Will NBU See All My Financial Data? Here's the Honest Answer

Almost every time I tell someone about NBU, the first thing they ask isn't about features. It's some version of "so you'll have access to all my financial data?" It comes up before pricing, before what the app even does. People have been burned enough that they lead with the worry now.

So let me answer it directly, because the answer is the thing I'm most proud of.

No. NBU never logs into your bank. We never ask for your banking password, and there's nowhere in the app to even enter it. That's not a setting you switch on for extra privacy. It's how the whole thing is built, and it doesn't change.

Then how does NBU see anything?

You show it. You export a CSV or PDF statement from your bank yourself and import it. You pick which accounts, which months, how much you want to share. Nothing lands in NBU that you didn't hand it.

That's a little more work than clicking "connect my bank," and I know it. It's also the entire point. The import is a door you open, not one a middleman keeps a key to.

What does NBU actually store, then?

The transactions you import, and not much else. They live in your own account, walled off from every other account by row-level security, so nobody else's login can reach your data and yours can't reach theirs. It's encrypted at rest and in transit.

Before our assistant Valerie ever reads a transaction to categorize it, we strip the parts that identify you personally: names, account numbers, card numbers. She works with the description, the amount, and the date. We don't train AI models on your financial data.

I say "not much else" but I want to be precise, because vague privacy claims are the problem, not the fix. We also keep a small internal record of product events, things like signing up, your first import, finishing a monthly review. They live on our servers, never touch Google, never get sold, and disappear when you delete your account. They exist so I can tell what's working and what isn't.

What if I want my data back, or gone?

You can export it as a plain CSV or delete it whenever you want, and under Québec's Law 25 and Canada's PIPEDA you have that right whether or not you live in Québec. Deleting your account clears your data from our systems, with backup copies gone inside 30 days.

One more thing that matters to me: nothing changes your money picture on its own. Imported transactions wait for you to review them before they count. A person, you, is always the one who signs off.

The community part, because I'd want to know

NBU gets better at recognizing merchants when people correct it. There's a way to share in that without sharing yourself, and it's off unless you turn it on.

If you switch on community learning, the merchant categories you fix get counted toward a shared pool of suggestions. A suggestion only makes it into the pool after at least five different people have independently taught NBU the same thing, and what gets stored is a scrambled one-way code, never a readable merchant name. No amounts, no names, no notes, no e-transfer details, and no record of who taught what. The app learns from patterns, not from people. You can turn it back off any time.

What about open banking later?

Canada is still rolling open banking out. NBU doesn't touch it today, and privacy mode stays the default. If regulated sync ever ships, it'll be opt-in, one institution at a time, with consent you can pull back, and anything that syncs in goes through the same review step as a file you import yourself. No credential scraping. That line doesn't move.

That's the whole answer. The reason NBU exists is that I wanted to understand my own money without handing my banking password to anyone, and I figured other people wanted the same. If you've got a question I didn't cover here, ask me.