In the past few weeks, we’ve seen huge news about the future of AI as a personal financial manager for consumers. But, all of these AI innovations are still missing one critical factor — they still depend on humans to assemble the raw materials they need to work. 

Perplexity and OpenAI Both Making Moves in Personal Finance

Perplexity just launched a Plaid integration that lets consumers link their financial accounts to an AI assistant. Once accounts are connected, Perplexity Computer can analyze spending patterns, build custom trackers, and calculate net worth. And, people can ask freeform questions about their finances. 

It's very cool. But, it still asks you to do the same thing every PFM, banking, and wealth management app has asked you to do since 2006: connect your accounts one by one.

At the same time, OpenAI just made its second personal finance acquisition — Hiro, an AI-powered personal finance planning startup — to add “focused talent in consumer financial planning” to its team. While OpenAI hasn’t announced a dedicated consumer financial planning product, it already markets ChatGPT as a tool for business finance teams and these acquisitions point to a PFM play on the horizon. 

Again, Hiro asks consumers to do the work —  manually entering information about their salary, debts, and monthly costs into the platform’s modeling tool.

Connecting Accounts One by One Since the Early 2000s

Credit cards. Mortgages. Checking and savings accounts. Car loans. Investment accounts. Retirement plans. Student loans. Personal loans. Health savings accounts. Each one is a separate authorization flow with yet another login and consent prompt. 

When what many say is the OG of PFM apps — Mint (now part of Credit Karma) — launched, the innovation wasn't a new budgeting interface. It was having a tool that would compile your data for you. 

Before Mint, consumers managed money by logging into each institution separately or exporting CSVs. Mint changed that by pulling everything together to create one view of the consumer’s entire financial life. But, you still had to do the assembly work yourself. 

Today, data aggregators like Plaid have made connecting your accounts easier and more secure by replacing screen scraping with APIs. However, it’s still account-initiated. A consumer has to remember all of their financial relationships, find them inside the aggregator’s institution search, and authenticate each one. The manual work and cognitive load remains the same.

The Missing Link: Start with the Consumer

Here's what the current data aggregation model doesn't take advantage of: a consumer’s financial accounts are already attached to their identity. This is what Spinwheel does differently when it comes to creating a unified view of a consumer’s liabilities. 

Instead of asking them to connect all of their debt obligations — mortgages, auto loans, student loans, credit cards, etc. — individually, Spinwheel enables lenders, PFM apps, and others to create that picture with a phone number and date of birth (and of course, consumer consent).

If a consumer grants permission to share their financial data, they shouldn’t have to do the work to go get that data — regardless of where the data resides. They should be able to simply say “yes” and then reap the benefits: intuitive money management tools, instant loan approvals, personalized credit offers, and more. 

This approach is a slightly different take on open banking and open finance — where consumers can securely share comprehensive financial data with authorized third-party providers. Today, open finance conversations also remain centered on account-by-account authorization via standardized APIs. We think the future of open finance will be identity-level authorization with clear controls for consumers to manage which third parties can access which accounts. 

Friction Is the Feature Gap

The Perplexity integration may become one of the most capable personal financial management tools available to consumers today. But, we still have an opportunity to make managing money even easier. 

AI isn’t yet entirely eliminating the friction in managing money. It’s just moving one of the biggest friction points — connecting accounts one by one — from one tool to another. 

The real power of AI will be when it no longer asks people to assemble their financial lives to gain value. It does it for them.