Why CrestCast Doesn't Connect to Your Bank Account
Open banking feeds are convenient, but they only ever show you the past. CrestCast is built entirely around numbers you enter yourself, and there's a deliberate reason for that. It isn't a missing feature.
A lot of finance apps lead with the same pitch: connect your bank account and everything happens automatically. It's a reasonable thing to expect in 2026, so it's worth explaining why CrestCast deliberately doesn't work that way.
What a bank feed actually gives you
Open banking connections pull your transaction history, which is to say what you've already spent, categorised as best the algorithm can manage. That's genuinely useful for a budgeting app, because budgeting is fundamentally a backwards-looking exercise: did we spend more than planned last month, and on what.
A forecast is a different problem. It needs to know what your mortgage rate becomes when your fixed deal ends in fourteen months, what happens to your take-home pay if you go part-time next year, and what a second child would do to your childcare bill from next September. None of that exists in a transaction history, because it hasn't happened yet. No amount of bank connectivity can hand you your own future plans.
The trust problem, not just the technical one
There's also a simpler reason. A full household forecast is used by both partners, and it holds a complete picture of your financial life: income, debts, assets and plans. Asking a household to hand real bank credentials to a third-party aggregator on top of all that is a bigger ask than most people realise until they stop and think about it.
What you enter instead
CrestCast asks you to set up your income, bills, debts and assets once, as a model of your household, not a live feed you have to police for miscategorised transactions. You update it when something actually changes: a pay rise, a new bill, a mortgage remortgage. In between, the forecast projects forward from what you told it.
- No bank credentials shared with CrestCast or any third-party aggregator
- No dependency on transaction categorisation being accurate
- No live feed to audit, so you control exactly what's in the model
- A forecast built from your actual plans, not just your spending history
It's a small amount of setup in exchange for a forecast that can actually answer the forward-looking questions a bank feed never could.
›About this post
This is an explainer about a design decision, not a modelled scenario, so there's no forecast comparison or screenshot here. The point being made (a transaction history can't tell you your own future plans) doesn't have a chart that would illustrate it any better than the argument above already does.
If you want to see what the manual-entry model actually produces, the other posts on this blog walk through real modelled examples. See "Comparing Financial Scenarios Before You Decide" for how the underlying forecast engine works.
A forecast built from your plans, not your past
Enter your income, bills and debts once and CrestCast projects your household ten years ahead, with no credential shared and nothing read from your accounts.
Start forecasting free →Interested in CrestCast?
Create your free account →