CUSTOMER: PERPLEXITY

No two financial lives look the same, and neither does the support people want for them. Some want to get hands-on: building their own trackers, running their own scenarios, digging into exactly how their money is doing. Others would rather set things up once and let them run quietly in the background.

Personal CFO is designed to work either way. Built on Perplexity Computer, it's intelligent finance that adapts to how someone wants to engage with their money, not the other way around. Once users securely connect their accounts through Plaid, they can ask it to build a tool or dashboard around their exact situation, or set up an automation that checks in on their finances regularly.

In this sit-down with Jeff Grimes, Head of Capabilities Product at Perplexity, we spoke about why Personal CFO is powered by Plaid, how it builds financial tools personalized to each person’s own data, and why he sees it working more like a family office than a typical finance app.


Plaid: Tell us about Personal CFO.

Grimes: Personal CFO is part of Perplexity Computer, a digital worker we launched that can accomplish any task from start to finish. Once you connect your accounts to Personal CFO via Plaid, you can get personalized financial analysis and guidance.

Plaid: Why the name?

Grimes: We named the product Personal CFO because we wanted it to be exactly that—a Personal CFO that never stops working for you. We think of it as if you had a family office: a staff of people checking in with you at least daily, giving you updates on where you‘re on track and where you need to make changes. Beyond that, a family office gives you targeted actions to take. That‘s where we see things moving, from information down the funnel to action, and making those actions as easy, accessible, and cost-efficient for users as possible.

Plaid: Why did Perplexity decide to build it?

Grimes: From the beginning, finance has been one of our strongest use cases. In fact, 75% of our users each month were coming to Perplexity to ask questions about it. So that's when we decided to build something even more powerful for personal finance. 

Plaid: Once you connect your accounts via Plaid, what can you actually do?

Grimes: You can ask Personal CFO any question about your finances. That could be something like a moment in time—how am I tracking toward my budget this year? You can also ask it to make a personal dashboard, a live app that you can come back to.

Plaid: Can you give an example?

Grimes: One of the things Personal CFO unlocks about Perplexity Computer is the ability to make an app that‘s personalized just to you, based on your own data. That‘s actually why we decided to build this now: we saw the capability Computer had to build personalized apps. If you‘ve used a personal financial management app before, this lets you make something very similar, but based on your own data or vision.

So maybe I‘m moving to a new neighborhood and I want to make a rent-vs-buy calculator, looking just at homes in that neighborhood, based on my finances. Or maybe I want to create a personal repayment plan for my student loans. Personal CFO lets you do that, too. One of the nice things about Plaid is that it gives a look at your current account balances, as well as your historical transactions, investment account holdings and history, and loan data. The breadth of this financial data from Plaid allows consumers to build so many different things, for many different financial journeys or challenges.

Plaid: How are people using Personal CFO today? 

Grimes: We‘ve seen that a lot of our users set up automations with Personal CFO to get a check-in at the end of every day, week, or month, showing them how they‘re progressing toward their financial goals. 

Some people set up an automation at the end of every day; others set up an end-of-week review instead. You get an email or text saying here‘s how the markets did today, here‘s what happened in your portfolio. We know your long-term goals, we know your risk tolerance—so it might suggest certain actions you can take to rebalance your portfolio or mitigate risk, for example. So that‘s giving you the kind of confidence that a true personal CFO or family office would provide.

Plaid: What‘s the benefit of using real-time financial data via Plaid?

Grimes: It‘s a really nice combination to be able to pull real-time data from accounts connected through Plaid married with historical transactions, so you can do things like backtesting, or compare your current budget against last year‘s. We combine that with Perplexity‘s general ability to pull real-time data from the markets. So Personal CFO can tell you what‘s happening with your own portfolio, as well as the news items explaining why it might be up or down today.