How Ask Linc Protects Your Financial Data

If you're going to trust us with your financial information, we'd better be crystal clear about how we keep it safe.

Money is personal. Connecting your bank accounts, investment portfolios, and property data to a new tool can feel unsettling. So let's talk about exactly what happens with your data inside Ask Linc — and just as importantly, what doesn't.

We Never See Your Bank Login

When you connect a bank or credit account through Plaid, the entire login happens inside Plaid's secure interface — not inside Ask Linc. Your username, password, and security codes go directly to Plaid and never pass through our servers. We only receive a secure token that allows us to request specific data you've approved. That token cannot be used to log in to your bank, move money, or change anything in your account.

The same applies to investment accounts connected through SnapTrade. Whether you're linking a Fidelity 401(k), a Vanguard IRA, a Robinhood account, or a brokerage at Charles Schwab or TD Ameritrade, the authentication happens through SnapTrade's secure OAuth flow. We get read-only access to your holdings and transaction history — nothing more.

We Don't Store Your Credentials — Ever

Ask Linc never stores your banking passwords, investment account passwords, or full credit card numbers. Period.

What we do store — securely — are the things necessary to give you a useful financial picture: account balances, transaction history, portfolio holdings, and your profile information. All of it is encrypted at rest using AES-256-GCM encryption. None of it includes your login credentials.

The Dual-Layer Anonymization System

This is where Ask Linc is fundamentally different from simply giving an AI chatbot access to your financial data.

A lot of AI tools work by feeding your raw data directly into a language model. If you handed a system like that your complete transaction history, all of it — your actual account names, merchant names, account numbers — would be inside the AI's processing environment.

We don't do that.

Our system uses two completely separate layers:

1. The sensitive financial data layer — Your real account names, merchant names, investment holdings, and identifiers live here. This layer is isolated and never comes into direct contact with the AI model.

2. The anonymized context layer — Before any data reaches the AI, it's tokenized. "Chase Checking" becomes "Account_1." "Amazon" becomes "Merchant_1." "AAPL" becomes "Security_1." The AI analyzes this anonymized version and returns its response, which we then translate back into your real names before displaying it to you.

The result: you see your actual account names and meaningful answers; the AI never sees them at all.

Encryption Everywhere

All data moving through Ask Linc is encrypted in transit over HTTPS and encrypted at rest using AES-256-GCM. Your user profile — including any home address used for property valuation — is encrypted with a unique initialization vector. This isn't checkbox compliance; it's the baseline we hold ourselves to.

Read-Only Access, Always

Ask Linc cannot move your money. It cannot initiate transfers, make trades, or change anything in your connected accounts. All connections are strictly read-only. This is true for bank accounts via Plaid, investment accounts via SnapTrade, and every other integration we support.

Your Complete Financial Picture, Still Private

Beyond banking, Ask Linc can incorporate your investment portfolio, home value (via RentCast property valuations), and manually added accounts like real estate or other assets. More data means more accurate analysis — and our anonymization system applies uniformly across all of it. Your home address is encrypted at rest; your investment holdings are tokenized before AI processing.

No Selling. No Shady Sharing.

We don't sell your data. We don't rent it. We don't share it with advertising partners. Your financial data exists in Ask Linc for one purpose: to help you understand and improve your finances.

You Control Your Data

You can disconnect any account, delete your data, or close your account entirely at any time from within Ask Linc. We don't lock up your information or make it difficult to leave. It's your data.

Security Isn't an Afterthought

From day one, security and privacy have been architectural decisions, not features added after the fact. The dual-layer anonymization system, the read-only access model, the encryption standards — these exist because we built Ask Linc the way we'd want a financial tool built for ourselves.

If you have specific questions about our security practices, reach out. We'd rather over-explain than leave you guessing.