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UAE: Yabi app uses AI to help you track your spends, budget
An app tracking your personal expenditure gives a real-time view of where your hard-earned cash goes
- PUBLISHED: Fri 7 Mar 2025, 2:17 PM
- By:
- Justin Harper
As humans, we often prefer to stick our heads in the sand and ignore uncomfortable truths. How much we spend on food delivery apps like Uber Eats and Deliveroo every month is one of those dreaded truths. But a financial app has just been relaunched that now uses artificial intelligence (AI) to track your spending to give you a real-time view of where your hard-earned cash goes. So, no more burying your head in the sand when it comes to your finances.
It’s called Yabi and it is quickly gaining users who want to be able to budget better and save more of their salaries. It uses AI to track your spending by securely connecting to your bank and credit card accounts. This might sound scary, but Yabi doesn’t actually have access to your accounts, and the data is fully encrypted.
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Rakhil Fernando, CEO of Yabi, explained how the app can offer actionable insights linked to your financial goals. “The way we position it for a user is, having your own AI personal financial coach in your pocket at any time you need it. The whole experience is around AI learning your existing financial behaviour — how you spend your money, how you manage your budgets, what your income is, what your financial commitments are each month.”
So, whether someone wants to save for a down payment on a house or a car, manage credit card debt, or simply determine if they can afford the latest iPhone, Yabi provides data-driven guidance based on actual spending habits.
Learning while earning
As part of its relaunch, Yabi looked at the traditional way financial education is provided — typically long videos and static tutorials — and decided to change its approach. “Before, we had three-minute training videos, but we’ve now condensed them into under a minute. We took inspiration from Instagram Reels and TikTok to make financial education engaging and easy to digest.”
Yabi primarily targets individuals between 25 and 35 years old, a demographic making major financial decisions — buying homes, starting families, and investing for the first time. “We want to reach users before they develop poor financial habits, so they avoid common pitfalls like lack of savings or overspending,” Fernando adds.
Unlike many fintech platforms, Yabi is currently free to use, with no subscription fees. But as it scales, the company has devised a monetisation strategy: curated financial products.
We want to reach users before they develop poor financial habits, so they avoid common pitfalls like lack of savings or overspending"
Rakhil Fernando, Ceo, Yabi
“Our first product will likely be a money market fund,” says Fernando. “Many users leave money sitting in their accounts earning no interest. With Yabi, we can identify surplus funds and offer an easy way to invest them in a high-yield savings product.” Yabi also aims to introduce prepaid debit cards.
The app has already observed some startling financial behaviour through its annual savings survey. It found that
54 per cent of respondents aren’t saving at all, and many are spending more than they earn. In Dubai especially, many workers are dining out frequently while others are buying designer labels and the latest electronic gadgets often.
“Consumer spending in the UAE is incredibly high,” Fernando says. “Take, for example, individuals earning Dh3,000–Dh4,000 per month. Many still buy the latest iPhone, which is nearly their entire monthly salary.”
This is where Yabi comes in — helping users identify spending patterns and curb unnecessary expenses — whether it’s frequent food delivery orders, excessive Uber rides, or impulse shopping.
But the savings gap is not just among young people on spending sprees. When it comes to retirement planning, nearly 70 per cent of individuals in the GCC who are within 10 years of retirement have no financial plan. Experts have called it a savings crisis.
Money and machine learning
Artificial intelligence seems to be changing every facet of our working and personal lives, especially when it comes to personal finance. And Fernando has witnessed AI’s rapid advancement firsthand since taking the helm of Yabi seven months ago. “The speed at which AI is improving is mind-blowing,” he says.
As AI develops, one of Yabi’s goals is to make financial planning more engaging and accessible. Features like goal tracking, spending nudges, and gamification are in development, allowing users to compete in savings challenges and stay motivated.
As the new kid on the block, Yabi knows it needs to do things differently to stand out from the crowd. For example, its new brand identity is intentionally different from traditional financial institutions. The company uses a fox mascot to symbolise intelligence and agility—akin to Duolingo’s approach to language learning.
“Our goal is to make Yabi a habit,” Fernando says. “We want people to think, ‘Let me ask Yabi before I make this purchase.’ If we can achieve that, we’ve truly changed how people approach their finances.”