Famed as the publisher of both Quicken and TurboTax, business and financial management software company Intuit is aiming to spur third-party developer innovation by opening the APIs to its financial data service in the U.S. and Canada.

NOTE: Recently profiled in a Dr. Dobb's interview, Intuit's chiefs say that its data aggregation and categorization capabilities are built to support the automated delivery of targeted financial guidance based on a user's particular financial situation.

"Quicken was invented at a kitchen table. Mint arose when its founder got too busy to keep up managing his own money. You never know where the next great idea will come from, but we intend to find out. By reaching out to the developer community, we can help identify and solve important customer problems," said Brad Smith, Intuit president and CEO.

The Intuit Partner Platform already offers third-party developers access to QuickBooks data, so this new financial data service will enable third-party technology providers to offer their customers access to their own data from more than 19,000 sources of personal and business banking, brokerage, and investment accounts in the U.S and Canada.

To maintain what it calls its "strong commitment" to data privacy and audit standards and services, Intuit will determine which vendors can utilize its financial data service. Intuit also expects that popular third-party solutions using this financial data service could be incorporated back into its own offerings to benefit the millions of customers using Intuit solutions today.