Most financial apps make one decision for you before you ever start: if you want your bank connected, there’s one way in, and you take it or leave it.
Carlo doesn’t work that way.
When we built Bank Reminders, the obvious starting point was Plaid. It’s familiar and fast, built around a flow people already understand. Pick your bank, sign in, choose your accounts, done. That ease matters more than it might seem. If connecting a bank feels like a project, most people won’t do it, and Carlo isn’t trying to turn your money into an engineering task. The technology should disappear into the background.
But ease was only half the decision. Carlo has always been built on the idea that you shouldn’t have to give up more control than you’re comfortable with to use a good tool. And on that measure, Plaid and SimpleFIN are honestly different, so we’ll be honest about the difference.
The tradeoff, stated plainly
With Plaid, Carlo handles the connection for you, and it feels like connecting a bank in any modern app. The cost of that convenience: like nearly every finance app you’ve used, Carlo’s systems can technically reach the transaction data Plaid returns. We don’t sell it, we encrypt it, and you can disconnect anytime. But we’d rather tell you the truth than let you assume otherwise: with this method, we could reach it.
SimpleFIN is the other answer. You set up access through SimpleFIN Bridge and hand Carlo a token. The credential that pulls your data stays on your device, not on our servers, which means we genuinely can’t reach your bank data, even if we wanted to. It takes a few more steps, and it involves a small separate subscription paid directly to SimpleFIN, not to us. In exchange, the connection is yours in a way the convenient path can’t offer.
Most apps only offer the first kind, and don’t tell you what it means. We offer both, and we’d rather you choose with clear eyes.
Neither is the “right” answer. If you want the simplest experience, Plaid is it. If knowing where your credential lives is worth a little setup and a few dollars, SimpleFIN is there. Both are reasonable, and the choice is yours to make, not ours to make for you.
The same restraint runs through the whole feature
That instinct, keep the choice with the person, shaped far more of Bank Reminders than the connection screen.
Carlo isn’t trying to become another dashboard that imports your whole financial life and tells you what it means. Your manual record stays the center of Carlo. Connected bank data has one small job: helping you notice a transaction you may have forgotten to log. It doesn’t log for you. It doesn’t take over.
So we built the connection system to leave your choices as your choices. Carlo doesn’t quietly widen what it watches, and it doesn’t treat a setting you never touched as permission to reach for more. That sounds like a small thing. In practice it meant choosing restraint over convenience again and again, and it’s the part of this work that mattered most, precisely because it’s the part you’ll never notice.
That’s the balance we wanted from the start. Carlo should be easy to use. And it should hand you more control the moment you want it.
If you want the longer version of how Carlo thinks about who can open what, I wrote about the encryption design here.