How much did you spend on takeaways last month? Are you still paying for subscriptions you've forgotten about? Will there be enough in your account when the rent goes out?
These are simple questions, but answering them usually means scrolling through a banking app or building a spreadsheet. Beginning today, people in 17 European countries, including France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Ireland, Poland and the Netherlands, can simply ask Perplexity and get answers based on their own bank account data. Plaid powers the secure connection.
Money management becomes a conversation
Perplexity is an AI agent platform focused on accurate AI. Personal CFO lets them connect their bank accounts via Plaid and ask about their own money in everyday language.
People ask what they want to know, for example:
"How much did I spend on coffee each month this year?"
"Which subscriptions am I paying for, and what do they cost me over a year?"
"Build me a monthly budget with categories for rent, utilities, eating out and travel."
"Which weeks is my balance likely to drop below €500?"
To answer well, Personal CFO needs to understand what's in each account. Plaid organises the transaction data so it's clear which payment is a salary, which is rent and which charge renews every month. Personal CFO can then turn those answers into simple tools, like a budget tracker or a spending chart, that update as new transactions come in.
People choose which accounts to share, and access is read-only. In the EU, Plaid provides this connection as a regulated account information service through Plaid B.V.
"AI is most useful when it works from your own data, and nothing is more personal than your money. Trust matters so much when it comes to your financial well-being, which is why we’ve partnered with Plaid to maximize security as we bring Personal CFO to Europe." - Jeff Grimes, Head of Capabilities Product at Perplexity
AI is reshaping what people expect from financial services
Most financial apps still show everyone the same screens: a balance, a list of transactions and perhaps a spending chart. Personal CFO starts from each person's own data and answers the question they actually asked. Once people have seen an assistant understand their financial picture, they'll expect more insights and answers from their bank, their budgeting app and every other financial service they use.
We call this shift intelligent finance, and it's already under way. In our State of Intelligent Finance research with The Harris Poll, 53% of UK adults said they expect fintech apps to use AI, and 51% said managing money without it will soon feel outdated. AI is also bringing more people into financial management: in the US, nearly two-thirds of people connecting their bank accounts to AI assistants through Plaid had never used a Plaid-powered personal finance app before.
For banks, fintechs and developers, the opportunity is to bring that kind of personalised help into their own products. It starts with connected financial data that AI can understand, and the trust that comes with it.
Plaid delivers infrastructure for intelligent finance
Perplexity is the first company to bring this kind of AI experience to people in Europe with Plaid. It's one of 800+ AI companies building on Plaid, and we expect more to follow.
If you're building intelligent financial experiences in Europe or the UK, we'd love to talk.