Why Finamus doesn't connect to your bank

A finance app connected to your bank sees everything. That's not an exaggeration: every transaction over the chosen period ends up on its servers. Where you send money, who you rent from, what your partner pays for, which medications you buy at the pharmacy, which clinic you go to, where you have lunch every workday, where you go on a Friday night. This isn't a side effect — it's the whole point of the connection: to build analytics and categorise spending automatically, the app needs to see everything.

Most people don't think about this. Ads and reviews talk about convenience: connect your bank, forget about manual entry, everything is calculated for you. Almost no one makes it as far as the terms of service.

The price of that convenience is that your financial life ends up on the servers of a third party — the service you decided to use, and often an intermediate aggregator through which that service connects to banks. Your financial picture gains at least one more owner besides you and the bank. What happens next depends on the honesty and stability of every link in the chain. The service can be acquired, change its policy, hand over data on request, leak after an attack. These are ordinary scenarios, and as a user, you aren't asked.

Financial data is a special class. A half-year bank statement reveals far more than it seems at first glance. Family composition and the nature of relationships — from transfers between people. Health status — from pharmacies and clinics. Religious and political views — from donations and subscriptions. Habits, hobbies, your relationship with alcohol, trips abroad, where you work and where you actually live — all of it can be pulled from a routine statement without much effort. Not by an algorithm, not by analytics — just by a person who gains access to it for ten minutes.

That's why we designed Finamus so that we don't have access to your transactions on the bank's side. We don't connect through a banking API, we don't use aggregators, we don't receive or request statements. Financial data enters the system only when you put it there yourself. And we don't pass it to third parties, don't sell it, and don't use it for advertising.

When you record a transaction yourself, you name it in your own words, place it in your own category, see it in the moment it happens. Over time, that attention changes your relationship with money: thoughtless spending gradually becomes deliberate — without limits, reminders or gamification. Other apps try to produce the same effect through shame scales and budget overrun warnings; for us it emerges naturally, as a consequence of the approach itself.

This setup has a few practical advantages beyond privacy. Finamus works with any bank and in any country — and also with cash, gift cards, transfers between friends, foreign currency abroad and everything that automatic tracking usually has no category for. If your bank changes its API tomorrow, shuts down its integration, or you move to another country and open new accounts — none of it affects how Finamus works: we have no external infrastructure that can break. Categories are built the way you understand them — not the way they're labelled by an algorithm that has never been in your apartment and doesn't know who you transfer money to.