Today OpenAI has released a preview for a new personal finance experience that allows users to connect their personal accounts for better insights about their money habits.
The new rollout is available to ChatGPT Pro users in the U.S. and is powered by Plaid. This allows users to connect to over 12,000 financial institutions like Robinhood, Chase, Fidelity, Capital One, and more. Once accounts are linked, users can receive personalized insights based on based on their spending habits and financial goals.
More than 200 million people turn to ChatGPT every month with questions about their finances and other forms of future planning. This new feature will ensure that those users can ask straightforward questions or requests like “help me build a plan to buy a house in my area in the next 5 years,” according to OpenAI’s announcement.
“Over the last few years, we have all witnessed ChatGPT become a daily part of people's lives across America. People go to Chat to ask questions about health, relationships, research, email drafting, and so much more,” Plaid’s AI Partnerships Lead Kathleen McGuirk said in an email to This Week in Fintech. “Now, when people turn to ChatGPT for help understanding and improving their financial lives, Plaid’s behind it, helping to make it happen.”
ChatGPT Pro users can access this tool by typing “@Finances, connect my accounts,” or by opening “Finances” in the sidebar and then selecting “Get started.”
It’s especially useful for users who have spread their money and spending across different platforms, like online investing apps and digital banks. Financial accounts are not all automatically connected to ChatGPT, the user can choose which of those accounts to use when asking for financial advice. For example, a Pro user can connect their checking account and credit cards instead of their savings or brokerage account.
Users don’t have to worry about their accounts, or history of questions being saved and misused. To remove their financial accounts, users can go to Settings, then Apps, then Finances and remove the connection to the individual accounts that were linked to their ChatGPT account. Once they do that, the synced data will be deleted from OpenAI’s system in 30 days.
OpenAI hopes that the initial preview for Pro users in the U.S. will allow for a better rollout for more customers in the future. “We’ll learn and improve from early use before rolling it out to Plus, with the goal of making it available to everyone,” OpenAI’s announcement explained.
