Most money apps stop at showing people what they spent. We asked industry leaders how fintech apps can turn that data into better decisions, then checked their answers against the research.

Open almost any money app and you will find a chart of last month’s spending, sorted into neat categories. Seeing the number, however, rarely changes what happens next. So we put one question to industry leaders: how can fintech apps move from simply showing people their data to genuinely guiding their financial decisions?

The answers pointed in the same direction. For fintech apps, insight is where guidance starts, not where it ends. What changes behavior is a clear next step, tied to a goal the user picked and easy to take. We then checked each answer against the research on how people manage money.

Fintechbits analysis

Why Fintech Apps Need More Than a Dashboard

The market has already tested the dashboard model. Intuit closed Mint, the best-known free budgeting app, in 2024 and pointed its users to Credit Karma, a service built around credit scores and product offers.

Attention is the second problem. Economists Arna Olafsson and Michaela Pagel studied logins on a money app in Iceland. They found that people check their accounts more on payday and less when they are overdrawn (CEPR). In other words, a dashboard gets the most views when things are fine and the fewest when help matters most.

Personalization is the first fix most people reach for, and one answer we received started there.

To enhance user decision-making, fintech apps should provide personalized financial insights instead of just displaying data. By analyzing individual spending habits and financial behaviors through algorithms, apps can give tailored advice that resonates with users’ unique situations. For instance, a budgeting app might review a user’s dining and grocery expenditures to recommend a specific savings plan, leading to better financial choices.

Mohammed Kamal, Business Development Manager, Olavivo

Personal insight is a sensible start, but research suggests it is not enough on its own. In a field experiment on a Brazilian money-management platform, reminders about upcoming card payments cut late fees by 14%. However, the same reminders raised overdraft fees by 9% (Review of Financial Studies). The nudge fixed one bill and pushed the cost onto another.

Coach the User Toward One Goal

Wayne Lowry runs a search marketing agency rather than a fintech. Still, he gave the most concrete answer we received. In his view, the winning fintech apps will behave like coaches.

The fintech apps that win aren’t dashboards, they’re coaches. And the same principle that makes SEO content actually convert is what makes financial guidance stick: meet the user at the moment of intent, then tell them exactly what to do next.

At Scale By SEO, I spend my days thinking about how raw data becomes a decision. A site audit that just lists 400 errors is useless. A site audit that says “fix these three pages first, here’s the expected ranking lift, here’s the deadline”, that changes behavior. Fintech is the same game. Showing someone they spent $612 on takeout last month is a vanity metric. Telling them, “If you cap takeout at $300, you hit your emergency fund goal by March,” is guidance.

Three things I’d steal directly from how we build trust with clients:

First, prioritize ruthlessly. When we explain tradeoffs to a small business owner, we don’t dump every SEO opportunity on them, we say “do these two things this month.” Fintech apps need to surface one decision at a time. Decision fatigue kills engagement faster than a bad UI.

Second, tie every insight to a KPI the user actually cares about. We use a 6-Month Performance Guarantee because clients want outcomes, not activity reports. Fintech should benchmark progress against a user-stated goal, “house in 3 years”, “debt-free by 40”, not abstract category averages.

Third, build feedback loops that prove the advice worked. When a plumbing client sees their citation count climb and the phone start ringing, they trust the next recommendation. Fintech apps that show “you followed this nudge, here’s the dollar impact 90 days later” earn the right to guide bigger decisions like investing or refinancing.

Data informs. Context persuades. Accountability converts. The apps that nail all three stop being trackers and start being advisors people actually listen to.

Wayne Lowry, CEO, Scale By SEO

His point about goals has strong backing. A Journal of Finance study gave a goal-setting feature to randomly chosen beta testers of a fintech app. Setting goals raised their savings rates, and the biggest gains went to people who had been least likely to save (Journal of Finance). Benchmarking against a target the user chose is therefore more than a design preference.

Make the Right Move Take One Tap

Abhinav Gupta, founder of the bookkeeping firm Profitjets, focused on friction instead. For him, fintech apps should attach an action to every recommendation.

The people drowning in financial data do not need more visibility. They need less decisions.

Most of the apps have stopped at showing. “You spend this much”. “Your savings look like this”. “Your runway is X days”. These don’t help at all. The problem wasn’t showing information; the problem is decisioning around that information. Usually, this information has been looked up because the user didn’t know how much or where to start.

The paradigm shift to guidance, requires you to both present a recommendation and eliminate the friction of taking that decision. It’s not about “savings are low”. It’s about “move $X into savings now”, which requires a single tap. The classic product example of automated round-up investing proved that people opt into that once, and their spending habit is modified without any more effort. Guidance is showing, recommendation, and a path for action. Any less than that is just a prettier view of their pre-existing confusion.

Abhinav Gupta, Founder, Profitjets

The one-tap principle holds up well. Acorns once offered new users a recurring deposit framed as either $5 a day or $150 a month. As a result, about four times as many people signed up under the daily framing (field study).

Round-ups, though, are a weaker example than they look. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau analyzed 127,243 savings goals on the Qapital app. Rules triggered by spending, such as round-ups, were the most popular. Yet those rules saved an average of $80.36 a month, against $167.84 for scheduled rules such as saving on payday (CFPB). In addition, 85% of goals saw a withdrawal within a year. Opting in once helps people start, but scheduled saving moves more money.

From Advice to Action

The newest fintech apps go a step further and act for the user. Cleo’s Autopilot, launched in 2026 and rolling out by waitlist, can move money into savings and set spending limits at chosen merchants once the user agrees (Cleo). It can also offer cash advances to head off overdrafts. That shows how quickly guidance can turn into lending.

Revolut has put guardrails on its version. In April, it began rolling out its AIR assistant to 13 million UK customers, and sensitive actions still need biometric approval (Revolut). Similarly, Schwab Charley handles account housekeeping but is not listed as moving money.

Where Guidance Meets the Rules

The further fintech apps go, the closer they get to regulated advice. In the UK, the FCA’s targeted support regime went live on 6 April 2026. It lets authorized firms suggest pension and investment options to groups of consumers in similar circumstances (FCA). The regulator estimates that around 23 million consumers are underserved by advice and guidance.

US fintech apps, by contrast, face a sharper choice on investments, between general education and registered advice. Some, such as M1 with its fiduciary AI adviser, have chosen to register and accept the legal duty.

Across all three answers, the formula stayed consistent. Start with the user’s own numbers, link them to a goal, and make the next step easy. The research then adds one more test. Fintech apps should report what users save, borrow and pay in fees, not just how often they log in. The fintech apps that publish those outcomes will make the strongest case that they guide decisions rather than display them.

FintechBits covers payments, banking and fintech developments for readers in the US and UK. This article is for information only and is not financial advice. Views expressed are those of the FintechBits editorial team.