Your money, your data: what we collect and what we never sell

There is a reason so many of us hesitate before handing an app our information. We have watched data become a product — collected for one reason, then quietly sold, rented, and reassembled into a profile that follows us around the internet. That instinct to hold back is healthy, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a privacy policy written to be skimmed.

So this is the plain version of Mela’s posture on your data: what we collect, why we collect it, and the things we will not do with it. This is not about how we verify your identity at sign-up — we wrote a separate post on that. This one is about the data itself, where it lives, and where it stops.

What we collect, and the only two reasons we do

Everything Mela holds about you exists for one of two reasons. Either it is needed to run your account, or it is required by regulation. There is no third bucket, and the third bucket is exactly where most companies keep the data they later sell.

To run your account, we hold the basics: who you are, your contact details, your linked funding source, and the record of your transactions — the money you have moved, when, and to whom. We cannot send dollars to family in Addis without knowing the dollars are yours and where they are going. That is the operating data, and it is genuinely necessary; an account that does not remember your balance is not an account.

To meet regulation, we hold what US financial rules require every banking-adjacent product to keep — identifying information and a record of activity that regulators expect institutions to maintain. We would rather name that plainly than gesture at “compliance.” These rules are not optional, and they are the same ones a credit union down the street operates under.

That is the whole list. We do not collect data we have no use for on the theory that it might be worth something someday.

What we never do

This is the part that matters most, so we will be blunt about it.

We do not sell your personal information. Not to data brokers, not to advertisers, not to anyone. There is no arrangement where your transaction history becomes someone else’s revenue.

We do not rent or share your data with marketers. The fact that you are a Mela customer is not a signal we hand to other companies, and no outside app can query whether you bank with us.

We do not mine your spending to target ads at you. Your transactions tell a quiet story — where you shop, who you support, what you are saving toward. That story is yours. We do not read it to sell you things, and we do not let anyone else read it either.

And we do not build a profile of you to monetize. The record we keep exists to operate your account and satisfy regulators. It does not exist to be packaged.

Who does see your data — and why

Being honest about “we never sell it” means being equally honest that your data does touch a few outside hands to make the product work. Every one of them is bound by a formal data-processing agreement, and none of them get your data to use for their own purposes:

• The providers who verify identity at sign-up.
• Plaid, which links your US bank — and which sees your bank login, not us; we only receive a token to move money on your authorization.
• Our US-regulated banking and payment partners, who operate under their own strict rules.
• Anti-fraud services that help catch stolen-card funding and fake identities, which protects your account as much as ours.

The line that runs through all of these is the same: data moves to a partner only to do a specific job you are asking us to do. It never moves so someone can sell it.

Why a community-owned product treats this differently

There is a structural reason to trust this beyond our saying so. When the company holding your data is built by and for the community using it, your information is not the business model. Mela earns its keep by moving money well at the best legal rate and being the account the diaspora actually wants — not by turning your spending history into ad inventory. The incentive to mine you simply is not there, because the money is made on the banking, not on you.

That is the difference between a product where you are the customer and one where you are the inventory. We intend to stay the first kind, and the cleanest way to prove it is to collect less, name what we keep, and sell none of it.

The counsel-reviewed Privacy Policy in the footer is the operative document, and it says all of this in the binding language. This post is just the version you can read without a lawyer.

በመተማመን። — in trust.