OpenAI quietly bought two personal finance startups in the last seven months. Most people missed it. The first was a company called Roi, acquired in October 2025. The second was Hiro Finance, picked up in April. Hiro had built what it described as an "AI personal CFO" and had helped users manage over $1 billion in assets before OpenAI absorbed its team and shut the app down. Today, we can see exactly what OpenAI was building toward.
ChatGPT now lets users connect their bank accounts, investment portfolios, and credit cards, and then have a conversation about their money. The connection runs through Plaid, a company that already operates silently inside apps like Venmo, Robinhood, and Coinbase. Plaid acts as a secure bridge: your bank password never goes to OpenAI, ChatGPT can only read your data and cannot move money, and access can be cut off at any time. Plaid has never suffered a major breach, though it did settle a privacy lawsuit in 2022 for $58 million related to how it explained its data practices to users.
For now, the feature is only available in the US and only to ChatGPT's top-tier subscribers, who pay $100 a month. That is a deliberate choice. OpenAI says it wants to learn from a smaller group before rolling it out more broadly. The questions the tool can answer range from simple spending summaries to forward-looking scenarios, like modelling whether a planned purchase fits within a five-year homebuying goal.
The more important thing to understand is what this is competing with. Personal finance apps have existed for nearly two decades. Mint, which Intuit owned, served 17 million users at its peak and was shut down in early 2024. The problem with all those apps was the same: they showed you what happened, but could not help you decide what to do next. A dashboard of categories is not advice. ChatGPT, by contrast, already knows a lot about you from prior conversations, and OpenAI's product team has explicitly said the goal is to combine your financial data with everything else you have shared, including your life situation, your job, your goals.
That is a very different proposition from a budgeting app. It is closer to having a well-informed friend who also happens to have read all your bank statements.
Banks and insurance companies should pay attention to the specific dynamic at play here. The industry analysis firm Javelin has described this as OpenAI building "share of mind" in financial services. When a customer wonders whether they can afford to retire earlier, or whether their insurance coverage makes sense given their current assets, the first tool they reach for is increasingly ChatGPT. The bank that is not in that conversation has lost the moment before the customer even picked up the phone.
The near-term risk for financial services professionals is not replacement. Plenty of people will still need advisers, especially for complex situations. The risk is invisibility. OpenAI has already told users it plans to add Intuit to the mix, which would let ChatGPT estimate tax consequences of financial decisions and even connect users to local tax professionals from inside the chat. That is territory that has traditionally belonged to accountants and financial planners.
For anyone in financial services, insurance, or wealth management, the relevant question right now is not whether this tool is accurate enough. It is whether your clients will start forming opinions about their financial situation inside ChatGPT before they ever call you. That shift is already underway, and it will only accelerate as OpenAI opens this feature to its broader user base.