When no budgeting app supports your country
Most finance apps inherit their country list from one data provider. Plaid publishes 20 countries, and there are about 195. Here is how to check an app before you trust it, and what to do when the honest answer is that nothing will connect.
You read a roundup of the best budgeting apps, pick one, sign up, and search for your bank. Nothing. You try the next app on the list and find the same gap, because the two apps are reading from the same place.
This is not bad luck, and it is not your bank being obscure. It is a map, and it is worth seeing the map clearly, because it tells you which apps can ever work for you and which ones cannot.
The mapLink to this section
Almost no finance app talks to banks itself. It pays a data provider, and the provider's coverage becomes the app's country list.
The largest of them, Plaid, publishes its reach: "over 95% bank coverage and localized support across 20 countries", on a page titled "North America, UK, and Europe".
Twenty, out of roughly 195.
That single number explains most of what you have run into:
- Copilot Money's help centre says "At this time, we only support US financial institutions and as such are only available in the US App Store".
- Monarch Money's download page says it is "available on web, iPhone, iPad, and Android in the United States and Canada".
- Empower, the product people still call Personal Capital, says it "currently only support U.S based financial institutions (currency in USD)", and that you need a valid US phone number to sign up at all.
- YNAB's direct import reaches the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and the euro area, which is one of several things worth checking before you pick it.
None of these is a bad product. They are products built on a map that does not include you.
"But there is an open banking provider here"Link to this section
Often there is, and this is where the story gets more annoying rather than more hopeful.
Salt Edge advertises "over 5,000 financial institutions spanning across 50+ countries". Basiq connects "135+ financial institutions in AU and NZ". Belvo calls itself "the leading open finance data and payments platform in Latin America".
So the data often exists where you live. What does not exist is the app that bothered to integrate it. An American budgeting app has no commercial reason to add a provider for a market it does not sell in, and that is why your country can have working open banking and still have no app that uses it.
Check an app in two minutes, before you trust the marketingLink to this section
A landing page will tell you the app is "global". The help centre tells you the truth, because support staff cannot afford a vague answer.
- Search the app's help centre for "supported countries" or "supported institutions". Every honest one has that article. The quotes above all come from those pages, not from marketing.
- Look for your bank, not for your country. "Supported in Germany" can mean four banks. If there is a search box for institutions, type the name of yours.
- Read the currency rule. Copilot's own help centre says it "only supports USD and does not convert foreign currency transactions". An app can support your country and still report your money in the wrong currency.
- Ask what happens when a feed breaks. Connections drop, banks change their login screens, and re-authorisation is a chore you will inherit. In a country the provider barely covers, it breaks more.
If steps 1 and 2 come back empty, stop shopping in that category. No amount of feature comparison changes a connection that does not exist.
What is actually leftLink to this section
A local app, if your country has one. Plenty of countries do, built by people who integrated the local provider. If it connects to your banks and does what you need, use it: a real feed beats typing, and this page is not going to argue otherwise.
An app that connects to nothing. If it never asks for a bank login, it has no country list to leave you off, and it works the same in Jakarta, Lagos, Warsaw or Lima.
That second option is what Hundo is, on purpose.
The only thing that makes "no connection" workLink to this section
Manual tracking fails for one reason: putting an entry in takes too long, so you stop after two weeks.
So that is the part we built first:
- Type the amount, and pick. Hundo offers the merchants that match, ranked out of your own history, and one tap fills the description, category, budget and account. This is arithmetic over your own entries, not a model, so it is instant and it gets better as your history grows.
- Import what your bank already gives you. A bank that no aggregator reaches can usually still export a statement as CSV or Excel. Map the columns once, and Hundo flags the rows you already have.
- Or hand it to the assistant: photograph a receipt, forward an email receipt to your own address, dictate a note, or say "spent 45 on groceries yesterday" and confirm the draft.
Typing and file import are free and uncapped. The photograph, the forwarded email, the voice note and the assistant are part of Pro.
The other half of the problem: currenciesLink to this section
People who fall off the aggregator map usually have a second thing in common: their money is in more than one currency. A salary in one, savings in another, a card that bills in a third.
Every account, asset and budget in Hundo keeps its own currency, in 166 of them. A transaction can be in a currency its account does not hold, and the rate for that day is stored with it, so old months keep their old rates. Net worth reports in the currency you think in, and any period's change can be split into the part that was the market and the part that was the exchange rate.
Two calculators, free, no account needed, if you want to see the arithmetic first:
- Add up a net worth across several currencies at today's rates.
- See how much of an investment's return was the exchange rate.
The short versionLink to this section
The app that will not find your bank is not judging your bank. It bought a map, and you live off the edge of it.
If your country has an app that connects properly, use it. If it does not, the choice is not between a connected app and an unconnected one. It is between tracking your money by hand in something built for that, and not tracking it at all.