ChatGPT: AI Is Now Accessing Our Bank Accounts
By Léna Jauze
May 20, 2026
Looking for a new financial advisor? Look no further: ChatGPT is here. OpenAI launched a "Finance" feature in ChatGPT on May 15 for Pro users in the United States. The goal: to develop a suite of tools capable of helping them analyze their budget, make financial decisions, and manage their spending.
Users will be able to connect their bank and financial accounts to ChatGPT via Plaid. This company acts as an intermediary between banks and certain applications such as Venmo, Chime, and now ChatGPT. Acting as a "bridge", this service allows financial platforms to quickly access users' banking data, without the need to build an entire technical infrastructure to connect to thousands of different banks.
With this new agreement, ChatGPT can now access bank balances, transactions, investments, debts and loans, as well as subscriptions and recurring expenses of users who have chosen to use this feature.
A Feature That Meets a Real Need
More than 200 million people already use ChatGPT every month for questions related to budgeting, investing, or financial planning. By adding a dedicated finance feature, OpenAI is primarily looking to turn this occasional use into everyday guidance.
The idea is not just to answer questions, but to allow the tool to track users' financial situation over time. ChatGPT can thus analyze income and expenses, identify trends, and highlight potential savings, particularly on subscriptions or certain recurring expenses that often go unnoticed.
In line with this approach, the AI can go as far as suggesting concrete adjustments, such as canceling an underused service or optimizing certain spending categories. It can also support reflection around more significant decisions, such as a real estate purchase, acquiring a new vehicle, or managing debt repayment.
What changes most is the way responses are built: ChatGPT is no longer limited to a "snapshot" analysis, but also draws on contextual and ongoing information, including details that the user may have shared over time through the system's memory. This evolution raises a central question, however: the more the tool becomes personalized and integrated into users' financial lives, the more sensitive the question of the neutrality of its recommendations and the influence of AI becomes.
What About Personal Data?
In its press release published on May 15, OpenAI writes: "You can share important information about your financial situation, such as a mortgage, a savings goal, or a major purchase you're considering. [...] ChatGPT can save this information in your financial history to enrich your future conversations." Behind this promise of service personalization lies a particularly intimate level of sharing, where the user is led to entrust specific details of their financial life to a conversational agent.
ChatGPT does not have access to full account numbers, and cannot perform any banking operations or make changes to users' accounts. But that is not enough to dismiss concerns. Such a concentration of highly sensitive financial data mechanically exposes users to risks of hacking and data breaches.
In this context, the timing raises questions: on May 13, OpenAI faced an attempted data theft targeting devices belonging to company employees. An incident that reignites questions around the security of and trust placed in a platform set to handle such sensitive financial information.
