Project brief · Seeking founding funders
An anonymous, free AI guide that helps people understand their financial situation in their own language, and act on it themselves. This is what we are going to build, and why.
01The moment
Fatma is 67. She came from Turkey fifteen years ago, and her world is her community: neighbours, family, a life lived in Turkish. Her husband handled the money. Not always well, if she is honest; she had her own ideas about these things. But things got sorted, and for fifteen years that was enough. Three weeks ago he suddenly passed away.
Her anchor is gone, and with him every certainty about how life works. She does not know what accounts exist, what is owed, what is due. Her community shows up: people come, they cook, they sit. There is real love here. But in her culture you do not show financial struggle to the people closest to you, so the ones who would help without hesitation are exactly the ones she cannot ask. And the official help speaks Dutch, wants an appointment, and asks her to explain herself to a stranger. So she stays silent, while the envelopes pile up on the table and she cannot tell which are urgent and which are already too late.
What she needs is not rescue. She needs to know where she stands, what exists for her, and what to do first, so she can handle it herself and remain the person her family has always known her to be. Sometimes there is luck: a neighbour who notices, cares, and happens to know finance. Most people do not have that neighbour. Financial Kompas is built for everyone who does not.
The mechanism is proven. More than half of Dutch adults already ask AI about money questions; among young people, three in four. And Tikkie showed what happens when the social friction around money is removed: millions of people act. What is missing is not the behaviour. It is a tool built for the people with the most at stake.
02What it will do
The letter from the tax office, the debt collector or the municipality, explained in plain words. In your language.
Benefits, pension, debt arrangements, rights: what exists, where to find it, and what the first step is.
Not just Dutch and English. The languages that people with nowhere else to go actually think in.
No account, no storage, no trace. Close the conversation and it is gone.
No ads, no premium tier, no user data as a business model. There is no business model.
Financial Kompas does not give advice and does not replace professionals. It gives people the understanding and confidence to take the right next step themselves.
| What it takes | Financial Kompas | Municipal debt help | NIBUD | General AI |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Available now, no appointment | Yes | No | Partly | Yes |
| Multilingual | Yes | No | No | Yes |
| Anonymous, no shame threshold | Yes | No | Partly | No |
| Free | Yes | Yes | Yes | Partly |
| Vetted Dutch-specific knowledge | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
| Privacy-first architecture | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
Nobody has built the thing in between: a tool as accessible as ChatGPT, as trustworthy as NIBUD, and as private as a locked diary. That is exactly what Financial Kompas will be.
03How it will work
Sensitive information is processed locally or anonymised before anything reaches a language model. Names, addresses and case details never leave the device in identifiable form.
The knowledge layer of schemes, rights and routes is maintained by Kompas, based on authoritative Dutch sources, and will be validated by institutions such as NIBUD.
No accounts, no storage, no tracking. Not because a regulator demands it, but because the people we build for would rightly stay away otherwise.
The hardest people to reach are the ones no statistic sees. Some people stand in no queue and appear in no dataset, because being seen carries a cost they cannot pay. For them anonymity is not a feature. It is the precondition for any help at all.
This is not a startup that discovered privacy as a selling point. The founders spent thirty years building systems where the data of millions of customers had to be safe. Read who is behind Kompas.
04The route
The first phase takes tens of thousands of euros, not millions. It funds the first version and the knowledge layer.
No language goes live before validation by native speakers. Quality before speed.
With a library or municipality, in the place where people already turn for help.
More languages, and one outcome that counts: did someone know their next step afterwards.
The same problem exists across Europe. The model is built to travel.
05The invitation
The first funder does not fund a proven product. They fund the team, the plan and the architecture that make it possible. That is what the project brief is for: everything you need to discuss this internally.