ChatGPT can access your bank accounts now. Here’s why I’m not ready

If there’s one area that LLMs excel at, it’s analyzing reams of data and drawing out patterns, trends and insights. So it’s no surprise that OpenAI is focusing on personal finance, with ChatGPT now able to examine our bank, checking, and investment accounts.

But I’m just not ready for that.

First, some context. Using a secure third-party platform called Plaid (Intuit support coming soon), ChatGPT Pro (and eventually Plus) users can enable integrations with more than 12,000 financial institutions, allowing ChatGPT to connect and sync with a wide range of banking and investment accounts, from Bank of America and Charles Schwab to American Express and Robinhood. (Besides, more than 200 million users per month are Already come to ChatGPT with money questions, says OpenAI.)

Once connected, ChatGPT can use data and transactions extracted from your various financial accounts for a dashboard that summarizes your current financial situation, as well as to contextualize its conversations with you. ChatGPT will be able to generate more personalized responses to queries like “Have I spent more recently,” “Help me make a plan to put money aside each month,” and “What did my recent vacation really cost?” » These responses can take the form of standard text responses, tables, bar graphs, pie charts. In theory, you could get a quick overview of your financial situation with just a few prompts.

But the idea of ​​ChatGPT being able to access your bank accounts raises an immediate concern: could it drain your accounts with a bad prompt or hallucination? On this point, we can relax. Even after granting access to your accounts, ChatGPT can only look balances, transactions, investments and debts; it can’t actually change anything, and it can’t see your full account numbers either.

OpenAI also states that you can disconnect your various banking and investment accounts at any time, and that if you do so, your associated financial data will be erased from OpenAI’s servers within 30 days.

Things are getting tougher in a few other areas. While you can unlink your financial account integrations with a few clicks, any chats you’ve had with ChatGPT about your finances will remain in those chats unless you delete those specific chats manually. ChatGPT can also save “memories” about your finances, which you can manage and/or delete from the Finances page in the Settings menu.

More worrying is the fact that ChatGPT can use its financial discussions with you to train its models, unless you turn off the “Improve model for everyone” setting in Settings → Data Controls. You’ll definitely want to change this before using ChatGPT’s new personal finance integrations: all ChatGPT users should consider making this change.

Aside from training on the opt-out model, it looks like OpenAI did everything right when it came to allowing ChatGPT to browse our books. Account access is read-only, you can disable integrations (although with a brief delay to clear your data from OpenAI’s servers), and financial “memories” are stored in a centralized location where they can easily be deleted.

There’s also the integrity of Plaid (the financial account gateway) to consider, but for all accounts it’s no more or less secure than Intuit, which I use to connect my banking and investment accounts to Quicken.

And yet, I’m not ready to open my books on ChatGPT. All these transactions in your bank and investment accounts paint an intimate portrait of who you are, what you do and your priorities. Yes, you can choose which accounts you allow ChatGPT to see, but ChatGPT’s financial information won’t be very useful unless you give it as much access as possible, and even a single credit card statement can contain a ton of personal details that you might not want to share.

Could ChatGPT somehow go wild and leak my financial data to the world? This seems unlikely, and we already know that it can’t do anything with your accounts beyond reviewing them. But the way ChatGPT can “remember” your financial data from previous conversations can be difficult to track. (One option would be to limit financial chats with ChatGPT to temporary chats, which are deleted once closed.)

There is also the question of the quality of ChatGPT’s financial advice. OpenAI claims that ChatGPT’s financial discussions will by default use GPT-5.5 Thinking, its most powerful reasoning model, and that it has consulted with more than 50 financial professionals to evaluate ChatGPT’s performance.

Yet the content of ChatGPT’s responses can be greatly influenced by the prompts we give it. Asking ChatGPT about recipes is one thing, but asking for financial advice is another: a misinterpretation or hallucination can have dramatic consequences.

Maybe I’m just paranoid. I also realize that when it comes to finances, the privacy ship has pretty much sailed. (What do Bank of America knows me, anyway?) Still, I’m hesitant to connect my bank accounts to ChatGPT. Maybe I’ll sing a different tune in a year, but I’m not there yet.