How to Connect Your UK Bank Account to Claude

On 15 May, OpenAI launched ChatGPT Personal Finance for US users on the Pro plan. It uses Plaid to read your bank data so ChatGPT can answer questions about your finances.

If you're in the UK and use Claude, you can do the same thing today. This guide shows you how.

What this actually does

Aureli connects to your UK bank accounts through Open Banking. We've also built an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server, which is the standard way Claude talks to outside tools.

Put those two together and Claude can read your financial data directly from Aureli: balances across your current accounts, savings, ISAs, pensions, investments, mortgages, and credit cards. It can summarise your net worth, walk through your asset allocation, and answer questions like a finance-literate friend who happens to know your numbers.

Claude can also update valuations on anything you track manually in Aureli — say, your property's market value or a private investment. You ask, it writes back to your portfolio. Bank-linked accounts stay synced through Open Banking, so Claude never needs to touch those.

What Claude cannot do: move money, open or close accounts, or take any action with your bank. Its access stops at Aureli.

The Aureli MCP server is free on every Aureli plan, including the free tier.

What you'll need

• A free Aureli account
• At least one UK bank account connected to Aureli via Open Banking
• Claude Desktop, the Claude mobile app, or Claude Code
• About 5 minutes

Step-by-step setup

1. Sign up at aureli.app and connect your bank accounts.

Open Banking handles the connection in the UK and we use Stripe for US accounts. You authenticate with your bank using their own app or web flow, and Aureli receives read-only access to your account balances. Lloyds, Barclays, HSBC, Monzo, Starling, NatWest, Revolut and most major UK banks are supported. Aureli also supports US bank accounts, so if you have accounts on both sides of the Atlantic you can bring them into the same portfolio.

2. Add the Aureli MCP server to Claude.

The Aureli MCP server lives at a single URL:

https://aureli.app/api/mcp

In Claude Desktop or Claude on the web, open Settings, go to Connectors, and choose "Add custom connector". Paste the URL above. Claude will open Aureli in a browser tab and ask you to authorise the connection. Grant read access to answer questions about your portfolio, and edit access if you want Claude to update manual valuations on your behalf.

In Claude Code, run:

claude mcp add --transport http aureli https://aureli.app/api/mcp

Then follow the OAuth prompt in your browser to authorise.

The same URL works for ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok if you use those too — just add it as a custom MCP server in their settings.

3. Start asking Claude about your money.

Once the connection is authorised, Claude will have a set of Aureli tools available. You can ask it anything about your accounts, balances, or net worth.

What you can ask Claude

A few prompts to try once you're set up:

• "What's my current net worth?"
• "How much do I have across all my ISAs?"
• "What's my mortgage balance compared to my property's equity?"
• "Break down my asset allocation by type."
• "How has my net worth changed over the last 3 months?"
• "What are my five largest assets right now?"
• "Update my flat's valuation to £450,000."

You can go further than this. Claude can reason about the data: "If I overpaid £500 a month on my mortgage, how long would it take to clear?" or "Roughly what percentage of my portfolio is in cash versus equities?"

The quality of the answers depends on the quality of the data. The more of your accounts you connect to Aureli, the more complete a picture Claude has.

How it compares to ChatGPT Personal Finance

Same idea, different routes:

If you're in the US and already paying for ChatGPT Pro, the native integration is convenient. ChatGPT Personal Finance is US-only at launch, so if you're in the UK it's not available to you at all. Aureli + Claude is the equivalent setup, built around UK Open Banking — and works for US accounts too.

Security and privacy

A few things worth being clear about.

Open Banking is FCA-regulated. Aureli Tech Limited (FRN 1056139) is a registered agent of Finexer Ltd (FRN 925695), which is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority as an Account Information Service Provider (AISP).

Aureli never sees your banking credentials. When you connect a UK bank, you authenticate directly with the bank. Finexer receives a token that grants read-only access to account information and balances, and shares that information with Aureli. Learn more

Claude's MCP access is scoped to Aureli, not your bank. The MCP server exposes a fixed set of tools: read your portfolio data, and write new valuations against assets and debts inside Aureli. It cannot move money, alter bank connections, or take any action with your bank. You choose whether to grant edit access when you connect.

You can disconnect at any time. Revoke a bank connection inside Aureli or your bank and remove the MCP server from Claude's config whenever you like. Both take seconds.

We don't sell your data. We don't share it with advertisers. The full details are in our privacy policy.

One thing to keep in mind: anything you discuss with Claude is processed by Anthropic according to their terms. If that matters to you, Claude Desktop and Claude Code both let you control conversation history.

Get started

Sign up at aureli.app, connect a bank account, and paste

https://aureli.app/api/mcp

into Claude as a custom connector.

Five minutes from now, Claude will know what your money is doing.