This directly from Aaron Patzer, the founder of Mint.com, whom I spoke with this afternoon.

“The intent is not to become a bank,” Patzer told me. “We will not take deposits. We will not offer bill pay. We will not transfer funds between accounts. We [simply] want to make it easier to help you set up that account.”

Bank Innovation had previously reported that Mint.com will “become a bank,” but that’s not what will happen. The Goals function requires Mint.com users to assign each Goal to a particular bank account. As Patzer explained, if a user had a retirement goal, that goal could be matched to, say, the user’s Roth IRA account.

Assigning goals to some bank accounts is “easy,” he said, citing accounts from ING Direct and Ally Bank as examples. “Other banks make this more difficult,” he said. Those banks require Mint users to go off the site, which Mint does not want to require. “So one of the possibilities to take the work out is to either integrate with ING or Ally or another bank to allow you, right from Mint, to create the savings account to link to a goal,” Patzer said. He said Mint might even facilitate an ACH transfer to fund that new account.

Patzer emphasized that this account creation option is all in the very early stages of development. I asked Patzer which bank or banks with which Mint might create this program and he said, “whichever bank that had the easiest APIs to deal with.” He added that this “could be multiple banks.”

The big question mark seems to be Intuit’s FinanceWorks online banking platform that could give Mint entry into more than 5,000 financial institutions. Patzer acknowledged that Mint might facilitate account creation through FinanceWorks, but added that “nothing has been decided.”