How We Handle Bank Feeds and Reconciliation

Bank feeds are the backbone of any modern finance app. Without them, users are stuck manually entering transactions, which is tedious and error-prone. Financial IQ connects to UK banks through regulated Open Banking APIs, which means your bank authenticates the connection directly and we never see or store your banking credentials. The feed pulls in transactions, balances, and account metadata on a regular schedule.

Reconciliation is where things get interesting. Raw bank data is messy. Transaction descriptions vary wildly between banks, merchant names are often truncated or coded, and pending transactions can appear and disappear before settling. Our reconciliation engine normalises merchant names, detects duplicates from pending-to-settled transitions, and applies your categorisation rules consistently. Over time, it learns your patterns so that recurring transactions are categorised automatically.

We built the reconciliation system to be transparent rather than magical. You can see every automatic categorisation decision the system made and override it with a single tap. Overrides feed back into the learning model so the same correction is not needed twice. For users who connect multiple accounts, the system also handles inter-account transfers intelligently, recognising when a payment from one account is a receipt in another rather than double-counting the transaction.