I'm not naturally good with money. I'm pretty sure no one is, but I'm worse than average. Numbers are fine. Money is a different relationship. So I've used a lot of money apps. Three of them, on the same morning in January 2025, broke something in me.

App one: the bank's own app

I open my bank's mobile app to check my balance. The first thing it does is bury the balance under a carousel selling me a credit card. Then a banner: "You haven't enabled face login yet." Then a marketing tile for a fixed deposit. The balance, when I finally find it, is in 11-point grey font.

I check the "recent transactions" tab. Half the entries say things like "POS PURCHASE 4738299124". The other half say "UPI/PAYTM/ABCD1234@OKAXIS". There's no way to know what I bought, where, or how much I'm spending on coffee this month. The data is right there, and it's somehow useless.

I close the app frustrated. This is a bank with a $30 billion market cap. Their app is somehow worse than a screenshot of my own handwriting.

App two: the budgeting app

So I open a budgeting app I'd downloaded a few months earlier and not used. It greets me with: "Connect your bank account to get started." Tap. New screen: "Choose your bank." Tap. "Enter your online banking username and password."

I stop. Read it again. They are asking for my actual bank password. The thing the bank tells me, in three different places, never to share with anyone.

I close the app. I'm aware that this is how every other budgeting app works. I'm aware that it's an industry standard and that millions of people do this every day. None of that makes it feel okay.

App three: the receipt scanner

So I try a different angle. There's an expense-scanning app I'd seen ads for. Snap your receipts, the AI categorises them, you get a dashboard. Beautiful screenshots. I sign up.

The first thing it asks for is my email and a confirmation that I'm okay receiving "weekly insights and offers from our partners." Default opt-in. The privacy policy is six thousand words; one of the paragraphs explains how anonymised purchase data may be shared with "trusted commercial partners."

I am the data. The app is the funnel. The dashboard was the bait.

I close it.

The notes file

I open my notes app and write three lines:

1. The bank shows me the data and hides the meaning.
2. The budget app wants my password to do anything.
3. The receipt app sells me to its partners.

Then a fourth line, an hour later, after I'd had a coffee and calmed down a bit:

What if a money app just respected me?

What "respected" meant, concretely

I sat with that question for a few weeks. What does it actually look like? Not in marketing language — in features, in screens, in the things the app does and doesn't do.

Here's the list I came back to, again and again:

  • Doesn't ask for my bank password. Ever. For any reason.
  • Doesn't sell my data. Doesn't share it with partners. Doesn't train anyone else's AI on it.
  • Doesn't lecture me. No streaks, no badges, no motivational push notifications.
  • Tells me the truth. If I can't afford something, says so. If it's not sure, says so.
  • Speaks my currency. Not USD-translated. The app should know that ₹400 for coffee is normal in Pune.
  • Reads my receipts so I don't have to type. The capture should be effortless.
  • Has a real human at the other end of an email. Not a chatbot. Not a Zendesk queue.

That list was the product spec for Marvin. It still is. Every feature we've built since then has been tested against it. If a new idea violates one of those lines, we don't ship it.

What we built

I started writing code in February 2025. The first version of Marvin had three screens: capture (snap a receipt), timeline (see your spending), and chat (ask Marvin a question). It worked. Barely. It was ugly. But it did the seven things on the list.

By the time you're reading this, Marvin has shipped on iOS, Android and the web. There's a five-frame welcome onboarding, currency-aware insights for 76 countries, a real conversational AI advisor, and a chunk of small refinements that don't show up in screenshots. None of the seven lines have moved.

The frustration is the feature

I think this is true of most products that are actually good. They come from someone, somewhere, having a specific frustration with the way something works, and being unwilling to live with it. Mine happened to be a bad morning with three apps. The product is the version of those three apps that I wish had existed.

If you've ever closed a money app for the same reasons I did — if you've ever felt the small humiliation of being treated like a credentialed asset instead of a person — Marvin was built for you. We hope it shows.

The privacy commitments behind point 1 and 2 of that list — read why we don't ask for your bank login and where your receipts actually live.

M

Marshall Singh · founder, Mars Enterprises

Building the Marvin family of products at Mars Enterprises — an India-born technology company going global. Marvin Money is one of them. Writes here whenever something seems worth saying. Reach me at marshall@mars.enterprises.