Vesta — Financial Accountability Without Financial Surveillance

Inspiration

Financial decisions rarely affect just one person.

Whether you're splitting rent with roommates, combining finances with a spouse, supporting family members, or starting a business with a partner, your financial stability is often connected to someone else's.

Yet most financial applications treat money as an individual responsibility. They tell you what you've spent, what you have left, and where you could save. But what happens when your financial decisions affect someone who's counting on you?

We wanted to address that gap.

Our inspiration came from a simple question: How can people be financially accountable to one another without sacrificing their financial privacy?

You shouldn't have to share your entire transaction history, account balances, or spending habits just to reassure your roommate that you can cover rent.

That's why we built Vesta, an AI-powered financial intelligence platform designed to identify potential financial risks before they become shared problems.

What It Does

Vesta combines personal financial management with collaborative financial forecasting.

Personal Financial Intelligence

Vesta gives users a centralized view of their financial situation, including account balances, spending patterns, recurring subscriptions, upcoming obligations, and potential financial risks.

Rather than simply explaining where money has already gone, Vesta helps users understand what could happen next.

Our forecasting engine, Domino, allows users to simulate financial decisions before making them.

What happens if your paycheck arrives late? What if you cancel a subscription? Could an unexpected expense prevent you from covering rent?

Domino models these scenarios and shows how they affect your projected cash flow.

Shared Financial Planning

This is where Vesta goes beyond traditional budgeting.

Users can establish shared financial commitments with roommates, partners, family members, or business associates while maintaining separate finances.

Vesta evaluates how individual financial risks could affect those commitments.

For example, imagine two roommates splitting a $2,000 rent payment. One roommate's financial forecast indicates that they might fall $10 short before rent is due.

Vesta identifies that vulnerability early, allowing them to explore potential solutions.

The important distinction is that the other roommate doesn't need access to their private spending history.

Through selective information sharing, users control what financial information others can see, from basic contribution readiness to more detailed information they explicitly authorize.

Our goal is to encourage transparency and accountability without creating opportunities for financial surveillance.

Ask Vesta — AI Financial Assistance

We also developed a conversational financial assistant that helps users understand their financial situations and explore solutions.

Rather than generating generic recommendations, Vesta can consider individual priorities and preferences.

For example, if someone explains that their gym membership is non-negotiable, Vesta can remember that preference and explore alternative ways to improve their financial outlook.

The assistant supports English and Spanish, making financial guidance more accessible.

Importantly, AI explains and recommends potential actions, while our deterministic financial engine performs the actual calculations.

How We Built It

Vesta is a full-stack web application built using Next.js, React, TypeScript, and Tailwind CSS.

We combined several technologies to support different parts of the platform:

Capital One Nessie API: Connects Vesta to fictional banking accounts and supported financial records through Capital One's sandbox.
Google Gemini: Powers contextual financial explanations and helps interpret financial risks and potential decisions.
Backboard: Supports our conversational AI architecture and opt-in memory for personal financial preferences.
Tiger Data / PostgreSQL: Provides the database architecture for collaborative workspaces, shared commitments, privacy preferences, and financial planning information.
Vercel: Hosts our deployed application.

One of our biggest technical priorities was separating financial calculations from AI-generated explanations.

We built Domino to calculate projected balances, recurring expenses, and hypothetical scenarios deterministically, rather than relying on a language model to generate financial figures.

We also developed a permission-based sharing system designed to prevent users from accessing financial information that another member hasn't authorized them to see.

For our hackathon demonstration, we created fictional profiles and shared financial scenarios to illustrate how the platform could work without requiring real banking credentials.

Challenges We Faced

Our biggest challenge was balancing financial transparency with privacy.

It's relatively straightforward to build an application that lets people share financial information. It's much harder to help people coordinate their finances while respecting what they want to keep private.

We had to consider not only direct access to financial records but also situations where shared totals or forecasts could indirectly reveal another person's private information.

Another major challenge involved integrating multiple financial and AI technologies.

Working with the Nessie sandbox required us to distinguish between available banking records, unsupported transaction types, and fictional demonstration data. We wanted to ensure that Vesta never misrepresented simulated financial information as real account activity.

We also encountered database connection and TLS certificate issues while configuring Tiger Data, requiring us to improve error handling and separate personal financial functionality from collaborative database availability.

Finally, we spent considerable time refining the user experience. Financial forecasting can become complicated quickly, and we wanted Vesta to feel approachable even to someone with little financial or technical knowledge.

What We Learned

One of our biggest takeaways was that more financial information doesn't necessarily mean better financial decisions.

Sometimes, knowing that a shared payment may be at risk is more useful than knowing exactly how someone spends their money.

We also learned how important it is to design responsible AI systems, particularly when dealing with financial information.

AI can be incredibly useful for explaining complicated situations and helping people explore alternatives, but financial calculations need to remain consistent, verifiable, and grounded in actual data.

Beyond the technical challenges, this project taught us how to refine a product around a real problem.

Vesta initially began as an individual financial forecasting application. Through collaboration, feedback, and continued development, we realized that forecasting becomes even more valuable when financial responsibilities are shared.

That realization ultimately shaped the direction of our project.

What's Next?

We envision Vesta becoming a platform that helps people navigate major financial transitions, from moving in with roommates to getting married, combining household responsibilities, or entering business partnerships.

Future development could include secure account authentication, verified financial-data connections, more sophisticated collaborative forecasting, and additional tools for managing shared obligations.

We also want to continue improving financial accessibility through multilingual assistance and personalized financial education.

Ultimately, we believe financial technology should do more than organize money.

It should help people anticipate challenges, communicate responsibly, and make decisions with confidence.