OpenAI launches ChatGPT for personal finance, letting users connect bank accounts
OpenAI on Friday launched ChatGPT's new 'Personal Finance' module. The new feature allows users to connect their bank accounts to ChatGPT and view portfolio performance, spending analysis, subscriptions and upcoming payments in a single dashboard. The module is being read as the most concrete consumer-facing step of OpenAI's previously announced 'AI agent' strategy for this year.
The connection process runs over Plaid, the fintech that has become the US standard for connecting bank accounts to third-party applications. ChatGPT users can link 12,000 financial institutions in the United States and the United Kingdom, and more than 3,000 PSD2 Open Banking-certified institutions in the European Union.
The launch version of the feature offers four core components. The first is the portfolio component, which charts balances across all investment accounts and shows performance changes. The second is spending tracking, which analyses the last 90 days of credit-card and bank-account transactions by category. The third is subscription management, identifying recurring payments and suggesting which the user could cancel. The fourth is an upcoming-payments section.
OpenAI Consumer Product Lead Adam Gross told TechCrunch: 'Users today read their financial decisions piecemeal from many different apps and reach out to yet different channels for consultation. Our goal is to unify these actions into a single conversation flow.' Gross added that the module's training data does not include the user's financial data.
On security, OpenAI said all financial data in the module is end-to-end encrypted and that ChatGPT has 'read-only' access to user accounts. ChatGPT is not authorised to initiate a transaction at a bank or move money on the user's behalf. The company said this boundary would be updated 'through open-banking partners' in the next quarter, but did not disclose details of the update.
In the personal-finance market, ChatGPT's new module is an explicit competitive move against existing players. Intuit's Mint brand was closed in 2023; apps like Empower (formerly Personal Capital), Rocket Money and YNAB (You Need A Budget) provide similar services on an annual premium subscription. ChatGPT's new module is included in the existing ChatGPT Plus subscription ($20 per month).
Gartner's Director of Financial Services Margaret Hummel said the personal-finance module is a move that 'could reshape ChatGPT's consumer contract relationship.' Hummel said: 'For ChatGPT to move from a generic AI assistant to a tool that sees the user's bank account both raises product engagement and brings new regulatory obligations.'
A US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) spokesperson said that the new module 'will be assessed under section 1033 of the Open Banking rule.' The CFPB will examine ChatGPT's compliance on whether user data may be used for AI training, on third-party transfers and on data-deletion rights. In the European Union, an assessment in parallel with GDPR will be carried out under the PSD2 directive.
Reaction from the financial advice industry has been mixed. Edward Jones chair Penny Pennington said: 'AI-based personal-finance tools allow customers to understand their basic data better, but human advice for large financial decisions will continue.' Robinhood co-founder Vlad Tenev wrote on X: 'ChatGPT's entry into financial services will raise the bar in the sector; that's good for users in the long run.'
OpenAI's new module will be rolled out in stages to all users in the US and UK over the next three weeks. The European Union launch is planned alongside PSD2 approval by the end of the summer. Initial user feedback on the module is seen as an indicator of how OpenAI will extend new service lines in the market, and a directional signal for the next quarter.