Money saving and personal finance assistant app

Project Background

Silicon Valley startup contacted Itexus with a request to develop their core product – personal finance assistant/money saving app for them. Initially, the client had only a rough idea so he was looking for a proactive partner who could collaborate, exchange ideas and elaborate the concept into solution architecture and then develop the product and help launch it to the market.
The client has chosen Itexus because of its FinTech specialization, vast experience with similar finance projects

Solution Overview

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

The app allows setting saving goals: budgeting for the next vacation, paying off credits, saving for a house or retirement and tracking the progress daily. The app can be set up to automated transfer a predefined sum of money from a certain income/expenditure to a saving or brokerage account.

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

The app analyses and categorizes the user’s spendings and defines what “bad” habits (smoking, junk food, etc.) are typical of them. The app invites the user to meet the challenge, for example, “Cutting down on junk food” or “Setting a monthly budget for cigarettes”, which the user can accept or decline. To keep the users motivated the app will charge a fee in case the user fails the challenge. Apart from these penalties, the app is free to use.

Monetization functionality will come later.

The app has a number of social features to enable viral marketing by allowing the user to invite and challenge his friends and share the “Challenge accepted” results.

Technical Solution Highlights

The system consists of a native iOS and Android apps, along with a web-based admin panel and the backend server.

The application uses the Plaid aggregator to access user’s accounts.

• It provides access to user’s transaction data, once he/she links their bank cards with an app account.
• It is supported by nearly any bank and financial institution in the USA.
• It is extremely secure, applying an advanced tokenization system for transactions and sharing of sensitive financial data.

To be in line with the aggregator’s extra-high security requirements, the app uses in place role-based access controls, multi-factor authentication, encryption and other security measures.

The AWS infrastructure, chosen by our team for running the app in the cloud, provides additional monitoring and data protection tools.

Results

As a result, Itexus has 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 this money saving app turning it into a full-scale virtual personal finance assistant, empowered with a tax calculator and bill payment service, investment adviser allowing to automatically create a stock portfolio depending on the client’s investment profile and automatically invest savings via a 401k or IRA brokerage account.