Financia - Personal Finance Console with AI Cashflow Insights
AI-Native Personal Finance & Budget Tracker
Built a personal finance dashboard that ingests transactions across accounts, attributes spend by category, surfaces AI cashflow insights, and runs a live budget tracker with goal setting - shipped from clickable AI prototype to production in 10 weeks.
Most of our work is under NDA. Per agreement, we can share the work but not the company details - all names and identifying information shown here have been changed.
Impact
1 week scope, 2 weeks clickable AI prototype, 7 weeks production build with PSD2 account aggregation.
Income, expenses and net cash flow rendered live across all linked accounts with category attribution.
Smart insights name cause and suggest action - 'Dining spend up 34%, $62 above your average'.
Financial health score combines savings rate, debt ratio, runway, and behaviour into one signal.
The Problem
Financia's users had multiple bank accounts, scattered spend, and no consistent view of cashflow or budget - and existing personal-finance apps either looked like spreadsheets or were too aggressive with their nudges to be trustworthy.
Our Solution
We delivered a single dashboard that ingests transactions via PSD2, attributes spend by category, runs a live budget tracker with goals, and surfaces AI insights that name cause and suggest action - validated through a clickable AI prototype before any production code.
The Challenge: Cashflow Without Confusion
Personal finance UX gets two things wrong: too clinical (looks like a spreadsheet) or too pushy (every screen wants you to upgrade). Financia's users wanted clarity without either.
Account Aggregation Across Banks
PSD2 connectors return transactions in inconsistent shapes. Reconciliation, deduplication and categorisation had to happen server-side without showing the user the mess.
Categorisation That Holds Up
Auto-categorisation is wrong often enough that users stop trusting it. We needed a model that explained itself and let the user override quickly.
Insights That Drive Action
Static charts don't change behaviour. Users wanted insights that name cause ('dining spend up 34%') and suggest a one-tap fix.
GDPR + BaFin Compliance
Operating in Germany meant strict data-residency, account-aggregation licensing, and consent flows under GDPR + BaFin oversight.
Our Approach: 3 Phases in 10 Weeks
Discovery & Scope
Week 1: embedded with Financia's product and data teams to map every flow - onboarding, account linking, daily dashboard, budget setup, goal tracking - and the consent and disclosures required under GDPR + BaFin.
AI-Driven Clickable Prototype
Weeks 2–3: built a fully interactive prototype with mocked PSD2 data, AI insights and budget tracker, so the team could click through every flow and copy-iterate before any production code.
Production Build & Launch
Weeks 4–10: shipped the production console with PSD2 account aggregation, categorisation engine, budget tracker, goal setting, and the AI insights surface - plus a financial health score that summarises the whole picture.
Why It Works: Outcome-Based Differentiation
Speed to Value
Most personal-finance platforms take 9–18 months to ship to production. We delivered a clickable AI prototype in 2 weeks and a live console in 10.
AI-First Prototyping
Every flow - account linking, categorisation override, budget setup, AI insight delivery - was validated in the prototype before any production code touched a real bank API.
Single Accountable Team
Design, AI prototyping, PSD2 integration, and front-end engineering under one roof - no handoff between an app studio and a banking-aggregator vendor.
Outcome-Based Engagement
Financia paid for milestones and live functionality, not hours. Our incentives were tied directly to shipping a console that users actually opened weekly.
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