Lake Financial — Privacy Policy
Effective date: July 24, 2026
Last updated: July 24, 2026
This Privacy Policy explains how Rieper LLC, an Indiana limited liability company doing business as Lake Financial ("Lake," "we," "us"), collects, uses, protects, shares, and deletes information when you use www.lakefin.net and the Lake application (the "Service").
Lake exists to show you your own money clearly. Handling your financial data carefully is not a side concern of that job — it is the job. This policy is written to be read, not skimmed past.
The short version
- We do not sell your personal information. We never have and we do not intend to.
- We do not share your data with advertisers, and we do not run advertising or third-party tracking on the Service.
- We never see your bank username or password. Those go directly to Plaid, our bank-connection provider.
- Your Plaid access tokens and your optional profile fields are encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM, separately from ordinary database storage.
- You can delete everything from Settings, yourself, at any time. Deletion is real: it revokes our bank access, wipes your records, and removes your login.
- We use your data to run Lake for you. Not to build a profile to monetize elsewhere.
The rest of this document is the detail behind those statements.
1. Information We Collect
1.1 Information you give us
| What | Detail | Required? |
|---|---|---|
| Account identity | Email address, and any name or profile image you provide, handled through our authentication provider Clerk | Required |
| Optional profile | Birth year and gender | Optional — used only for peer positioning features; encrypted at rest; deletable on its own |
| Your labels and notes | Budget and category names, goal names and targets, account nicknames, colors and icons, transaction notes, custom merchant categorization rules | Optional |
| Attachments | Receipts and documents you attach to transactions (up to 4 MB per file, 5 per transaction) | Optional |
| Feedback | Messages you send through the in-app feedback form, including the page you were on and the number you were questioning; thumbs up/down and dismissals on Insights | Optional |
1.2 Financial information from your linked accounts
When you link a financial institution, Plaid Inc. authenticates you with that institution and provides us with account data on an ongoing basis. Depending on the institution and the accounts you select, this includes:
- Account details — account name, official name, the last four digits of the account number (the "mask"), account type and subtype, currency
- Balances — current balance, available balance, credit limits
- Transactions — amount, date, authorized date, description as reported by your institution, merchant name, pending status, and the institution's own category assignments
- Investments — securities held, quantities, cost basis, and market values
- Liabilities — for credit, student loan, and mortgage accounts: interest rates, minimum payments, due dates, payoff details, and similar terms
- Institution identity — the name and identifier of the institution, and the technical status of the connection
We do not receive or store your online banking credentials. You enter them into Plaid's interface. Lake receives only an access token, which is encrypted before it is stored and is used solely to fetch the data above.
1.3 Information we generate
- Derived analytics — budget pacing, net worth snapshots, category rollups, spending trends, forecasts, volatility measures, anomaly flags, and the Insights shown to you. These are calculated by us from your own data.
- Enriched transaction fields — a cleaned merchant name, a category, and a merchant logo, described in Section 3.
- Alerts — unusual-transaction, low-balance, and goal-off-track notices, with their dismissal state.
1.4 Information collected automatically
- Authentication and session data — handled by Clerk, including session cookies strictly necessary to keep you signed in.
- Server and security logs — our hosting provider records request metadata such as IP address, timestamp, user agent, and requested path, used for security, abuse prevention, and debugging.
We do not use advertising cookies, third-party analytics, tracking pixels, session recording, or cross-site trackers. The Service contains no advertising technology.
2. How We Use Your Information
We use your information only for these purposes:
- To provide the Service — display your accounts, balances, transactions, investments, and liabilities; keep them synced; run budgets, goals, net worth tracking, reports, and Insights.
- To authenticate you and secure your account — verify who you are, detect and prevent fraud and abuse, and protect the integrity of the Service.
- To process payments — create and manage subscriptions and one-time purchases, and determine which features your plan entitles you to.
- To communicate with you — service, security, billing, and account notices; responses to your support requests.
- To improve the Service — diagnose errors, fix incorrect calculations, and improve how Insights are phrased and ranked. Your feedback signals on Insights are used for this purpose.
- To comply with law — meet legal, tax, and regulatory obligations, and respond to lawful requests.
We do not use your financial data to build advertising profiles, to train models for sale or licensing to third parties, or for any purpose unrelated to operating Lake for you.
Aggregated and de-identified data. We may create statistics and benchmarks that cannot reasonably be linked back to you or any individual, and use them to operate and improve the Service — for example, to compare your spending stability against an anonymized peer range. We do not re-identify this data and we do not license it to third parties.
3. Who We Share Information With
We share information only in the circumstances below. We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising.
3.1 Service providers who process data for us
| Provider | Role | What it receives |
|---|---|---|
| Plaid Inc. | Bank account connections | Your institution credentials (entered directly with Plaid, never through Lake), and your account, balance, transaction, investment, and liability data. Plaid's handling of your data is governed by Plaid's own end user privacy policy at plaid.com. |
| Clerk | Authentication and identity | Email address, login and session data, and any profile details you provide at sign-up |
| Stripe, Inc. | Payment processing | Your payment method and billing details, entered directly with Stripe. Lake never receives your full card number. We store only Stripe's customer and subscription identifiers, your plan, and its status. |
| Neon | Database hosting | All data described in Section 1 that we store, as our hosting infrastructure |
| Vercel Inc. | Application hosting and scheduled jobs | Request metadata and server logs; processes data in transit while serving the app |
| Trove (Headline) | Transaction enrichment | For each transaction we enrich: the description, amount, date, and a pseudonymous account identifier. Not your name, email, account numbers, or balances. |
| Logo.dev | Merchant logos | Requests for merchant logos are made from your browser, so Logo.dev may observe your IP address and the merchant domain requested. It does not receive your identity, amounts, or account data. |
These providers are contractually or by their published terms limited to processing data for the purposes we direct. They are independent companies with their own security programs; we do not control them.
3.2 Other disclosures
- When you ask us to — for example, when you export your transactions to CSV, or explicitly direct us to share something.
- Legal requirements — when we reasonably believe disclosure is required by law, subpoena, court order, or lawful government request. Where permitted, we will attempt to notify you first.
- Protecting rights and safety — to investigate fraud, enforce our Terms, or protect the rights, property, or safety of Lake, our users, or the public.
- Business transfer — if Lake is involved in a merger, acquisition, financing, or sale of assets, information may transfer as part of that transaction. We will notify you before your information becomes subject to a materially different privacy policy, and you will have the opportunity to delete your account first.
We do not disclose your information to data brokers, advertising networks, or credit reporting agencies.
4. How We Protect Your Information
- Encryption in transit. All traffic to and from the Service uses TLS.
- Encryption at rest for the most sensitive fields. Plaid access tokens, and your optional birth year and gender, are encrypted with AES-256-GCM using a key held outside the database, in addition to the encryption our database provider applies to storage.
- We never store bank credentials. There is nothing in our systems to steal in that category.
- Ownership scoping. Every record is bound to your user identifier, and every query and API route is scoped by ownership, so one account's data cannot be read through another's session.
- Authenticated webhooks. Incoming notifications from Plaid are cryptographically verified (ES256 signature) and rejected if verification fails.
- Least-privilege secrets. Provider credentials are held as environment secrets, not in source code, and the application refuses to start without the required ones.
No system is perfectly secure. We cannot guarantee that unauthorized access will never occur. Protect your side of it too: use a strong, unique password, enable multi-factor authentication where offered, keep your email account secure, and tell us at contact@rieper.org if something looks wrong.
If we discover a breach affecting your personal information, we will notify you and any required authorities as required by applicable law, without unreasonable delay.
5. How Long We Keep Information
| Data | Retention |
|---|---|
| Account and financial data | For as long as your account is open |
| Data for a disconnected institution | Deleted when you remove that institution from Settings |
| Optional profile (birth year, gender) | Until you delete it from Settings, or delete your account |
| All account data | Deleted when you delete your account (see Section 6) |
| Encrypted backups and point-in-time recovery history | Retained by our database provider for a limited rolling window — no more than 30 days — after deletion, then purged automatically |
| Billing and transaction records held by Stripe | Retained by Stripe as required for financial recordkeeping and tax law, independent of your Lake account |
| Server and security logs | Typically 30 days |
| Aggregated, de-identified statistics | May be retained indefinitely, as they no longer identify you |
6. Your Choices and Rights
You control your data in Lake directly — you do not need to file a request and wait.
In the app, at any time:
- Disconnect an institution — Settings. This instructs Plaid to revoke our access and deletes that institution's accounts and transactions from Lake.
- Delete your optional profile — Settings. Removes your birth year and gender without affecting anything else.
- Edit or delete your notes, attachments, budgets, goals, and categorization rules — wherever you created them.
- Export your transactions to CSV — available on Premium and Lifetime plans.
- Delete your account — Settings. This instructs Plaid to revoke access to every linked institution, permanently deletes your accounts, transactions, notes, attachments, budgets, goals, snapshots, alerts, and feedback, and deletes your authentication record. It cannot be undone and we cannot recover the data afterward. Cancel any active subscription before deleting.
By contacting us at contact@rieper.org, you may also:
- Access the personal information we hold about you, in a portable form
- Correct inaccurate information
- Delete your information, if you prefer we do it rather than doing it yourself
- Withdraw consent for any optional processing
- Ask questions about anything in this policy
We will respond within 45 days, and will tell you if we need more time. We do not charge for these requests, and we will never penalize you, degrade your service, or change your price for making one.
Verification. To protect you, we will verify a request by confirming control of the email address on your account before acting on it.
State privacy laws. Depending on where you live — including under the Indiana Consumer Data Protection Act, the California Consumer Privacy Act, and comparable laws in other states — you may have statutory rights to access, correct, delete, port, and opt out of certain processing, and to appeal a denied request. Some of these laws may not currently apply to Lake because of our size, and some financial data is exempt from them under the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. We extend the rights described in this section to all Lake users regardless of whether a statute compels it. If we deny a request, we will explain why and how to appeal; you may also contact your state Attorney General.
7. Children's Privacy
Lake is intended for users 18 and older. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 18. If you believe a minor has provided us information, contact contact@rieper.org and we will delete the account and its data.
8. Location of Processing
Lake is operated from the United States and currently serves users in the United States. Your information is stored and processed in the United States and in other locations where our service providers operate infrastructure. If you access the Service from outside the United States, you understand your information will be processed in the United States, where privacy laws may differ from those in your location.
9. Changes to This Policy
We may update this Privacy Policy. If a change is material, we will notify you by email or in-app notice at least 14 days before it takes effect and update the "Last updated" date above. We will keep prior versions available on request. Continuing to use the Service after a change takes effect means you accept the updated policy.
10. Contact Us
Questions, requests, or concerns about privacy:
Rieper LLC (d/b/a Lake Financial)
c/o Registered Agents Inc
5534 Saint Joe Road
Fort Wayne, IN 46835
United States
Email: contact@rieper.org
Web: www.lakefin.net
Rieper LLC is an Indiana limited liability company, Business ID 202607202020836, operating under the assumed business name Lake Financial. This Privacy Policy is incorporated into the Lake Terms of Service.