $12B Mailchimp acquisition is about expanding its small business focus

At first blush, the $12 billion Intuit-Mailchimp deal might not make a heck of a lot of sense. But people tend to pigeonhole companies, and in this case they might see Intuit as purely a financial software company and Mailchimp as an email marketing firm and nothing more. If that's as far as your perspective goes, the deal is confusing. From a wider lens, however, there's more to both companies than you might think.

Let's start with Intuit. If you go to the company website and scan the product set, it's clearly all about managing finances for consumer and small businesses alike. The latter category appears to be what the company wants to exploit and expand upon with this deal.

Prior to yesterday's news, Intuit's biggest acquisition had been on the consumer side buying Credit Karma for $7.1 billion last year. That deal gave the company's customers a way to access their credit scores outside of the big three reporting companies: Experian, Equifax and TransUnion. Apparently not content with only that transaction, it set its sights on Mailchimp to throw some money at the business side of the house.