Behind the scenes of finsights
Oct 16, 2024
Do you sometimes struggle to get simple and fast answers about your spending behavior, for example: How much did I spend during my holidays in Indonesia? Or: Do I buy enough single public transport tickets to make a yearly subscription worth it? With finsights, we offer you a new and easy way to explore and understand your spending behavior – directly from your sofa.
finsights: Personal financial insights
Our neon community often told us that they were looking to get simple answers to specific questions about their spending. And those questions were so manifold and diverse that adding a simple report for all just wouldn't have done it.
For example, it would be quite convenient to know if my yearly public transportation spending makes it worth it for me to take a public transportation subscription, instead of paying single tickets. Or to understand if I am still spending as much in fast food this year as I was last year, following my new year’s resolutions. Or to track my progress on that other goal to reduce favoring flights over train trips.
With finsights, we are providing you, our users, with a new, easy, and comfortable way to ask about and learn from your spending behavior. We do so while continuing to move ahead of the Swiss banking landscape, bringing this AI-powered functionality to the market all while keeping your data 100% safe & private. We start with straightforward questions to explore an alternative type of search and analytics, and will be integrating fresh data, AI updates, and flexible answer formats with each discovery step.
You can now better understand your spending habits by literally asking your questions on your sofa, and finsights will swiftly show you the answer so that you can comfortably get the insights you need to keep control over your finances.
Where to find the finsights function
You can find finsights in the neon app, clicking the «Statistics» icon on the start screen, followed by a tap on the small purple icon with sparkles in the top right corner. Or if you are reading this blog post from your mobile phone, you can directly access the finsights section in your neon-app by clicking on this link.
Tangible examples for finsights
We mentioned the example of understanding if your spendings in public transportation makes it worth it for you to take out a public transportation subscription. But there are many more useful everyday insights you can gain. Here are the most popular questions that finsights can already answer, e.g. …
How much you spent at a specific shop during a specific time period: For example, how much you spent at Coop (or Migros or any other or all supermarkets) every month this year. This can prove helpful to really know what your monthly grocery shopping costs are for sustainable budgeting.
How much you spent in a specific location: For example, how much you spent during that trip to Indonesia this year. This can help you to not underestimate the cost of your next vacation. Or get some money back from your travel companions.
How much do you spend on average during a specific time window: For example, how much do you earn and spend every month this year, compared to the past. This can help you identify changes in your spending habits over time. What are your highest expenses this year, or on the contrary, what are the many small ones: This can help you identify where your money goes and adjust if necessary.
… And many more! finsights offers vast possibilities, so have a look for yourself and unleash your curiosity.
Behind the scene: How finsights works
Behind finsights, an AI model translates your questions into technical database queries (such as SQL). Our system takes those queries, retrieves the relevant information and displays it within our app’s secure, login-protected environment.
Are you a tech/AI enthusiast or you want even more transparency regarding our process? Here's how it works in more details: We use Google's LLM (Large Language Model) called Gemini in our GCP (Google Cloud Platform) environment to translate your question into SQL (Structured Query Language). Our back-end then processes this query like a regular data query (e.g., like when it checks and displays your transaction history in your neon app). The result is then displayed in the front-end (= on the screen) so that you can see it in your app, along with helpful details regarding the transactions and time periods included, to help you understand the result.
That's all! In other words, with finsights your data is not shared with third parties, but remains protected and inaccessible to third parties at our cloud partner Google in Switzerland the entire time. Also, all data processed by the AI model, such as your question and the data structure, are always protected from access by third parties, not stored separately, nor used for training purposes! Your data remains your data!
Please note: During the beta phase, finsights can only answer questions about your main account, not yet questions about Spaces, your joint account or your neon invest portfolio. Also, the outputs from finsights do not include card reservations that have not been processed yet (which usually takes 2 to 3 working days).
Why is it a beta version?
Two reasons
#1 This is just the beginning of finsights, and like many AI-powered applications, insights might be inaccurate and still need some iterations to be improved as a feature.
#2 It’s an evolving feature as there’s so much more to explore. We started with some basic questions to explore an alternative type of search & analytics. The technology and natural access to answers should allow everyone to get creative and find new use cases. With every step of discovery, we aim to add new data, latest AI updates and answer formats to cater for your need and further build an ideally totally new type of functionality.
Therefore, we decided to release finsights as a beta version to the whole neon users base until the end of this year, so that the neon community can start benefiting from it, while being aware that its outputs can be incorrect or incomplete – and should therefore not be the trigger for important decisions.
Join the finsights creator community!
In full neon style, this is the perfect feature to involve you (our community) in the further development of finsights’ functionality !
On this occasion, we want to explore a more interactive discussion within the community using Discord, where you can share your inputs to improve this feature and get fresh updates on its progress. You can also use this channel to exchange your experiences and help others with your best questions, prompts & use cases.
Our dedicated neon-Discord server is composed of a notification channel named #release-updates, via which we at neon will provide you with information about finsights improvement. It also entails a community channel called /finsights-friends, where you can share your experience and impressions on this feature with other neon users.
Additionally, we will be hosting virtual sessions to update you on the feature development every 3rd week until the end of 2024, following the release live streamed event. Like this, users like you will be able to concretely see the progress made on the feature development until the end of the year. You want to join the insights community?
