Money Saving and Personal Finance Assistant App

Solution Overview

We started with building a classical expense tracker MVP. Once a user registers and links their bank and credit cards to their personal account, the app automatically starts analyzing transaction details, tracking and categorizing the user’s income and expenses, and visualizing data with graphs and charts.

The app allows users to set saving goals and track progress daily, whatever their objectives may be: budgeting for their next vacation, paying off credit card balances, saving up for a house or retirement. Users can also set up automated transfers of predetermined sums of money to specific savings and brokerage accounts.

One of the key differentiators of the app is the gamification functionality that helps users develop “good spending habits.”

The app analyzes and categorizes a user’s spending and identifies “bad” habits (e.g., smoking, junk food, etc.) in their spending. The app then invites the user to meet the challenge, for example, of “cutting down on junk food” or “setting a monthly budget for cigarettes”, which the user can either accept or decline. To keep users motivated to stick with the challenges they choose to accept, the app charges a fee when the user fails the challenge. Apart from these penalties, the app is free to use.

Monetization functionality will come in a later iteration.

The app also has a number of social features that easily enable viral marketing. Users are able to invite and challenge their friends and also have the option to share their “Challenge accepted” results.

Technical Solution Highlights

The system consists of native iOS and Android apps, along with a web-based admin panel and the backend server. The application uses the Plaid aggregator to access users’ accounts. We chose Plaid for the following reasons:

• It provides access to users’ transaction data, once they links their bank cards to an app account.
• It is supported by nearly every bank and financial institution in the United States.
• It is extremely secure, applying an advanced tokenization system for transactions and the sharing of sensitive financial data.

To comply with with Plaid’s extensive security requirements, the app uses role-based access controls, multi-factor authentication, and encryption, in addition to other security measures. Additional monitoring and data protection is provided by the AWS infrastructure, which was chosen by our team to run the app in the cloud.

Results

Itexus delivered a ready-to-use mobile app with a core set of expense tracker functions and gamification features.

The team is currently working on the second version of the app, creating a full-scale virtual personal finance assistant that includes a tax calculator and bill payment service, an investment advisor that allows users to automatically create a stock portfolio depending on their investment profile, and the ability to automatically invest savings into a 401(k) or IRA brokerage account.