Vault - A complete finance app for 🇮🇳

Vault was a mobile app (Android and iOS) which allowed users in India to connect their bank accounts and credit cards in one single app.

Vault automatically summarizes data from all your Bank Accounts, Stocks, Mutual Funds, Loans, Insurance and helps you keep track through one single app.
And it lets you invest your spare money, pays your bills, set saving goals, personally advises on your investments, and helps secure your financial future.

What happened? 💔

Technical difficulties

• I build the first version using Yodlee APIs. But these APIs were very flaky and most of the times went down. So I had to build a lot of workflows to automtically detect failures.
• Over the time during beta phase we realized that we have to build the base solution ourselves.

Localized problems

• Very few or almost none of the leading banks in India have sophisticated and off-the-shelf usable APIs. This made our job really difficult.
• Eventually we built something like Yodlee in-house based on the scraping mechanism. This solution worked really well and much better than Yodlee.

Legal problems

• The RBI approved Account Aggregater licence and made it mandotory for building businesses like Vault. And it was a major hurdle for us. We had to go through a lot of legal and regulatory hurdles plus it had some monetory cost which was difficult for us to pay without external funding.
• Getting that licence itself was a big deal. On top of there was a lot of confusion around the capabilities, process and data handling.