On banks not supported by Plaid — while most are covered already (12,000+), totally understand that some like Fidelity aren’t. For this, we’re considering a way to manually import statements, but that wouldn’t support the live data sync that Plaid provides of course.
Performance tracking — yes! Absolutely on this. We’ve been sketching this out lately since it has some nuance to get right. Would love your input on what you’d like to see here.
Yeah, investing over time in such a way to beat the S&P is actually incredibly challenging (having tried it myself). I’m very skeptical an LLM can do better than that unless it has a very large, expensive firehose of data.
It may be that more mundane analysis ends up being the most useful. For example — for years, we had some money in a money market fund earning basically no interest. It just wasn’t on the radar.
Had even a not very smart LLM nudged us to put the money into a HYSA earlier, we would have made thousands per year in interest.
My wife also recently used our tool to do some simple investing optimization that’s going to save us a few thousand per year on taxes.
Thing like this aren’t sexy but do have value, and don’t take GPT Pro.
Correct. They’re incentivized to try to make it as seamless and secure as possible for the 95%, but it’s challenging to build custom integrations for thousands of institutions. Wouldn’t open standards be nice?
Local AI models are getting a lot better. If you have the capability to run them, you could automate this yourself using your own browser automation, actually. It is rather fiddly, as mentioned in the post, but is absolutely doable, and probably the only option, at least for now, where you wouldn't need to provide your credentials to a third party.
Plaid does do screen scraping for smaller banks, but they have agreements for OAuth-based access with most of the largest institutions.
The main reason I do it, at least, is because the insights it provides (as someone who's interested in spending patterns/investing/etc.) are actually quite useful. With even a very basic prompt, I've found things that were otherwise completely missed.
Making it secure is actually quite hard, but that's why we're spending an enormous amount of time thinking about that.
Yes, give it a try! I did this on my own first before deciding to make it "a thing." It's actually a really fun project and gives you a ton of insight into your finances. I'd recommend it.
Hey! Thanks for stopping by. Actually planning to do a full blog post on this topic soon (how to get started with Plaid).
It was a bit of a process involving sales calls, contracts, security attestations, etc., but they're planning to make it easier to try out the platform. There is a pay-as-you-go, developer-friendly option, but the support it includes is pretty flaky. The support issue is less "my code broke" and more things like "this institution isn't returning what it should," or, "I haven't been approved yet by this institution that does manual review."
Overall, it's been a pretty good experience! I'd suggest spinning up an app if you're considering them. Here are their LLM-friendly docs: https://plaid.com/docs/llms-full.txt
Yup, it would be really awesome if this concept was deployed in the US. Unfortunately, open standards don't seem to gain as much traction here outside of the tech industry.
Just to share -- Most of the largest banks/FIs actually work directly with Plaid.
Here's a quick list of some of the major ones:
JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citibank, U.S. Bank, PNC, Capital One, Truist, TD Bank, Charles Schwab, Vanguard, Marcus by Goldman Sachs, Goldman Sachs Private Wealth, Morgan Stanley, E*TRADE, USAA, M&T, RBC, American Express, Fifth Third, Citizens, KeyBank, Huntington, Ally, Discover, BMO