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 to receive only what you've chosen to enter yourself. We don't connect through a banking API, we don't use aggregators, we don't automatically pull statements from your bank. Financial data enters the system only when you put it there yourself — either by hand, or by importing a statement that you've downloaded from your bank and uploaded. Once we've read the transactions, the file is deleted. Of course, what you've entered is stored on our side — but we don't receive or request anything beyond that. And we don't share it with anyone — not with third parties, not with ad networks.

When you enter a transaction yourself, you decide what it was and put it in your own category. Over time, that attention changes your relationship with money: thoughtless spending gradually becomes deliberate — not because of shame scales or push notifications that other apps use to nudge their users, but as a consequence of the approach itself. Budgets and goals exist in Finamus too, but they show you the picture rather than push you along.

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 — and the analytics flow from there, not from an algorithm's attempts to guess the meaning of a bank statement line.