From Dashboards to Decisions

This writeup is a part of my series where I share about how Finanjo came to be. This is part 2 of the series. Part 1

Once I was clear about the problem, I started asking a deeper question:
why is the difference in financial behaviour between India and Europe so stark?

How do systems in Europe go beyond being information dashboards and actually help people take decisions? And more importantly, how do those decisions turn out to be consistently accurate?

While living in London, I began using a few local personal finance apps. What immediately stood out was not the design or features, but the quality of data they operated on. These apps connected directly with bank accounts and credit cards, fetching real, verified transaction data. They didn’t rely on manual inputs or approximations.

Because the systems had real context about how users earned, spent, borrowed, and saved, they were able to guide real decisions. Not generic advice, but timely, personalised, and actionable nudges rooted in actual behaviour.

Out of curiosity, I explored similar apps across other developed markets and noticed a clear pattern. Every large, successful personal finance platform was built on secure access to verified user data. Over time, this had been enabled by mature data-sharing regulations. In many countries, these regulations had quietly given rise to some of the most valuable fintech businesses.

This made me wonder: why couldn’t India have something similar?

As I dug deeper into global data-sharing frameworks, I realised that India did, in fact, have an answer. Around 2023, I came across the Account Aggregator framework. It was still early, but the idea was exactly what I had been looking for: a secure, consent-based, encrypted system for sharing financial data.

At the time, Account Aggregators were largely being adopted in B2B use cases. Consumer adoption was limited, and data quality and success rates were genuine challenges. But the more I read about the government’s approach and the long-term vision for the ecosystem, the clearer it became that this was not a side project. This was foundational infrastructure.

Account Aggregators were envisioned as a central layer of financial data sharing in India, benefiting banks, businesses, regulators, and most importantly, users. Much like UPI, their true impact would only become visible over time.

I became convinced that the Account Aggregator ecosystem would be as transformative for financial decision-making as UPI was for payments. And that meant this was the right moment to start building.

The idea was simple: use real, verified financial data to understand user context and help people make better decisions with their money. Not by overwhelming them with information, but by guiding action. The goal was to help users build long-term financial discipline, so that their relationship with money feels controlled, predictable, and calm.

That idea eventually became Finanjo.

More in my next post..