melsory

Inspiration

In Puerto Rico and across LatAm, financial stress is everywhere — credit card debt keeps rising, young people leave school without financial education, and taxes create anxiety every year. We wanted to build something bilingual, smart, and empathetic that helps people take control of their money without feeling judged.

What it does

Melsory is a bilingual AI-powered financial coach that centralizes all your accounts (via Plaid) into a real-time dashboard, helps you plan with projections, automates debt payments, and even pre-fills your taxes (IRS + Hacienda PR) with smart deductions and reminders. It’s like having a financial advisor + motivational coach in your pocket.

How we built it

Integrated Plaid to connect bank accounts, credit cards, loans, and investments.

Designed a real-time dashboard for balances, spending, debt, and savings.

Trained an AI financial coach to answer questions, give tips, and motivate healthy habits.

Developed a rule-based engine to automate debt payments (snowball/avalanche strategy).

Added a tax assistant that pre-fills planillas with transaction data, flags deductions, and reminds deadlines.

Built a responsive, bilingual UI with scalability in mind.

Challenges we ran into

Handling sensitive financial data securely (tokens, encryption, compliance).

Keeping transaction categorization accurate across different banks.

Balancing how much the free plan should offer vs. what pushes users to upgrade.

Making taxes simple without stepping into “legal/tax advice” territory.

Time constraints in bringing together banking, AI, and UX into one smooth product.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Built a working prototype that shows real-time balances from connected accounts.

Designed a bilingual experience from day one (Spanish + English).

Created an AI coach that doesn’t just give numbers but also motivates and celebrates user wins.

Structured a freemium business model that can scale sustainably.

Framed Melsory as not just another budgeting app, but a tool built specifically for Puerto Rico and LatAm.

What we learned

People don’t just need numbers — they need encouragement and clarity.

Automating even one task (like debt payments) creates huge relief for users.

A bilingual solution is rare but absolutely necessary to include underserved markets.

Security and compliance must be embedded from the very beginning.

The difference between a “feature” and a “product” is storytelling and alignment with real pain points.

Built With

• figma