Bring Your Own Connections
Connect UK and European banks to Forbidden Finance through Lunch Flow, a service you subscribe to directly. Available on Starter and above, and these connections never count against your plan's connection limit.
Overview
Bring your own connections is a connection rail for UK and European banks. Instead of connecting through our aggregator network, you bring your own subscription to Lunch Flow — an open banking service that reaches around 2,300 banks across the UK and EU — and Forbidden Finance reads your accounts from there.
Because you pay Lunch Flow directly for the connection, these accounts are free of our connection limits. However many banks you link this way, none of them count against the 5 connections on Starter or the 15 on Pro.
What You Need
- Tier: Starter or above. The Free tier is manual-only and does not include any bank connections.
- A Lunch Flow subscription. This is a separate service with its own paid plan, billed by Lunch Flow, not by Forbidden Finance. Your receipts, billing questions, and password resets all come from Lunch Flow. See their site for current pricing.
- A bank Lunch Flow supports — UK and EU institutions.
How to Connect
Open the add-account screen
Go to the Accounts tab and tap Add Account or the + button.
Choose Bring your own connections
Scroll to the Bring your own connections section and tap the Lunch Flow card. A short summary explains the setup before you go anywhere.
Sign up or log in at Lunch Flow
You are handed off to Lunch Flow. We pre-fill your email address so you do not have to type it, but the account is yours — you set the password and you manage it there. If you already have a Lunch Flow account, log in with it.
Subscribe and link your banks
Complete Lunch Flow's checkout, then pick the banks you want to link and authenticate with each one. Your bank credentials go to your bank, never to Lunch Flow's or our servers.
Come back to Forbidden Finance
Tap the return link. Your accounts import automatically, usually within a few minutes. Each bank appears as its own card, with its own name and logo.
How Your Accounts Appear
One Lunch Flow subscription can hold several banks at once. Forbidden Finance shows each bank as a separate account card — a Monzo card and a Wise card, rather than one card called "Lunch Flow" — so your accounts screen reads the same way it does for every other connection.
Transactions, balances, and currencies all flow in normally, and multi-currency accounts keep their own currency.
Syncing
Accounts on this rail sync daily. You can also pull to refresh at any time.
Lunch Flow refreshes your data from your bank on its own schedule, so a pull-to-refresh brings in whatever Lunch Flow has received so far.
Adding or Removing Banks Later
Banks on this rail are managed inside your Lunch Flow account, not in Forbidden Finance.
- To add a bank: open Lunch Flow, link the new bank there, and it appears in Forbidden Finance on the next sync.
- To remove a bank: remove it in Lunch Flow. Forbidden Finance notices on the next sync and marks that account as no longer shared, so you can clear it from your accounts screen.
The Remove bank option on a Lunch Flow account card opens Lunch Flow for you, because removal has to happen on their side.
Renewing Access
European open banking rules require you to re-confirm access to your bank roughly every 180 days. When that date approaches, the connection shows that it needs attention and you re-authenticate through Lunch Flow. Your history stays put — re-confirming just resumes syncing.
Cancelling
Your Lunch Flow subscription is between you and Lunch Flow, so cancel it there. Once it lapses, those accounts stop syncing into Forbidden Finance. Your existing transactions stay in your history and keep counting in budgets and reports, exactly as they do when any other connection is removed.