Why we connect to your bank read-only
What open banking access actually gives us, what it deliberately does not, and how to verify any provider that asks for it.
Asking someone to connect their bank account is the largest trust request a personal finance product can make. It deserves a plain explanation rather than a badge that says secure.
What the connection is
Flowarden uses a regulated open banking provider to read transaction data. You authenticate directly with your bank, on your bank's own domain, and the bank issues a token that grants read access to the accounts you selected. We never see your banking credentials, because they are never entered on our surface. There is nothing for us to store and nothing for us to lose.
The access is read-only. The token we hold cannot initiate a payment, cannot move money between your accounts, and cannot change any account detail. This is not a policy we apply to ourselves — it is the scope of the permission itself. Even if our systems were fully compromised, the attacker would inherit the ability to read transaction descriptions, not to spend anything.
What we actually read
Transaction date, amount, merchant descriptor, and account identifier. That is what recurring-charge detection requires: to notice that the same merchant takes a similar amount at a regular interval, and to tell you before it happens again.
What we do not do with it
We do not sell transaction data. We do not share it with advertisers or data brokers. We do not build profiles for third parties. Our revenue comes from subscriptions and concierge work, which is a deliberate choice: a business model funded by selling behavioural data is structurally incapable of promising it will not.
Your controls
You can revoke access from your bank's own app at any time, without telling us, and the connection dies immediately. You can also disconnect from within Flowarden, which deletes the token and the stored transaction records associated with it. Open banking consent additionally expires on a fixed schedule and must be renewed by you — an expiry we consider a feature rather than friction.
How to check any provider that asks for bank access
Ask these five questions of us or anyone else.
Do you ever see my banking credentials? The answer must be no, and the login must happen on the bank's own domain.
Is the access read-only, or does it include payment initiation? If it includes payments, ask why.
Who is the regulated provider behind the connection, and are they authorised in my jurisdiction? The name should be given without hesitation.
Is transaction data sold, shared, or used to train anything outside my own account? Get this in writing in the privacy policy, not in a support reply.
What happens to my data when I disconnect or close the account? A specific deletion behaviour, not a vague retention statement.
Using Flowarden without a bank connection
You can. Adding subscriptions manually gives you renewal reminders, price-change tracking, and the calendar, without any bank link at all. Detection is the only thing you give up. We would rather you use the product on terms you are comfortable with than agree to a connection you have doubts about.