Private Finance on QVAC: No Bank Linking, Ever

Almost every modern budgeting app asks for the same thing on day one: link your bank.

You hand over your banking login to a third-party aggregator, it pulls your transactions into a cloud, and the app reads them from there. It's convenient. It's also the single biggest privacy trade you'll ever make with a piece of software — your entire financial life, continuously synced to servers you don't control.

Local Money (coming soon) is being built the other way around. There will be no bank linking, and there never will be. Here's why we made that choice, what you'll give up, and what you'll get.

What "bank linking" actually is

When an app links your bank, it usually routes through an aggregator — Plaid is the best-known — that stores credentials or tokens and maintains a live connection to your accounts. Your transactions flow into that company's infrastructure, then into the app's cloud, then to your screen.

Two copies of your financial history now exist off your device: one at the aggregator, one at the app. Both are attractive targets. Both have privacy policies that can change. Both are places your data can leak from, be analyzed, or be handed over.

For a lot of people that trade is fine. For anyone who'd rather their money stay their business, it's a lot to give up for the convenience of automatic sync.

How Local Money gets your data instead

We're keeping the useful part — seeing your whole financial picture in one place — and removing the server. Your data will get into Local Money three ways, all on-device:

Import a bank statement file. Download the statement your bank already offers (most US banks do), and Local Money will read it directly on your device. One-way, no live connection, no stored credentials.
Import from another app. Moving from Mint, Copilot, Monarch, or YNAB? You'll be able to bring your export in and pick up where you left off.
Enter it yourself. Manual entry, receipt scanning, or voice — say "twelve bucks on lunch" and the on-device AI will log it.

No banking password will ever leave your device, because you'll never give us one. There's nothing to link, because there's no server on the other end of the link.

"But isn't manual entry a pain?"

It would be, if you were typing everything into a spreadsheet. That's exactly where the on-device AI will earn its place:

Receipt OCR will read a photographed receipt and turn it into a categorized transaction — on the device.
Voice logging will let you speak an expense and have it entered, hands-free.
Automatic categorization will learn how you sort your spending, locally.
Ask your money will let you chat with your own finances — "how much did I spend on groceries last month?" — with the model running on your phone, not in a cloud.

Statement import will handle the bulk in one shot; the AI will handle the day-to-day quickly. You'll get most of the convenience of auto-sync without the standing connection to your bank.

What you actually get by dropping the bank connection

Nothing to breach. There will be no server holding your transactions, so there will be no financial database of yours to leak.

Nothing to change its mind. No privacy policy that quietly updates to allow "analytics partners" access to your spending.

Nothing to link, nothing to revoke. No aggregator holding a live key to your accounts.

It will work offline. Because the intelligence runs on your device, your dashboard and your "ask your money" chat will work with no connection at all.

You'll trade continuous automatic sync for a private financial life that lives only on your device. We think that's the right trade for the most sensitive data most people own — and if you disagree, that's genuinely fine; plenty of great apps make the other choice.

How this is even possible

On-device finance used to mean giving up the smart features — the categorization, the OCR, the chat — because those needed a server. Local Money will run them locally using QVAC, Tether's open-source on-device AI engine. The model will come to your data; your data will never go to the model.

That's the whole thesis of our studio, localhost/AI: the most personal software you own shouldn't live in someone else's cloud.

Simple or envelope — your call

Local Money will offer two budgeting styles: Simple, in the Copilot Money spirit, for people who want a clean net-worth-and-spending picture; and Envelope, in the YNAB spirit, for people who want to give every dollar a job. Same private, on-device foundation underneath either one.

Local Money is private personal finance with no bank linking, coming soon from localhost/AI, built on QVAC. Your money will stay on your device. Learn more.