Can You Connect ChatGPT to Your Bank Account in the UK? (2026)

Last updated: 2 July 2026. ChatGPT Finances availability is changing quickly — we will keep this post current as OpenAI expands the feature.

If you are in the UK, you cannot officially connect ChatGPT to your bank account today. ChatGPT Finances — the feature OpenAI launched in May 2026 that links your financial accounts to ChatGPT through Plaid — is available only in the United States, to Plus and Pro subscribers, and OpenAI has not announced a UK launch date. There is a technical workaround through ChatGPT's developer mode, which we will be honest about below, and there is a fully supported way to get the closest UK equivalent — an AI assistant that can read your balances and net worth, though not your individual transactions — with Claude instead. This post covers all three: what ChatGPT Finances actually is, why it has not reached the UK, and what UK users can do right now.

What ChatGPT Finances actually does

OpenAI announced its personal finance experience on 15 May 2026, initially for Pro subscribers in the US, and opened it up to US Plus subscribers on 25 June. The official name in OpenAI's help centre is Finances in ChatGPT, though most coverage calls it ChatGPT Finances. It works on the web, iOS, and Android.

The setup runs through Plaid, the account aggregation service that powers most US fintech apps. You open Finances in ChatGPT, choose Connect with Plaid, and sign in to your bank inside Plaid's own flow. That detail matters: your banking credentials go to Plaid and your bank, not to OpenAI. Plaid supports more than 12,000 banks, credit cards, brokerages, and other financial institutions, and once connected, ChatGPT can see your balances, transactions, investments, and liabilities. You get a dashboard of where your money is going and can ask questions grounded in your real numbers — what you spent on subscriptions last month, how your portfolio performed, whether your savings rate has changed.

Two limits are worth spelling out, because they answer the question a lot of people are really asking, which is whether ChatGPT can see into your bank account and do something with it. First, access is read-only by design. ChatGPT cannot move money, make payments, change anything at your bank, or even see your full account numbers. Second, the connection is yours to end. You can disconnect your accounts at any time from ChatGPT's settings, and when you do, the synced account data is deleted from OpenAI's systems within 30 days, and the data associated with that connection is deleted from Plaid within 30 days as well. One caveat OpenAI is upfront about: disconnecting does not scrub your conversation history, so anything you discussed about your finances stays in your chats until you delete those conversations yourself.

Taken on its own terms, it is a well-designed feature. The architecture — regulated aggregator in the middle, read-only access, credentials never touching the AI company, deletion on disconnect — is exactly the shape this kind of product should have. The problem for UK readers is simply that none of it is available here.

Why it isn't in the UK yet

The obvious guess is that the UK's banking rules are the blocker, but that does not hold up. Plaid already operates in the UK: Plaid Financial Ltd is authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority (firm reference number 804718) to provide account information services, which is precisely the regulatory permission a feature like ChatGPT Finances needs. UK open banking is, if anything, more standardised than the US system Plaid was built to paper over — every major UK bank is required to offer secure, regulated API access to account data. The plumbing exists and has done for years.

So the honest answer to "why not the UK?" is that OpenAI has launched in one market first and has not said anything about the next one. That is a normal way to ship a feature that touches financial data: launch where your largest user base is, learn from support tickets and edge cases, then expand. OpenAI's other features have historically reached the UK anywhere from weeks to many months after a US launch, but a feature involving bank connections has regulatory and operational work attached that a new model rollout does not. We are not going to invent a date, and you should be sceptical of any article that does. When there is an official UK timeline, we will update this post the same day we see it.

The developer-mode workaround (and why we don't recommend it)

There is one route by which a UK user can technically get bank data into ChatGPT today, and in the interest of a complete answer we will describe it — along with why we think most people should not bother.

ChatGPT supports MCP (Model Context Protocol) connectors, the open standard that lets AI assistants talk to outside tools. But full support for custom MCP connectors — the kind that could carry your financial data — sits behind developer mode, a setting buried under Settings, then Apps, then Advanced, and only available on the web. OpenAI describes developer mode as a beta feature for developers building and testing their own connectors, and it behaves like one. It comes with warning screens about untrusted servers, requires you to approve tool calls as you go, and is not covered by the polished onboarding that Finances gets in the US. In principle, a technical user could enable it and add a finance MCP server — including Aureli's, which works with any MCP-capable assistant. In practice, it is fiddly, unsupported, and clearly not what the feature is for. If you are a developer who enjoys this sort of thing, it works. If you are anyone else, there is a better option.

What UK users can do today

The better option is to change the assistant rather than fight the workaround, and here we should be upfront: this is where our product comes in, so read the next few paragraphs knowing we built it.

Claude, Anthropic's assistant, supports MCP connectors natively — not behind a developer flag, but as a standard feature in its settings on desktop, web, and mobile. That difference is the whole story. What requires developer mode in ChatGPT is a supported, first-class flow in Claude, which means a normal person can set it up in a few minutes without touching anything labelled "advanced".

Aureli supplies the banking side. It connects to UK current accounts, savings, ISAs, pensions, credit cards, and mortgages through open banking — the FCA-regulated system UK banks are required to support. Aureli Tech Limited (FRN 1056139) is a registered agent of Finexer Ltd (FRN 925695), which is authorised by the FCA as an Account Information Service Provider. You authenticate with your bank in your bank's own app, the bank issues a read-only token, and your credentials are never shared with Aureli or with the AI. Aureli then exposes your portfolio to Claude through its MCP server, and the connector is free on every Aureli plan, including the free tier.

One honest caveat before the pitch, because it matters: this is not a like-for-like replacement. Aureli is a net worth tracker, and it syncs account balances rather than individual transactions. Claude can tell you what your net worth is, how your cash compares to your ISAs, what your five largest assets are, or how your mortgage balance stacks up against your property's equity — all from live data. What it cannot do through Aureli is itemise your spending. There is no transaction feed, so questions like "what did I spend on subscriptions last month?" — a headline feature of ChatGPT Finances — are out of scope here. If transaction-level spending analysis is the part of the announcement you wanted, this setup does not replace it. If what you wanted is an AI that knows your balances, your accounts, and your overall financial position, it does that in the UK today.

The safety properties, meanwhile, are the same ones ChatGPT Finances promises. Access is read-only at the bank — Claude's only optional write ability is updating valuations on assets you track manually in Aureli, like a property, and you choose whether to grant that. The connection is revocable in seconds from either side. And the bank link runs through the same category of FCA regulation that a UK version of ChatGPT Finances would use.

The full walkthrough, including the exact connector URL and setup steps for Claude Desktop, mobile, and Claude Code, is in our guide to connecting your UK bank account to Claude. It takes about five minutes end to end.

One more thing worth knowing if you are attached to ChatGPT: because Aureli's connector is a standard MCP server, it is not Claude-exclusive. The same URL works in ChatGPT's developer mode, and in Gemini and Grok, if you want to experiment. Claude is simply the assistant where the experience is supported rather than tolerated.

Is it safe to connect AI to your bank account at all?

A reasonable question to ask before doing any of this, with either company. The short version is that it can be safe, and the difference between safe and reckless is architecture, not branding. The bank connection should run through regulated open banking, where you authenticate directly with your bank and a third party receives a read-only token rather than your password. The AI should never touch your bank directly — it should only ever see data held by a regulated app in the middle, through scoped, revocable access. And you should be comfortable with how the AI provider itself handles your conversations, because that is where your questions and answers actually live. Both ChatGPT Finances and the Aureli-plus-Claude setup pass that test; a random app asking you to type in your online banking password does not. We have written a full deep-dive on whether it is safe to connect AI to your bank account, and the technical detail on encryption, data retention, and access scoping is on our security page.

We'll keep this post updated

The situation as of July 2026: ChatGPT Finances is real, well-built, and US-only, with no announced UK timeline. The developer-mode workaround exists but is not something we would recommend to a non-developer. And the Aureli-plus-Claude route delivers the core of what UK searchers are looking for — an AI assistant that can safely read your balances, accounts, and net worth — today, through FCA-regulated open banking, for free, with the honest caveat that it does not cover transaction-level spending analysis.

When OpenAI launches ChatGPT Finances in the UK, we will update this post with what it costs, how it compares, and whether it changes our recommendation. Until then, if you want an AI that knows what your money is doing, the Claude guide is the place to start.