Personal finance management (PFM) services are present in almost every banking app, but only a small percentage of the audience actually uses them. Users want to control their budgets but are not willing to spend time on manual data entry.
Blockers and barriers to service development:
- Incorrect auto-categorization of expenses, requiring constant manual corrections.
- PFM systems show the past (where the money went) but do little to help plan the future (predictive analytics).
- The difficulty of combining accounts from different banks into a single shared dashboard (lack of Open Banking).
How to overcome the barriers (Recommendations):
- Training LLM models to accurately recognize MCC codes and merchant names to minimize errors in expense categories.
- Transitioning from reactive to proactive analytics: automatic warnings about the risk of exceeding the budget a week before the end of the month.
Summary: The real breakthrough will be proactive financial assistants that do not just draw pie charts but provide personalized advice: from rescheduling a payment date to automatically investing spare change.
These are insights from a study on user behavior in Kazakh financial ecosystems by Rocket Tech.
