finboard 2026

finboard is an iOS-native app that lets early-career adults read their own spending at a glance.

As payments go cashless, the felt sense of spending money fades, and budgeting apps that are good at collecting data rarely turn it into self-understanding. finboard reframes spending as something to explore rather than track, and puts it where this group already looks, on the Home Screen, the Lock Screen, and the Dynamic Island. I treated native widgets as new interaction points and designed them to optimize financial cognition, so a person can understand their money without opening an app or logging in.

There is no simple way to understand your spending quickly. Banking apps collect the data but keep it behind a login, so it never becomes self-understanding.

Canadian bank apps already ship personal-finance tools, but they sit deep inside the app and go unused, and no major bank surfaces spending across institutions. I framed the problem around access rather than features: how do you put a person's own financial picture in front of them, at the moment and place they would actually glance at it?

I opened the research by fixing the target and the bet. finboard would be an iOS-native widget dashboard for students and early-career adults in the Canadian banking context, and the working hypothesis was that surfacing bank data as a widget, outside the login, would improve how people see their own spending.

From there I mapped the pain across three fronts at once, the market, in-app behavior, and Canada's banking rules. It showed me that the weak link is not the tools themselves but their adoption, and that the incoming Consumer-Driven Banking Act shapes what a cross-institution product is allowed to do.

I grounded the direction in data and existing behavioral research, reading what actually lifts app satisfaction, who adopts new in-app surfaces first, and how glanceable feedback changes spending. One pattern held throughout: information beats features, and the users who struggle most gain the most from low-effort, always-visible cues.

Then I redrew the flow. Today, checking your spending means logging into each bank, digging past a balance-only view, and doing the math yourself, and most people drop off along the way. finboard intercepts that drop-off point and replaces the whole routine with a glanceable widget backed by a single consent-based connection.

I prototyped in two passes, first to settle the structure, then to make it feel like a real iOS product.

Low-fidelity Prototype

The low-fidelity pass laid out the widget system and the app behind it: a daily transaction glance, a weekly goal, an AI report summary, an interactive controls widget, and five in-app destinations that each pay off a widget the user installed. Working in grayscale let me test the information hierarchy before committing to any visual style.

High-fidelity Prototype

The high-fidelity pass brought it onto the real surfaces. Widgets stack on the Home Screen, the Lock Screen carries a glance with no unlock, and the Dynamic Island animates each transaction, the weekly pace, and the AI summary. Inside, five screens, Home, AI Forecast, Bills, Cards, and Settings, turn the glance into detail, and a shared component set keeps the widgets, Dynamic Island, and bank tokens consistent.

finboard treats the widget as the product, not a shortcut into an app. By moving a person's financial picture onto the surfaces they already glance at, and tuning it for quick reading, the project makes banking data legible to people who never opened the tools built for them. As open banking rolls out in Canada, the same widget-first approach has room to grow into a genuine cross-institution view.