Bunq Buddy

Your Bunq Buddy

Inspiration

We wanted to built something that actually tracks your usage, a personalized experience which actually engages with the user.

Most finance apps tell users what happened, but they do not remember the story behind the money. Bunq buddy is an assistant that not only knows your history but can help you make better decisions and have your finances up to date.

What it does

Bunq Buddy is an AI-powered financial memory app for bunq users. It helps users upload receipts, bills, parking slips, important letters, and other financial documents, then links them to bunq payments when possible. Users can ask questions such as 'Did I already pay this bill?', 'Who still owes me money?', or 'What subscriptions are coming next month?', 'What are my payments over the past 30 days'.

The app creates a searchable Obsidian-style Markdown vault with a workable backend which detects recurring payments and subscriptions, helps split shared expenses, and prepares payment requests or bunq.me links after user confirmation

It also includes your Buddy the otter, an AI companion that lives in the bottom-right corner of the app and quietly surfaces useful financial reminders.

The backends supports further dashboards as well as AI insights such as how to save for a trip, wedding or such occasions as long as it has enough information about you.

How we built it

We built Bunq Buddy around three core layers: bunq data, AI understanding, and a human-readable financial vault.

It was built using AI, mainly ChatGPT (and Codex) and Anthropic (and Claude Code) using a detailed app spec and prompts splitting the work

The bunq sandbox API is used to retrieve accounts, balances, payments, payment requests, and demo payment flows.

AI is used to classify documents, extract key fields, match receipts or bills to payments, detect subscriptions, and generate helpful dashboard insights.

The frontend is designed as a dashboard-based experience with sections for today, upcoming money, people, subscriptions, documents, and vault search

Uploaded files are processed into structured databased records and Markdown notes, making the user's financial memory both searchable inside the app and portable outside of it

Challenges we ran into

The backend was very extensive, joining both obsidian with querries in order to keep track of information in a structured way while also ensuring data security.

Surprisingly, the biggest challenge actually turned out to incorporate the backend layer into the UI which had many problem and we almost gave up until we were finally able to fix it 1h before the deadline

Given the large ammount of information that can be accessed, correct usage of tools and claude skills did present a challenge. Making the AI actually use Obsidian to give a structured vault was hard since it requires correct links from the beggining

We also had to make the product useful and engaging without becoming distracting

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud that it actually worked since this was a very ambitious project and we spent the whole time working without sleeping. The most brainnumbing part was watching for 8 hours as the app spec and the promtps where actually being built

After talking with other teams, we are very proud of the safety-first design. The app not only gives users AI assistance without taking control away from them, it also offers very high security with encription and other methods to prevent data problems

What we learned

We learned how to use coding agents in a cost saving way while actually learnings about how to make tools as well as AI agents. While we both have experience making apps, this is the first time we have made something in such as short time and it really did bring it the most out of us

What's next for Bunq Buddy

Making a better obsidian vault for more information and links is crucial for having better and more information that can lead to better results from the AI

We also want to store it in a safe vault in the cloud for better security

We also want to include more dashboards to bring more insights as well as offer an AI dashboard creator so you can track the things you want