Fina Story

Today, I’m writing a new blog post talking about the future stories of Fina, and the imagined Fina we are bringing to the world. Please also let others know if you like the story!

The essential problem: in the financial world, different people implement different methodologies in managing their finances, so there is no single solution that could work for all.

But the cookie-cutter solutions worked, that’s why Intuit’s Mint has 29 million registered users with 3.6m MAU, it is a huge number/market, well, at least for the freeware business model. The Mint shutdown news shocked the world, and the impact wave benefits other similar service providers, leaving Mint users scratching their heads to hunt for the next software.

At Fina, we know that we do not want to build another cookie-cutter solution to compete with the existing point-solution offerings. We want to solve the problems that existing solutions haven’t solved yet:

Connect people through finance and empower them to help each other.

Why?

Society is formed by all kinds of cultural groups, they are like the stars that form the galaxy, and people in the same cultural group tend to share similar interests and mindsets to manage their finances.

Finance is not just finance, it is

• culture
• religion
• emotion
• privacy

We can not expect all people to use the same way or follow the same philosophy to manage their finances, for example, some practice tithe while others don’t.

Hence, flexibility is the most important property in Fina. We want to build a 100% customizable product that works just for you!

How do we achieve flexibility?

By building flexibility, you pay way more effort to the foundation, you design the system to handle multiple scenarios rather than one, you handle multiple integrations rather than one, and of course, you handle multiple failures rather than one. The cost is a magnitude higher than a cookie-cutter system, of course, we want to see the benefits we pay the cost as the return:

1. Multiple Portfolio:
   A portfolio is a container for a list of assets/liabilities. Users can easily organize all their financial accounts into different containers for different purposes, such as personal, family, and business.
2. Multiple Profiles:
   A profile is one implementation of your methodology, it includes a category tree and a list of rules on how to categorize transactions. Switch profiles within a portfolio are just worth a few seconds of waiting.
3. Document Interface:
   Many people saw this as the biggest difference — they can freely write literacy in a doc while your financial insights pop into your fingertips, displayed as an interactive page block.
   The biggest advantage is that you can create as many pages as you want, and choose whatever you want to organize in different docs, flowing layout with writings.
4. Build a block:
   Remember how you tackle numbers in Spreadsheet? You can build a completely new metric in a Fina block too, by picking a system-defined metric (eg. average monthly expense), and applying a mathematic formula, you can create and track any Financial Metric you want.
5. Create and share a template:
   Document is born to be a template, if you have put your creativity into it, we want to maximize its usefulness by allowing you to share it with others. Upon one click, any Fina user can apply your work to their portfolio.

So what, future?

You don’t want to build flexibility for Mint users to get the dashboard they want, right?

You’re correct, building flexibility is not because we think everyone wants to build , in fact, most people do not want to build, they want to see what they need!

Coming back to the essential problem we started the blog post with — everyone is living in an isolated world financially, and we want to enable the connection! The connection enables creators to create, teach, and share, the connection enables most people to discover, learn, and apply.

We envision a Fina Package store to be created on Fina where everyone can share their methodologies, principles, and templates, and all of us can discover and learn from like-minded people.

Our mission

It’s time to summarize our mission at Fina Labs: empower people to create and share their financial views with build a well-connected community for a better world.

Stories

Thanks for reading thus far. Before you leave, I’d like to share 3 stories in which Fina gets involved to paint a clear picture of what Fina is going to be.

Story-1

Jim walks into shop X, a push notification shows up on his phone, it says “According to the history and your current goal setting, you have $78 available for grocery and $88 available for discretionary spending in shop X’. Fina is a life assistant available to you at any time.

Story-2

Jason and Lynn are a couple, one day, in their apartment, they talk about buying a new house at the dinner table, they want to have a larger space to welcome their firstborn, a playful yard is a basic requirement.

They sit down on the couch, Jason opens his laptop and signs in Fina, he creates a new document, and types “How much of a house can we afford to keep my current lifestyle?”, after some thinking and conversation with Fina AI, Fina suggested a few plans in the document:

If income has no change and the current interest rate stays, ….

If we can save an extra $1000 from current spending… then ….

As projected, your net worth and passive income grow, and you can easily pay a $4000 monthly mortgage…

The “what-if’’ variables are something that Jason could easily change in the doc, hence the buying plan automatically updates accordingly. Jason and Lynn are happy with the options, they immediately invite their house agent to this doc on Fina to review and take action for the next.

Story-3

Mike is a young freelancer, he is enthusiastic about digital products, and he is also very active on some social media, growing more influence in a large audience is his ultimate goal, ideally, Mike wants to build his community, he understands how important it is to continuously learn and teach, Finance is Mike’s main interest, he builds lots of templates for people to download and use.

Before Fina, Mike used Spreadsheet and Notion, now he only shared his own Fina package link, thousands of his audience clicks the shared Fina link to view and apply, by following a wizard of sign-in, account adding process, every user can see their finance now in Mike’s way, at Fina, we call that see your finance through your shepherd’s lens.

Fina has thousands of creators similar to Mike, they build their philosophy of managing finance on Fina. To implement their philosophy, they customize their category schema, define some key rules to categorize transactions, define formulas and variables, and create nice layouts using Fina pages to track those variables. By bundling all these assets up, Mike and other similar creators packed their methodology in a format called Fina Package.

Conclusion

I don’t have a conclusion here, with my colleagues at Fina Labs, Inc. I’m looking forward to the future.

If you like what I have shared here, I sincerely invite you to join our journey!

• Become a Fina user: https://fina.xyz
• Join our team / Become a partner: cao@fina.xyz

Thank you!