It depends on how the bank is connected, not on the country alone. There are three cases, and only the first is automatic.
United States and Canada: connected through Plaid
These are the only two countries where Finthy keeps a bank up to date on its own, and it needs a paid plan. On the free plan the Connect automatically card carries a padlock and takes you to the upgrade screen.
- Transactions arrive when your bank reports activity. Plaid notifies Finthy and Finthy pulls the new transactions in, usually within minutes of your bank posting them. There is no fixed hourly schedule, because the bank decides when it posts.
- Balances are refreshed once a day as well, in the early hours UTC, for every connected bank. This exists precisely because those notifications only fire when there is transaction activity: a quiet account, a savings account for example, would otherwise keep showing an old balance.
There is no refresh button, and no pull to refresh. You cannot force a sync from Finthy. The one thing in your hands is reconnecting, below.
The US list is Plaid’s own, so it runs to thousands of banks and credit unions rather than a short selection. Canada covers the major banks.
What you can see on the Banks page
Each connected bank shows its state, so you can tell waiting from broken:
- Pending, Syncing, Synced: normal states while a sync is queued, running or finished.
- Last synced, with the time it last completed.
- Sync Failed: the last attempt did not work. It is retried on its own.
- Action Required: the connection needs you. See the next section.
- New Accounts Available: the bank now exposes an account you have not added yet.
When automatic sync stops
Two badges mean the connection needs you, and neither is a bug:
- Expires with a date. Your bank asks you to reconnect before that date to keep syncing. Banks require this periodically; it is their rule, not ours.
- Reconnect needed. The connection stopped syncing.
Use Reconnect on that bank and sign in again. Nothing is lost by reconnecting.
If you would rather not reconnect, Keep manually turns the bank into a manual one without losing any of its accounts, balances or history. From then on you update it yourself. If the bank later syncs again, Move accounts matches each manual account to its synced counterpart and brings your older history across.
Mexico: Banamex, Banorte and HSBC México
For these three the Finthy Chrome extension captures transactions while you are signed into your bank’s own website. Log into the bank as usual, click the Finthy extension icon, follow the prompts, and the transactions appear in Finthy within moments.
This is not a background sync. Nothing arrives while you are away from your bank’s site, so you decide the frequency by how often you visit. Every other Mexican bank is manual, as below.
Everywhere else: you decide when
In Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Colombia, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Belgium, Ireland and Switzerland, banks are manual. Your transactions are up to date the moment you:
- import a statement (PDF, CSV, OFX, QFX, XLSX, JPG, PNG or HEIC, up to 10 MB, read for you with AI),
- forward a statement by email to your personal Finthy import address, then review it, or
- enter transactions yourself.
The free plan includes one statement import per account each month. Nothing about a manual account is second class: budgets, the calendar, reports, exports and Finthy AI treat it exactly like a synced one.
Good to know
- Finthy runs in a browser, on a desktop and on a phone. The native iOS and Android apps are on our roadmap, so there is no app to pull to refresh in. The Chrome extension needs a desktop browser.
- Connecting the same bank twice is worth avoiding. Finthy warns you, because two connections to one bank produce duplicate transactions.