Privacy Policy

Notho (“we”, “our”, or “us”) is a South African personal-finance learning app available at notho.co.za. We are committed to protecting your personal information in accordance with the Protection of Personal Information Act, 2013 (POPIA) and applicable data-protection regulations.

This Privacy Policy explains what personal information we collect, why we collect it, how we use it, and what rights you have. By using Notho you agree to the practices described here.

Notho was previously called Fundi Finance. Only the name has changed. The app is operated by the same company, The Solution Org (Pty) Ltd, and this policy continues to apply to information collected under the former name. Nothing about how we handle your data changed with the rename.

We collect the following categories of information:

• Account information - your email address and, where the provider makes them available, your name and profile photo if you sign in with Apple, Google, or Facebook. Apple lets you use a private relay email address instead of sharing your personal address with us.
• Learning progress - lessons completed, XP earned, streaks, quiz answers, and in-app challenge data.
• Financial inputs - expense logs, budget figures, and financial goals you enter voluntarily within the app.
• Imported bank transactions - if you choose to upload a bank statement, the transaction rows we extract from it (date, amount, description, category). See Section 4a for how the file itself is handled.
• Coach conversations - the questions you ask Cosmo, our optional AI money coach, and its replies. Only stored if you switch Cosmo on. See Section 9.
• Notification subscriptions - if you opt in to push notifications. See Section 4b.
• Usage data - features you interact with, session timestamps, and device/browser type, collected for analytics and app improvement.
• Diagnostics - crash reports and error logs, so we can find and fix what breaks.

We do not collect payment card details, bank account numbers, banking login credentials, South African ID numbers, or your location.

Your information is used to:

• Provide, personalise, and sync your learning experience across devices.
• Calculate and display your XP, streaks, and leaderboard ranking.
• Send optional in-app notifications about your progress or new content.
• Improve app features through anonymised, aggregated analytics.
• Comply with legal obligations under South African law.

We do not sell your personal information to third parties or use it to serve advertisements.

We share your data only with trusted service providers necessary to operate the app:

• Supabase - our database and authentication provider, hosting data on servers in the European Union under GDPR-compliant terms.
• Vercel - our web-hosting provider, for serving the app.
• Apple, Google & Meta (Facebook) - solely for OAuth sign-in; we receive only the account profile data you authorise during the login flow. Apple may provide a private relay email address instead of your personal address.
• Google (Gemini API) - powers Cosmo, our optional AI money coach. Cosmo is switched off until you turn it on. When you do, we send Google only an anonymised summary of your budget: category totals and monthly income. We never send your name, email, merchant names, transaction descriptions, or any other identifying detail. See Section 9 for the full explanation.
• PostHog - product analytics, so we can see which features are used and where the app breaks. Used for aggregate measurement only; we do not use it to track you across other apps or websites, and we do not run advertising.
• Resend - sends our transactional email (welcome messages, budget alerts, and replies to your requests). Receives your email address and the contents of that message only.

These providers are contractually prohibited from using your data for their own purposes. We do not sell your personal information, we do not share it with advertisers, and we do not share it with any other third party except as required by South African law or a court order.

Notho never connects to your bank. We do not ask for your banking username, password, PIN, or one-time PIN, and we have no ability to log into your account or move money. The only way your transactions reach Notho is if you export a statement from your bank and upload it yourself.

When you upload a statement, the file is read on our server in memory only in order to extract the transaction rows. The file itself is never written to disk and never stored. What we keep is the extracted transaction data - date, amount, description, and the category it was sorted into - saved against your account so your budget works across devices.

You can delete any imported batch from within the Budget screen, or erase everything at once by deleting your account (Section 8).

If you opt in to notifications, we store a push subscription for your device - an endpoint URL and the encryption keys your browser generates. This lets us send reminders about your streak, budget alerts, and new content. It contains no personal information and cannot be used to identify you outside the app.

You can turn notifications off at any time in Settings, or in your browser or device settings. Doing so deletes the subscription.

We retain your account and learning data for as long as your account is active. If you request deletion (see Section 7), we will remove your personal information from our systems within 30 days, except where retention is required by law.

Anonymised, aggregated analytics data (with no link to you personally) may be retained indefinitely for product-improvement purposes.

Exit feedback. If you choose to tell us why you are leaving - when you delete your account, unsubscribe from our emails, or reply to a “what happened?” email - we keep that answer after your account is gone. This is the only way we can learn what to fix, since by definition we can no longer ask you.

What we keep is deliberately anonymous: the reason you selected, any comment you chose to write, and general context such as how many days you had been signed up and how many lessons you had finished. It is not linked to your name, email address, or account - your account identifier is replaced with a one-way code that cannot be reversed to identify you. Answering is always optional, and you can skip the question entirely without it affecting your deletion request in any way. If you wrote a comment and would like it removed, email privacy@notho.co.za.

Your learning progress (lessons completed, XP, streaks, quiz results, challenges, and budget entries you save) is stored securely in our database and linked to your account when you are signed in, so it can sync across devices.

We place a few small first-party cookies on your device for non-sensitive preferences only - for example dark mode, whether you have finished the first-time onboarding flow, and whether you dismissed the “add to home screen” prompt. These values are not used to identify you beyond the app experience.

Some in-app toggles (such as sound effects) apply for your current browser session only and are not written to persistent storage on your device.

We do not store your account progress, scores, or other sensitive personal data in your browser's local storage or session storage APIs. Session cookies are used where needed for authentication. We do not use advertising or tracking cookies.

Under POPIA and applicable law, you have the right to:

• Access - request a copy of the personal information we hold about you.
• Correct - ask us to fix inaccurate or incomplete information.
• Delete - request that we delete your personal information (see Section 8 below for Facebook data-deletion instructions).
• Object - object to the processing of your data in certain circumstances.
• Portability - receive your data in a machine-readable format.

To exercise any of these rights, contact us at support@notho.co.za. We will respond within 30 days.

You can request complete deletion of your Notho account and all associated personal data at any time.

The fastest way - delete it yourself, instantly:

1. Open Settings in the app.
2. Tap Delete My Data. We will ask why you are leaving - this is optional, there is a Skip button, and skipping does not delay or affect your deletion in any way.
3. Confirm. Your account and every piece of data attached to it - budget entries, imported transactions, learning progress, XP, coach conversations, and notification subscriptions - are erased immediately. This cannot be undone.

You can also export everything we hold on you from the same Settings screen before you delete, if you want a copy.

Or request deletion by email:

1. Email support@notho.co.za with the subject line “Data Deletion Request” and the email address associated with your account.
2. We will verify your identity and confirm receipt within 5 business days.
3. Your account and all personal data will be permanently deleted from our systems within 30 days of verification.

If you signed in with Facebook, you may also initiate deletion directly via the Facebook platform: go to Facebook Settings → Apps and Websites → Notho → Remove. While our rename is completing, this may still be listed as Fundi Finance; both refer to the same app. This will revoke our access token. To ensure full deletion of your data from our servers, please also send us the deletion email above.

After deletion you will lose all learning progress, XP, and account history permanently. This action cannot be undone.

The one thing that is not erased is the anonymous exit feedback described in Section 5, if you chose to give any. It carries no name, email address, or account identifier, so it cannot be traced back to you or used to rebuild your account.

Cosmo is an optional AI assistant inside Notho that answers questions about your own budget in plain language. It is powered by Google's Gemini model. Cosmo is switched off by default and sends nothing until you explicitly turn it on.

What Cosmo is sent. Only an anonymised summary of your budget: totals per spending category, your monthly income figure, and the question you typed. That is all.

What Cosmo is never sent. Your name, email address, user ID, merchant names, individual transaction descriptions, account numbers, or anything else that could identify you or where you shop.

Limits and safeguards. Cosmo is restricted to financial education. It is instructed never to recommend or name specific financial products, providers, funds, shares, or cryptocurrencies, and to point you to a registered financial adviser for anything product-related. Usage is capped at 10 messages per day per person. Conversations are logged on our servers so we can review for abuse and improve safety, and they are deleted along with the rest of your data if you delete your account.

AI makes mistakes. Cosmo can be wrong, and it is not a financial adviser. Treat its answers as a starting point for your own thinking, never as advice to act on. If a response looks wrong or inappropriate, please report it to support@notho.co.za.

You can withdraw consent at any time in Settings. Cosmo stops immediately, and no further data is sent to Google.

If you have questions about this Privacy Policy or our data practices, please contact us:

If you are not satisfied with our response, you may lodge a complaint with the Information Regulator of South Africa at inforegulator.org.za.