Using Claude or ChatGPT with your finances: what the assistant actually sees

Two ways to get your money into a chat

The obvious way is to give the assistant your data: export a statement, upload the file, and ask questions about it. The whole document, with your name, address, account number and every transaction, becomes part of the conversation.

The other way is to leave the data where it already lives and give the assistant a way to ask for specific things. This is what a connector does. Your records stay in the finance app's database. When you ask a question, the assistant requests just the piece it needs, such as this month's spending by category, and gets back just that.

What reaches the assistant through a connector

It helps to be exact, because 'the AI never sees your data' would be false. The assistant sees the answers to the requests it makes. If you ask what you spent on groceries, the grocery total comes back into the conversation, and the company that runs the assistant handles it under its own privacy policy, like anything else you type.

What changes is how much arrives and who decides. A question about subscriptions brings back your subscriptions, not three years of transactions. And several things never travel at all:

• Your bank username and password. The assistant talks to the finance app, never to your bank.
• Your password for the finance app. You approve the connection by signing in yourself, and the assistant receives a separate token.
• The bank connection itself. The assistant cannot link a bank, unlink one or reach the token that reads your accounts.
• Anything you did not ask about, unless the assistant decides it needs it for your question.

The arithmetic happens in the app, not in the model

Language models are good at explaining and unreliable at long arithmetic. A good connector does not ask the model to add up 400 transactions. It runs the calculation on the app's own servers and returns the result.

In My AI Fin App the payoff estimate an assistant gives you comes from the same code as the payoff calculator in the app, and the cash-flow projection is the one on the Budgeting page. The assistant's job is to choose the right tool and explain the answer, so the numbers match what you see when you open the app.

Read-only by default

The safest connection is one that cannot change anything. In My AI Fin App, a connection approved through the sign-in flow that Claude and ChatGPT use is always read-only. Personal access tokens are read-only unless you choose otherwise, and with a read-only token the tools that change data are not offered to the assistant at all.

If you do allow changes, they are limited to four housekeeping jobs: setting a transaction's category, marking transfers and reimbursements so they do not count as spending, adding a note, and setting a category's budget. An assistant can never move money, link or disconnect a bank, add or edit accounts, debts or goals, or delete anything.

The same rules as your own sign-in

Every request an assistant makes runs as you, under the same database rules the app itself uses. It can read what you can read, including data shared with your household, and nothing more. If you use two-factor sign-in, you enter your code before you can approve a connection.

On our side, we record which tools were called and whether they worked, for 90 days, so we can see what breaks. We do not record what you asked, the amounts, or the data returned.

Habits worth keeping

• Check the privacy settings of the assistant you use, including whether conversations are used to improve its models, and set them the way you want before connecting anything.
• Start read-only. Add write access later if you find you want the assistant to tidy categories for you.
• Treat a personal access token like a password. It is shown once; do not paste it into shared documents or chats.
• Disconnect what you no longer use. A revoked token stops working immediately.
• Remember that chat history is a copy. If you would not want a figure sitting in your chat history, do not ask for it there.