Remember when Mel Robbins suggested women upload their banking statements to an AI?
The backlash was instantaneous. Harsh even. She was pushing Microsoft Copilot, sure, but the concept stuck in the craw of the public. Privacy fears are not theoretical anymore, they are visceral.
OpenAI decided to ignore the noise.
Instead of apologizing for the trend, they leaned right into it. Today they announced a “personal finance experience” inside ChatGPT. It’s here, it’s live for Pro users in the US, and it wants to look at your bank account.
The setup involves Plaid, that ubiquitous fintech bridge you probably already have buried in some app settings. Once you link everything, ChatGPT gets the green light to reason through actual numbers. Not estimates. Real dollars. It looks for patterns in the chaos and helps plan for whatever comes next, OpenAI claims.
You get a dashboard.
It shows portfolio health. Spending habits. Bills looming on the horizon. The company suggests using it to plan big goals, dissect travel spend, gauge investment risk, or finally cancel that subscription you forgot about from three years ago.
“200 million people already use GPT for budgeting,” OpenAI stated.
They say 200 million of us are already doing this manually, asking questions about stocks and savings every single month. Why make it harder when the AI is waiting?
Who wouldn’t?
Currently, it works on the web browser or iOS. The list of supported banks is massive, though OpenAI didn’t publish a full directory. Screenshots give it away though. American Express. Bank of America. Charles Schwab. Robinhood.
Intuit is next on the docket.
Think TurboTax. QuickBooks. Credit Karma. If your finances live there, wait for the update. Integration is coming, according to the company.
But what about the data?
ChatGPT doesn’t see full account numbers. Good. It can assess balances, transactions, liabilities. The raw data stays raw. You can cut ties anytime, disconnect accounts, or delete the specific financial memories used in those chats. Temporary chats are an option too, disappearing from your history like smoke.
How to get started?
Log in. Link Plaid. Pray the insights are actually useful.
A small note, perhaps irrelevant but legally necessary. Ziff Davis, which owns Mashable, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI back in April 2024. Copyright infringement they alleged, specifically regarding how AI models were trained.
So, your data might be safer than OpenAI’s training set. Or maybe not.
We will see.
