Privacy Policy
Poet Money, LLC ("Company," "we," "us," or "our") operates Via Texts, an SMS-based personal finance awareness platform (the "Service"). This Privacy Policy describes how we collect, use, store, share, and protect information when you use the Service.
If you do not agree with our practices as described, you should not use the Service.
1. Information We Collect
We collect information reasonably necessary to provide and improve the Service.
1.1 Personal Information
- Phone number (required to use the Service)
- Name, email address, and account credentials, if and when you create an account
- Information you provide when contacting support
1.2 Financial Information
When you use the Service, you connect your bank account through Plaid, our third-party financial data provider.
- You authenticate directly with your bank or financial institution through Plaid's connection flow.
- We do not collect, store, or have access to your online banking login credentials or password.
- We do not receive your full bank account or routing number — Plaid provides us with a tokenized reference to your linked account, not the underlying numbers.
Once you authorize a connection, we receive and store:
- Transaction-level data (amount, merchant/description, and date)
- The name of the financial institution you connected
- The available balance of your checking and savings accounts, where you have asked us a question that requires it (see below)
We do not receive account ownership details (such as your legal name or mailing address as held by your bank) through this connection. We request only the minimum data access needed to deliver your spending digests and summaries.
About account balances. If you ask us whether you can afford a specific purchase and we do not yet have enough transaction history to answer from your spending patterns, we retrieve and store the available balance of your linked checking and savings accounts so we can tell you whether you currently have enough cash. We store a single, most-recent balance figure per account holder — not a history of your balances over time. We do not retrieve balances from credit card, loan, or investment accounts. Balance information is used only to answer that question and is never used for advertising, profiling, or any purpose beyond responding to you.
1.3 Usage and Device Information
We may automatically collect:
- Device type, browser type, and operating system (for the web-based onboarding and dashboard)
- IP address and approximate location
- Usage patterns and feature interactions
- SMS delivery status and carrier metadata
1.4 Communications
- Messages and support requests you send us
- SMS message content and delivery metadata associated with your account
1.5 Information From Third Parties
We may receive information from:
- Plaid (financial connections and transaction data)
- Your financial institution, via Plaid
- SMS carriers (delivery and opt-out status)
- Analytics providers
1.6 Inferred and Derived Information
Plaid supplies a spending category for each transaction as part of its enrichment. We store that category as provided, and in some cases resolve it to a more specific category when answering a question (for example, treating a rideshare charge as its own category rather than as general transport).
From your transaction data we also calculate summary figures — such as daily and weekly spending totals, category totals, and comparisons against your own past spending. These derived figures exist to provide the core functionality of the Service (your SMS digests and summaries).
1.7 Sensitive Personal Information
We treat your financial account information as sensitive personal information. This includes your transaction data and the available balance of your linked checking and savings accounts. We take this position deliberately, and we apply it regardless of whether a particular category of this data meets the statutory definition of "sensitive personal information" under any specific privacy law.
We use sensitive personal information solely to provide the Service. Specifically, we do not:
- Use it to build profiles about you for any purpose unrelated to the Service
- Use it for cross-context behavioral advertising
- Sell it or share it, as those terms are defined under applicable law
- Disclose it to third parties beyond what is necessary to operate the Service, as described in Section 5
2. How We Use Information
We use information for legitimate business purposes, including to:
- Provide, operate, and maintain the Service
- Deliver SMS spending digests and weekly spending summaries
- Group your transactions into spending categories, using the category data Plaid provides
- Authenticate users and prevent fraud
- Respond to support requests
- Improve features and functionality
- Comply with legal obligations
- Enforce our Terms of Service
- Protect rights, property, and safety
We collect and process information only as reasonably necessary for these purposes.
3. Text Messaging (SMS) Consent
The Service is delivered primarily by SMS. By providing your phone number and completing sign-up, you consent to receive text messages from us, including daily spending digests, weekly spending summaries, budget-related messages (such as spending suggestions, budget check-ins, and offer reminders), and account-related messages (such as bank-link confirmations).
- Message and data rates may apply.
- Message frequency varies based on your spending activity and settings.
- Reply STOP at any time to opt out of messages. You will receive one final confirmation message.
- Reply HELP for support.
- Opting out of SMS will prevent us from delivering the core Service, since Via Texts does not currently offer an alternative delivery method.
By tapping "Connect your bank & start texting," you agree to receive recurring automated text messages (including daily spending digests, weekly spending summaries, and budget alerts) from Via Texts at the number provided. Consent is not a condition of purchase. Message frequency varies. Msg & data rates may apply. Reply STOP to cancel, HELP for help.
Text messaging originator opt-in data and consent will not be shared with any third parties for marketing or promotional purposes.
Via Texts sends transactional SMS related to your account activity, budgets, and spending. These are not marketing messages, and you may not opt out of them selectively while remaining an active user, since they are core to how the Service works. You may cancel your account entirely at any time to stop all messages.
4. AI and Automated Processing
We use AI systems, including third-party AI infrastructure providers, for two narrow purposes: to interpret the text messages you send us, so we can work out what you are asking; and to word some of the answers we send back to you.
AI never calculates your money. Every figure we send you — every amount, comparison, budget number, and category — is calculated by our own systems directly from your transaction data, before any AI is involved. AI may describe and interpret those figures — for example, telling you that a category is running higher than usual for you, or suggesting you hold off on a purchase — but it may not change a figure, invent one, or make a claim our own calculations do not support. Every AI-worded message is checked automatically against the figures we calculated, and anything that adds a number, reverses a comparison, or asserts something we did not compute is discarded in favour of our standard wording. AI does not tell you whether you can afford something; that is a separate calculation of our own, and messages claiming otherwise are rejected.
Keeping track of a conversation. So that we can follow a back-and-forth — understanding “where?” or “wait, I meant food” without making you repeat yourself — we temporarily keep the last few messages of a conversation in progress. This is limited to the most recent handful of messages, is deleted after an hour of inactivity, and is discarded as soon as the conversation ends. We do not build a long-term record of your conversations from it.
Your daily digests and weekly summaries are not AI-worded; they are assembled from fixed templates.
We do not send your transaction history to AI providers. AI systems that word a reply receive only the figures we calculated for the question you asked.
Spending categories are supplied by Plaid's own transaction enrichment, not generated by our AI systems.
We do not use your personal financial information to train publicly available large language models, and we do not share your data with AI providers for any purpose beyond processing your own messages.
5. How We Share Information
We do not sell personal information as defined under applicable law. We do not sell or share your data with third parties for marketing or promotional purposes. We share data with third parties only when strictly necessary to deliver the Service, and only under agreements that require confidentiality and restrict use of your data to that purpose.
5.1 Service Providers
We share information with vendors who help operate the Service, including:
- Plaid (financial account connections and transaction data)
- Cloud hosting and infrastructure providers
- SMS and telecommunications providers
- AI infrastructure providers (for interpreting the messages you send us, and for wording some replies from figures we have already calculated)
- Analytics providers
Service providers are contractually obligated to use information only to provide services to us.
5.2 Business Transfers
Information may be transferred in connection with a merger, acquisition, financing, or sale of assets.
5.3 Legal Compliance
We may disclose information to:
- Comply with law, regulation, subpoena, or court order
- Enforce agreements
- Protect rights, safety, and security
- Investigate fraud or illegal activity
5.4 Aggregated or De-Identified Data
We may share aggregated or de-identified information that cannot reasonably identify you.
5.5 With Your Consent
We may share information when you direct us to do so.
6. Data Retention
We retain personal information for as long as necessary to provide the Service, comply with legal obligations, resolve disputes, and enforce agreements.
Disconnecting your bank account does not delete data we have already stored. If you disconnect a linked account through Plaid, we stop receiving new data from it, but the financial data we already hold remains stored. This applies to both your transaction history and any balance figure we have stored for you. A stored balance figure stays in place until it is overwritten by a later refresh or deleted at your request — disconnecting alone does not remove it.
To have this data deleted, make a deletion request as described in Section 8.1.
We may retain de-identified or aggregated data that cannot reasonably be used to identify you. We do not attempt to re-identify such information.
7. Data Security
We implement commercially reasonable safeguards, including:
- Encryption in transit
- Encryption at rest
- Role-based access controls
- Administrative and technical security measures
However, no method of transmission or storage is completely secure. In the event of a security incident involving personal information, we will provide notice as required by applicable law.
8. Your Rights and Choices
Depending on your jurisdiction, you may have rights to:
- Access personal information
- Correct inaccurate information
- Delete personal information
- Restrict or object to certain processing
We will respond to verified requests in accordance with applicable law. We may require identity verification before processing requests.
8.1 Data Deletion
You may request deletion of your account by contacting hello@poet-money.com. We may retain certain information as required by law or for legitimate business purposes.
8.2 Marketing Opt-Out
You may unsubscribe from promotional communications at any time. Transactional messages related to your account may still be sent unless you opt out entirely via STOP.
8.3 Disconnecting Your Bank Account
You may disconnect your bank account via Plaid at any time. Previously collected financial data — including your transaction history and any stored balance figure — remains stored as described in Section 6, and is not deleted by disconnecting. To have it deleted, make a deletion request under Section 8.1.
8.4 Do Not Track
We do not currently respond to browser "Do Not Track" signals.
9. Children's Privacy
The Service is not intended for individuals under 18. We do not knowingly collect information from children.
10. International Transfers
Information is processed and stored in the United States. Some of our service providers may process data using infrastructure located in the United States or other countries. By using the Service, you consent to such transfers.
11. Changes to This Privacy Policy
We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. If we make material changes, we will provide notice as required by applicable law. Continued use of the Service after updates constitutes acceptance of the revised Policy.
12. California Privacy Rights
If you are a California resident, you may have rights under the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA).
We do not sell personal information as defined under California law.
Categories of Personal Information (CCPA/CPRA)
| Category | Examples | Collected | Disclosed to Service Providers | Sold/Shared |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Identifiers | Phone number, email | Yes | Yes | No |
| Financial Data | Transactions, checking/savings available balance | Yes | Yes | No |
| Internet Activity | IP, browser | Yes | Yes | No |
To exercise applicable rights, contact: hello@poet-money.com
13. Governing Law
This Privacy Policy is governed by the laws of the United States and the State of Delaware, without regard to conflict of law principles.
Disputes are governed by the dispute resolution provisions in our Terms of Service.
14. Contact Information
Poet Money, LLC
Email: hello@poet-money.com
15. Severability
If any provision is held invalid, the remaining provisions remain in full force and effect.
16. Entire Agreement
This Privacy Policy, together with our Terms of Service, constitutes the entire agreement regarding privacy practices.