We built an MCP server that did this for Claude about six months ago (Driggsby). We've evolved since then into a standalone financial devtool, but several interesting learnings building something in this space:
- The insights you can get from connecting AI to your finances can actually be pretty cool. I've used it for detecting big charges, optimizing my taxes, investing, cancelling subscriptions, negotiating bills, and building my wife a custom dashboard with all our finances that she looks at daily. If you're someone who has traditionally been "bad at money," in the sense of feeling like you're not managing it closely enough, this kind of product could be good for you.
- The read layer for personal finances is commoditized: all the big players (Muse/Meta, ChatGPT, Grok, Claude, Perplexity) now let you connect your finances through Plaid. They all understandably want this data from you, which can help them serve better ads and predict your behavior. The frontier labs will likely own the readonly portion but leave the riskier parts (like money movement) to third parties. Anthropic interestingly mentioned in their press release they want to hear from "licensed professionals and regulated firms" who want to work with them on this.
- Actually building a great financial AI product that works at scale is harder than you'd expect, because of how diverse and messy financial data is, plus the risk of getting something wrong. This takes a ton of iteration to get right, and often simpler AI features with a clear "this is not perfect" give the biggest bang for the buck. Our transaction classification pipeline that corrects Plaid's broken categorizations using a small LLM has been surprisingly useful.
- If you're like me and are primarily a Claude Code user rather than Claude.ai, this still won't work for you. At Driggsby we optimized more for performance in environments like Claude Code and Codex.
- Financial data is incredibly sensitive, so do consider before you link whether you're comfortable with your AI company having access to all your finances, plus your chat history. I'm hearing from friends in the litigation space how valuable chat histories have become for lawsuits. Incentives will guide action.
I use a personal finance app called Monarch and like it, and it makes it easier for non technical people like my wife to check budget, get alerts and categorize expenses. However accounts connected through Plaid constantly get disconnected due to MFA so it's a bit of a pain to have to reconnect every few days
I used Claude to discuss my mortgage renewal and it was pretty good but for family budget you need some place to store the data and have it properly categorized. I imagine Claude can maintain a local spreadsheet or database with the info it pulls from the bank accounts but it would be a bit of a pain to update the categories
I do enjoy bantering about financial stuff with Claude, but do I want to give Anthropic read access to my accounts? That's a pretty big ask. They'd need to have a pretty solid privacy guarantee and I'd have to trust them to keep it.
What I do is download the statements from my banks/trade platforms and then I have a custom Python script that strips out PII/account data and create a cleaned up CSV. Then use that CSV with Gemini for analytics and modeling.
This is somewhat manual but works well enough without handing over access and account details to AI.
privacy is the big concern here, while I give claude a lot of access to my computer, actually giving it read access to my bank and payment details is a big no. In the end, you never know what happens to data that your client sends to a server. Is there a bad configuration to logging? Is the data stored and analyzed? What exposure is there in case of a hack?
We built an MCP server that did this for Claude about six months ago (Driggsby). We've evolved since then into a standalone financial devtool, but several interesting learnings building something in this space:
- The insights you can get from connecting AI to your finances can actually be pretty cool. I've used it for detecting big charges, optimizing my taxes, investing, cancelling subscriptions, negotiating bills, and building my wife a custom dashboard with all our finances that she looks at daily. If you're someone who has traditionally been "bad at money," in the sense of feeling like you're not managing it closely enough, this kind of product could be good for you.
- The read layer for personal finances is commoditized: all the big players (Muse/Meta, ChatGPT, Grok, Claude, Perplexity) now let you connect your finances through Plaid. They all understandably want this data from you, which can help them serve better ads and predict your behavior. The frontier labs will likely own the readonly portion but leave the riskier parts (like money movement) to third parties. Anthropic interestingly mentioned in their press release they want to hear from "licensed professionals and regulated firms" who want to work with them on this.
- Actually building a great financial AI product that works at scale is harder than you'd expect, because of how diverse and messy financial data is, plus the risk of getting something wrong. This takes a ton of iteration to get right, and often simpler AI features with a clear "this is not perfect" give the biggest bang for the buck. Our transaction classification pipeline that corrects Plaid's broken categorizations using a small LLM has been surprisingly useful.
- If you're like me and are primarily a Claude Code user rather than Claude.ai, this still won't work for you. At Driggsby we optimized more for performance in environments like Claude Code and Codex.
- Financial data is incredibly sensitive, so do consider before you link whether you're comfortable with your AI company having access to all your finances, plus your chat history. I'm hearing from friends in the litigation space how valuable chat histories have become for lawsuits. Incentives will guide action.
I use a personal finance app called Monarch and like it, and it makes it easier for non technical people like my wife to check budget, get alerts and categorize expenses. However accounts connected through Plaid constantly get disconnected due to MFA so it's a bit of a pain to have to reconnect every few days
I used Claude to discuss my mortgage renewal and it was pretty good but for family budget you need some place to store the data and have it properly categorized. I imagine Claude can maintain a local spreadsheet or database with the info it pulls from the bank accounts but it would be a bit of a pain to update the categories
I do enjoy bantering about financial stuff with Claude, but do I want to give Anthropic read access to my accounts? That's a pretty big ask. They'd need to have a pretty solid privacy guarantee and I'd have to trust them to keep it.
What I do is download the statements from my banks/trade platforms and then I have a custom Python script that strips out PII/account data and create a cleaned up CSV. Then use that CSV with Gemini for analytics and modeling.
This is somewhat manual but works well enough without handing over access and account details to AI.
privacy is the big concern here, while I give claude a lot of access to my computer, actually giving it read access to my bank and payment details is a big no. In the end, you never know what happens to data that your client sends to a server. Is there a bad configuration to logging? Is the data stored and analyzed? What exposure is there in case of a hack?
Agreed. Id never use this
I would not be worried , provided it cannot make actual trades without authorization
I guess this is just a way to collect more training data than anything. I don't see the use for it comparing to establish financial tools.
"When you chat with Claude in the Personal Finance hub, those conversations aren't used to train our models."
Seems to imply this is not true.
ChatGPT had this for quit a while btw