Claude Can Now Link To Your Bank Account

Anthropic has launched Personal Finance in Claude, a new feature built on top of Plaid that lets you securely connect your bank accounts and ask Claude plain English questions about your money. You can ask things like how much you spent with a particular supplier last month, or get transactions automatically categorised, without opening a spreadsheet.

For most UK SME owners, this is not about personal budgeting. It is about the hours lost trawling bank statements before you can even start reconciling against invoices or chasing a supplier dispute. If you run a trades or construction business and you are still eyeballing a PDF statement line by line looking for a duplicate charge or a missed payment, this closes that gap.

A worked example

Say you spend forty minutes a week manually checking business bank transactions against invoices, looking for anything odd before your bookkeeper gets involved. That is roughly 35 hours a year. Linking an account to Claude and asking it to flag duplicates, unusual amounts or recurring charges that have crept up will not eliminate that task, but it should cut the first pass down to minutes. You still need a human to sign off, especially on anything that touches payroll or supplier payments, but the trawling gets faster.

There is a real caveat here. You are granting a third party, via Plaid, read access to your bank data. Plaid is widely used by UK fintech apps already, so the plumbing is familiar, but you should treat this the same way you would any new piece of software touching your business bank account: check what data it can see, start with one low-risk account, and do not link your main trading account on day one.

What to do this month

• If you already use Claude for other admin, test Personal Finance on a single secondary account first, not your main trading account.
• Ask it to summarise last month's spending by supplier and compare the answer against your own records before you trust it.
• Check your bank's and Plaid's terms on data sharing before linking anything that touches payroll.
• If it saves you real time on the reconciliation first pass, roll it into your month end routine, but keep a human checking the output.