ZDNET’s key takeaways
- You can share bank information with Claude via Plaid.
- Anthropic will not use financial conversations to train models.
- Claude and ChatGPT now offer financial analysis tools.
You can now share your financial information with Claude and ask the chatbot for insights about your expenses.
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What does Personal Finance do in Claude
Functionally, this feature appears similar to ChatGPT Finances: It lets you connect as many bank and credit card accounts as you want via Plaid with read-only access. You can then ask Claude where you spent your money this month or if you can afford to take a vacation in six months, for example.
(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, ZDNET’s parent company, filed an April 2025 lawsuit against OpenAI, claiming it violated Ziff Davis’ copyright in training and operating its AI systems.)
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According to Anthropic, the feature is a response to existing usage patterns: The company’s April usage report found that financial advice was one of the top topics users ask Claude for help with.
Due to privacy concerns about sharing sensitive data with AI systems, especially agents, Anthropic emphasized what data the new feature would access and how.
“For the accounts you choose to link (and only those), Claude sees the bank name, name, type and last four digits of each account, balances and credit limits, and up to two years of transactions. When you chat with Claude in the Personal Finance Hub, these conversations are not used to train our models.”
The last part is important: Personal Finance in Claude is its own mode with its own protections. If you share or discuss your financial data with Claude outside of that “Hub”, it is only subject to your Claude privacy settings.
The idea behind the feature is that you can ask follow-up questions and ask for more insights about spending habits, trends over time, and future goals based on what Claude finds, similar to any other Claude conversation. The tool also generates tables and charts to visualize your financial information.
“You can ask for a weekly expense chart, a calendar of what it is, or a dashboard of the numbers you’ve chosen, and Claude builds it up as an artifact that you can keep adjusting and coming back to,” an Anthropic representative told ZDNET via email.
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You can also expect an ad-free experience in the feature.
“Like the rest of Claude, Personal Finance has no ads or sponsored recommendations, and it doesn’t offer credit cards, loans or savings accounts of its own, so your money questions get a direct answer,” the company said in the announcement.
The company added that since Claude uses actual transaction data and not memory, the feature should not be hallucinating.
“It can list the exact transactions behind each number so you can check its math,” Anthropic said via email. “Like any AI, it can make mistakes, so for anything important, we recommend you confirm with your bank.”
For who it is
For now, Personal Finance in Claude is only available to Pro, Max, and Ultra subscribers in the United States. Because of the many financial apps out there, it can be especially for users who already use Claude for much of their work and everyday life and don’t want to switch interfaces.
Still, the difference – and for many, the appeal – here is the natural language interface. Other financial apps don’t necessarily have a simple, accessible chat function where users can quickly shoot questions like they would to a human financial planner. These assistants also present historical budget analysis in plain English, rather than requiring users to interpret dashboards themselves, which users see as an advantage.
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On Reddit, many users find ChatGPT Finances to be accurate and reliable. One Reddit user said that ChatGPT Finance seemed to have Mint or Monarch potential, but noted that it was still “weaker” than those apps in some areas, such as historical synchronization, high-quality dashboards, and generating full statement PDFs.
ZDNET editor-in-chief Elyse Betters Picaro was “incredibly impressed” with ChatGPT Finances when she tried it, and still uses it as one of several financial tools (not a substitute for professional advice). She also structured her privacy settings in ChatGPT to reduce security risks.
“ChatGPT has really helped me make better financial decisions,” she wrote.
Anthropic noted that users should not look to Personal Finance for Claude as a total authority.
“Personal finance is a first step. For life’s bigger money decisions, we think that people are best served by Claude working alongside the licensed professionals and regulated companies they trust,” the company said in the announcement.
“We are investigating how to make this possible in Claude, and we would like to hear from banks, asset managers and financial services companies who want to help shape it” – indicating that a more integrated financial planning system is on the way in Claude.
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