OpenAI, Plaid to bring tailored financial guidance to masses

At the moment, ChatGPT’s access to financial accounts is read-only, meaning moving money or taking other actions must still be done by the consumer. Photo by JUSTIN TALLIS/AFP via Getty Images

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OpenAI is partnering with Plaid Inc. to give consumers using ChatGPT personalized financial advice based on data they share with the tech companies.

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ChatGPT, the best-known artificial intelligence platform among consumers, has until now been able to provide only generic recommendations: “automate your savings” or “reduce takeout to once a week.” It’s been lacking a window into consumers’ actual financial lives to offer more tailored guidance.

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That’s where Plaid comes in. Since the majority of United States consumers have linked a bank account to a fintech via Plaid, access to those data feeds would give ChatGPT the ability to offer wide-ranging advice to a user. For example, it could explain exactly which credit card to pay off first, and how much. OpenAI said that ChatGPT isn’t a replacement for professional financial advice.

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Plaid chief executive Zach Perret said the goal is “to allow people to have greater financial freedom,” which he said “means a better understanding of the financial products that are out there, and it means greater trust in the financial system that surrounds all this.”

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Consumers are increasingly turning to large language models such as ChatGPT for financial advice. The company said in a statement Friday that more than 200 million users have accessed the platform for help with budgeting, investment questions and other finance-related queries. Traditionally these were questions answered by advisers, though adviser-focused firms such as Charles Schwab Corp. are now turning to AI to enhance and broaden their own offerings.

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Anthropic PBC, maker of Claude, is also focusing on the opportunity in financial services to target the biggest Wall Street firms. The company unveiled agents earlier this month that are designed to handle a broader mix of financial-services tasks.

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At the moment, ChatGPT’s access to financial accounts is read-only, meaning moving money or taking other actions must still be done by the consumer, Ty Geri, an OpenAI product lead, said in an interview.

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There are also still some gaps that would need to be filled in to truly capture a consumer’s entire financial circumstances. Home equity, for example, won’t show up in a linked account.

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“I think there will be many steps that we will take, with OpenAI and others, to enhance the quality of the financial experiences, enhance the breadth of financial experiences, that people are going to be able to do,” Perret said. “My hunch is that what we launch with is not what we’ll end with, in a year or two or three years, with OpenAI and with the broader industry.”

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