Budvisor

Inspiration

Want to save some money and have full control over your budget, but don't know where to start? Let Budvisor do the work for you!

What it does

Budvisor is an intelligent beast that scrapes through your transaction history and creates your spending profile. Using this profile, it suggests you the most relevant offers that can help you save money and even get some extra cash. Offers and promotions, saving suggestions, investment opportunities - Budvisor got it all covered! Oh, and did we mention that all offers are personalised? So, no generic marketing bullshit, but just what's right for you. Under the hood, advertisers, financial and insurance institutions get an opportunity to target customers like never before. In return for your spending data you get a powerful tool to manage your budget and expenses.

Available features:

Automatic categorisation
Transaction visualisation

Planned features:

Spending goals and limits
Future spendings forecasts
Expense splitting capability / shared budget

How we built it

Meteor framework was chosen in order to minimize the setup time. The initial intention was to query the Nordea Open Banking API, but the idea was abandoned later for the reasons described in the next section. In the end we generated the transaction data ourselves to have it closely match the realistic spending behavior.

Challenges we ran into

At first, having Node.js talk to the Open Banking API was nearly impossible and in the end we had to send requests through cURL. While Open Banking API is good for demonstrating how the whole thing works, the transaction data that we got back from it wasn't enough to make anything sensible. On top of that, it was absolutely random which made it hard to draw a parallel with the actual spending patterns (~10k transactions a month, ~7 payment destinations). For that reason we chose to simulate everything.