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Transfering Money

Alma: Voice-First Accessible Banking

Inspiration

What if managing your money was as simple as having a conversation?

My grandmother needs to transfer money to pay her carer every week. She's sharp, funny, completely on the ball; but the banking app? Tiny buttons, confusing menus, three different passwords. She calls me every time. Every. Single. Week.

Sound familiar? It certainly did to us. So we started thinking: why is this so hard? Why do we accept that banking is only accessible if you're comfortable with screens and small print and dropdowns?

What if she could just... say it? "Transfer 50 euros to Maria." Done.

That's Alma.

What We Built

Alma is a voice-first mobile banking app where users hold a button, speak a command like "Transfer 20 euros to Anna", and the app handles the rest — confirming the action with a clean, minimal UI.

Frontend — React + Vite, styled with Tailwind CSS, built as a mobile phone-frame interface with smooth voice overlay transitions.

Backend — Python FastAPI serving a REST API, with session middleware, CORS, and modular route structure across users, payments, transactions, and voice processing.

Voice Pipeline — Gemini for real speech-to-intent processing, parsing natural voice commands into structured actions. ElevenLabs for live transcription and natural text-to-speech audio output.

Banking Integration — TrueLayer OAuth for real bank account linking, balance fetching, and payment initiation.

Carer Dashboard — a full carer portal with real-time notifications, transaction monitoring, approval flows, and spending limits. Trusted people stay in the loop without taking over.

Storage — Lightweight CSV-based user and transaction storage for rapid prototyping.

Challenges

Getting the voice hold-to-record UX to feel natural across touch and pointer events on mobile
Structuring the FastAPI backend modularly while keeping imports clean
Designing a UI that is genuinely minimal without feeling empty
Wiring the full voice → Gemini intent → ElevenLabs → confirmation flow end-to-end within a hackathon timeframe

What We Learned

That accessibility and simplicity are the same thing. Designing for users who need simplicity produces a better experience for everyone. We also learned how quickly a clean voice UX can come together when the stack is well-chosen — FastAPI and React are a genuinely fast combination.

What's Next

Full TrueLayer payment execution, not just drafting
Multi-language support so Alma works for everyone, everywhere
Taking Alma beyond the hackathon and into the hands of people who actually need it

Built With

Submitted to

HackEurope

Created by

I worked on the Eleven Labs and gemini agent functionality. Speech to text using 11 labs, pass to gemini return intent json to guardrail functionality, read out (11 labs) and confirm intended action. Then team mates integrated calling functions to execute.

Beornstone
I worked on the stripe integration for the project. We created peer-to-peer transactions on stripe & also general payments scheme. I also added in fraud detection and prevention in stripe using their fraud ML model. I added in debit card issuers, to create temporary cards with expiry dates and limits for amount of transactions per week and total money altogether. Purchase safety measures can be added to the cards, such as blocking gambling or alcohol purchases depending on the user selections. I also added in a two user system, where an overseer can see transaction history and also get WhatsApp messages for risky alerts for purchases flagged by stripe's ML. The ML can also block payments over a certain risk threshold. I was additionally responsible for integrating ElevenLab's voice controls and Gemini's output into Stripe's Api features, to be called verbally rather than through buttons for additional accessibility.

Emma Burgess
I worked on integrating TrueLayer into our app so Alma could work with real bank accounts, not just fake data. Using their secure OAuth flow, users connect their existing bank just like they would with any commercial financial app.

From there, the backend can fetch balances, show recent transactions, and initialise payments directly from the user’s account. FastAPI handles the token exchange, secure calls to TrueLayer, and converts the bank data into Alma’s simple interface.

This is what makes the ui or a voice command like “Transfer 50 euros to Maria” actually move real money in real accounts.

Ben Hewston
Liliana Berenguer
"When god sings with his creations, will a turtle not be part of the choir?"

Updates

Ben Hewston posted an update — Feb 22, 2026 09:33 AM EST

I was in charge of integrating TrueLayer into our app so Alma could work with real bank accounts, not just fake data. Using their secure OAuth flow, users connect their existing bank just like they would with any commercial financial app.

From there, the backend can fetch balances, show recent transactions, and initialise payments directly from the user’s account. FastAPI handles the token exchange, secure calls to TrueLayer, and converts the bank data into Alma’s simple interface.

This is what makes the ui or a voice command like “Transfer 50 euros to Maria” actually move real money in real accounts.

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Liliana Berenguer started this project — Feb 22, 2026 05:00 AM EST

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