What NBU actually does.
No bank login, no daily nagging, no gimmicks. Here's the full list, feature by feature.
Works with your bank. Whatever bank that is.
Upload a statement and NBU recognizes where it came from. It knows the export formats for RBC, TD, Scotiabank, CIBC, BMO, Desjardins, National Bank, Tangerine, Simplii, and more. If your bank isn't recognized yet, a simple column mapper lets you point NBU at the right fields once, and it remembers for next time.
Here's the part that compounds: when someone maps a new bank format, NBU can offer that mapping to everyone else with the same bank. Mappings are only promoted after several people submit the same one, so they stay accurate. The more Canadians use NBU, the better it gets at reading Canadian banks. CSV is free to process. PDF costs a few Sparks, since reading a PDF takes AI and a CSV doesn't. If your bank only gives you PDF, that works too.
Your whole financial picture, side by side.
Most people's money lives in pieces: chequing at one bank, a card at another, investments somewhere else. NBU is one of the only tools that brings them together without asking for a single login. Import each account and NBU shows you total spending across all of them, plus a net worth figure that counts your savings and investments against what you owe. No bank does this for you. None of them can see your accounts at other banks, and none of them are in a rush to, since money that's easy to compare is money that's easy to move. You can see the whole picture anyway.
Valerie figures out the groceries. You handle the exceptions.
Valerie reads every transaction description and assigns a category. Most imports need only a handful of corrections. Reassign anything with two clicks, apply a fix to all similar transactions at once, and she learns as you go. Create your own categories, set monthly targets per category, and see where you're running over. Got an unknown merchant she couldn't place? Send it back for a deeper search, and she'll look it up on the web and figure out what it is.
Ask the question you've been avoiding.
Valerie knows your transactions, your categories, and your patterns. Not in a surveillance way, in a "she can actually answer you" way. Ask why spending went up, what your average grocery bill is, or whether you're on track for a savings goal. She runs the numbers and explains them. She'll also help with general questions like RRSPs, TFSAs, or debt payoff, and she'll tell you plainly when you're better off talking to a registered professional.
One number that tells you where you actually stand.
NBU calculates a Financial Health Score from three things: whether you have an emergency buffer, how you're managing credit, and which way your spending is trending. It's not a credit score. It's a private read on your own habits, from your own data. Everything that raises it is good for you, which is why we use it as the gate for the churning tools below: those only pay off once your foundation is solid.
Make the rewards work for you, not the bank.
Done well, churning is one of the most lucrative things a disciplined person can do: welcome bonuses, reward multipliers, sign-up offers. The overhead is what stops most people. NBU handles it: welcome-bonus spend targets and deadlines, cancel-by alerts before annual fees hit, cooldown tracking per card or institution, and every reward chase checked against your real spending so you don't overspend to earn a bonus.
Unlocks once your Financial Health Score is in good shape.
We don't need your bank login. And we don't want it.
Many apps pull transactions by screen-scraping or open-banking access. Both mean giving up your credentials. NBU doesn't. You download a CSV or PDF and upload it, and your banking login never touches our system. Before Valerie's AI analyzes anything, identifying details like names and account numbers are scrubbed. Your data lives in your account, and you can export or delete all of it whenever you want.
How NBU compares
Honest, no asterisks.
| NBU | YNAB | Copilot | Spreadsheet | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Works with Canadian banks | ✓ | Partial | ✗ | Manual |
| No bank login required | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Brings multiple banks into one view | ✓ | Partial | Partial | Manual |
| AI categorization | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ |
| AI chat assistant | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Credit card churning tools | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | Manual |
| Free option | ✓ (beta) | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
| French language support | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | Manual |
| Québec privacy law compliant | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | N/A |
Comparison reflects publicly available information as of 2025. We update this when things change.
One session a month. The full picture.
Free during beta. No credit card. No bank login.
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