Intuit Is Buying Mailchimp. Here's What Investors Need to Know.

Software giant Intuit (INTU -0.53%) recently announced an agreement to buy email marketing platform Mailchimp. This comes shortly after Intuit's sizable acquisition of Credit Karma. In this Fool Live video clip, recorded on Sept. 30, Fool contributors Toby Bordelon and Matt Frankel discuss the acquisition and whether the company is likely done with big purchases for a while. 

Toby Bordelon: Big news from Intuit is Intuit is buying a company called Mailchimp. You may have heard of Mailchimp. That's a marketing service and email marketing platform. They are focused on small businesses really, they help businesses to website, open an online store, do online appointment scheduling, that sort of thing. For their marketing, they do email marketing, digital ads, social media marketing tools. They also offers some business and data analytics, like surveys, accessing recommendations on marketing campaigns you might want to do.

The deal is meant to boost Intel's offerings to small businesses. It's really meant to compliment QuickBooks like financial accounting platform they have for small businesses. I meant to accelerate two of their big strategic bats in their strategic plan, which is be the center of small business growth and disrupt the small business mid-market.

If you see this slide here from their investor presentation on the acquisitions, you can see how they put Mailchimp and QuickBooks side-by-side, showing how these two together are going to create a more cohesive overall platform with the marketing and customer relationship management that Mailchimp will offer compared to the accounting and financial and HR and payments platform that you can get from QuickBooks. That's really what they're trying to do, create a more robust small business platform. They've been doing acquisitions.

They recently also acquired Credit Karma, which goes more to their consumer-focused. Credit Karma is a personal finance app and platform so they've got two things going on here very recently, Credit Karma boosting this personal stuff, the consumer stuff, Mailchimp with a small business thing. They're changing their business. This is not the Intuit of old which used to own Quicken and no longer does and was really no more for TurboTax, they are expanding beyond that, becoming a more full-service operation.

In some ways, I don't know, it almost seems like they're setting themselves up to be a competitor to Shopify in some ways. Very different businesses, but they are certainly making a portion that small business online tools and customer and finance management side of things. I think I like what they're doing here.

Matt Frankel: Those are two pretty big acquisitions right there. I think Credit Karma was the bigger of the two if I'm not mistaken in terms of dollar wise. Are they running out of money? Do you see Intuit continuing to make bolt-on acquisitions like this or do you see it as getting to pump the brakes and just let things play out as they are now?

Bordelon: I don't think they're necessarily running out of money. It's over $100 billion market cap. Mailchimp is about a $12 billion deal. They are financing some of it with debt. It's about, I think $4.5-$5 billion they're taking on a debt. They can handle that but to your question is do you think they're going on a shopping spree? I think they're going to continue to make acquisitions, but I really hope they put the pause on sizable ones for a while, especially when it might require taking on financing.

Credit Karma isn't even fully integrated, that's still very recent. It's a big company, but I think they need to take stock of what they have, make sure everything is working well together, is the vision playing out before they tackle any other big deal. It's not enough just to make an acquisition, you've got to make that acquisition work. I want to see them do that with both Mailchimp and Credit Karma before they go big again.