What's cooking at Intuit

Online trading has seen better days, but that's not holding back Intuit. Last month the financial software pioneer hooked up with New Yorkbased discounter Muriel Siebert & Co. to launch Quicken Brokerage, a service that's integrated with Intuit's popular personal financial management system. "We are all about solving unsolved problems; consumers have those problems whether markets are frothy or not," says Scott Cook, who co-founded Intuit in 1984 and now serves as chairman of its executive committee. Quicken Brokerage's big selling point: tools based on Intuit's other best-selling software, TurboTax, which lets customers test tax implications before they trade. "Any investor who pays taxes should want this," Cook asserts. Siebert chairwoman Muriel Siebert, best known for becoming the first female New York Stock Exchange member in 1967, needs just a fraction of Quicken's 15 million U.S. users to multiply her customer base, which she estimates to be "a couple of hundred thousand." Like Cook, she puts a positive spin on the timing for the new service. "It's not the best time, but it's a good time. If we did this in 1998'99, we'd probably have had a hard time keeping up with account openings."