Maybe the battle has long been lost, but why on earth would you want to entrust your entire financial transactions to an LLM? I bet LLM providers have even less safeguards regarding the use of these data than the financial industry, which to be clear is an abusive industry collecting, mining, and selling our data.
Could a Claude Code routine watch my finances?
101–110 of 141 posts
Re: Could a Claude Code routine watch my finances?
#102Maybe the battle has long been lost, but why on earth would you want to entrust your entire financial transactions to an LLM? I bet LLM providers have even less safeguards regarding the use of these data than the financial industry, which to be clear is an abusive industry collecting, mining, and selling our data.
Why not? How could it negatively affect my life?
Re: Could a Claude Code routine watch my finances?
#103I'm surprised y'all stopped at the personal finance layer. I've been thinking for awhile that LLMs would be really effective as personal financial advisers, and this kind of hookup (plus I guess another one for investment accounts?) seems like all that's needed to bootstrap reasoning.
> I've been thinking for awhile that LLMs would be really effective as personal financial advisers
Why would you be thinking that?
Re: Could a Claude Code routine watch my finances?
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The problem is that there sort of isn't a better way right now in the US, and for now, Plaid or a Plaid-like competitor is the safest way So then the correct thing to do is to not automate this, until there is a better way. Why would you willingly give your bank credentials to a third party just so you can get some summary emails ?? It doesn’t make any sense.
Hear you 100%. It's certainly not for everyone, and I respect your position.
I appreciate it, but by giving horrible companies like Plaid your business you are encouraging and normalizing poor security practices. My parents are almost 80 and use a local bank that I’m pretty sure would just be scraped by Plaid. Do you think they’re going to understand the difference between OAuth and storing their credentials? Plaid and any company like it should be shut down.
Re: Could a Claude Code routine watch my finances?
#105My primary bank, Monzo (UK) provides a full API and trigger webhook for events.
This has enabled me to make a WhatsApp bot that asks me to explain abnormal transactions (using an LLM for reasoning), and also have a pre-midnight sweep balance to savings account to maximise interest daily interest.
I also maintain a small daily balance, and if I spend money during the day it tops it up from the savings to maintain that low balance. If I need to spend more, I can move money manually.
Re: Could a Claude Code routine watch my finances?
#106We (Era Finance) have a solution for exactly this - Era Context, an MCP for connecting any compatible agent to your personal finances - https://era.app It's focussed on read tools at the moment, but we have write tools coming (money transfers, debt paydown, etc) Check it out and let me know if you'd like to see any particular features landing - just email alex at the above domain name. For background context I'm Alex…
Interesting, thanks for sharing. I’m trying it ring now
Re: Could a Claude Code routine watch my finances?
#107Maybe my net worth is too low but I just don't see a value proposition. I don't want daily emails from LLMs and if I need updates on my investments any more often than quarterly (at most), I should probably seek safer investments. I am a bit interested in budgeting tools, but I want them to be completely deterministic. For me at least, financial planning is pretty uneventful and time spent optimizing expenses more th…
Have you tried Actual budget + SimpleFIN as a bridge to get your transactions out of banks?
I use that to track credit card spending and my checking account.
Then you can connect an mcp to do analysis of the data from one place if that’s what you want
Re: Could a Claude Code routine watch my finances?
#108In case anyone is interested, just wanted to share a few high level details about our infra/security setup. - Backend & CLI are both strictly linted Rust. The webapp runs on Axum (Rust web framework), and connects to Postgres via sqlx. - Financial read-only. There's no transfer, pay, or send tool in the product. Nothing in the AI surface can move money. - We request transactions, investments, and liabilities from Pla…
Thank you so much for actually sharing these technical details. Shows you know THIS website’s audience.
And the thought put into security at every level gives me more confidence in the overall tool.
I’ve tried to build this myself (mvp for myself was just downloading statement PDFs manually and having Claude setting up ledger for plain text accounting, thinking I’ll eventually hookup plaid)
I’m mostly curious about how people work with plaid. Do you need a certain threshold of users to get started? Because I’d love to get a plaid account just for my finances. I’m not interested in building a product like this, just want to connect my personal and business accounts to a clean API.
Re: Could a Claude Code routine watch my finances?
#109Maybe the battle has long been lost, but why on earth would you want to entrust your entire financial transactions to an LLM? I bet LLM providers have even less safeguards regarding the use of these data than the financial industry, which to be clear is an abusive industry collecting, mining, and selling our data.
In this case, the creator has explained that this is all read only.
So what’s the problem?
Re: Could a Claude Code routine watch my finances?
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's rather hard because of their security & contractual requirements -- we had to sign a contract with them, go through security review, and so on.
We just this week launched a new sign-up flow to make it waaaay easier for non-businesses to use Plaid, I posted some details below. Actually, as part of publicizing our new hobbyist-friendly onboarding, we're looking to work with hobbyists who have created Plaid-powered apps and would be interested in making a short video about their app and their Plaid experience to potentially be featured on the Plaid blog -- if y…
I would love this. I’ve built software to manage my business and personal finances and am using hacks right now (activity csvs for personal, quickbooks transaction api for business).
In an ideal world I’d move it all to plaid to help analyze finances, cc spend, etc.
I’m happy to hear you’re working on a hobbyist product.