On Monday 14 September 2026, the tech site TestingCatalog published screenshots from the Claude iOS app showing something no user could yet reach: a new section called “Money”, with the line “Link your bank accounts and ask Claude about spending, plans, and more.” Within a week the story had travelled through the tech and business press, and on 18 September The Independent ran it under the headline “Anthropic wants to give AI access to your bank account”. That same Monday, Anthropic announced Claude for Financial Advisors on its own blog, a set of connectors for wealth advisers that includes one into the custody business of Charles Schwab. Through that connector, in the company’s own description, Claude reads “balances, positions, transactions, cost basis, alerts, and money-movement status”. The headline followed the leak, while the account access sat in the official announcement.
Public debate treats the model at the bank account as a future scenario that hangs on an unconfirmed app feature. In the United States it is already there, only by other routes: through advisers who bring their clients’ data into Claude, through Rocket Money’s partner app Rowan, which according to its own press release runs on an Anthropic model and acts on its users’ behalf, and through the read-only finance features of OpenAI and Perplexity. For a European bank, this shifts the question. Who keeps the account does not change. What remains open is who owns the screen on which customers make sense of their money, and which legal door a model provider would need to pass through to reach that data in Europe. What follows is an inference from published product pages, press releases and legal texts, not a forecast of whether or when Claude Money will launch.
What: a feature called “Claude Money” found in the Claude iOS app on 14 September 2026, which Anthropic had neither announced, confirmed nor denied by the time of writing. On the same day, the official launch of Claude for Financial Advisors, with connectors to custodians and wealth management software
Finding: in the United States, language models already read account data through Perplexity (since April) and OpenAI (since May), and act through partner apps such as Rowan, built on Anthropic (since August). No comparable launch in the EU is known
Compared with: the United States, where CFPB rule 1033 has been halted in court and banks have signed contracts with data aggregators. The EU, where banks cannot require a contract from a PSD2 account information service
For: retail and digital banking executives, heads of open banking and APIs, product owners of banking apps
Status at time of writing (25 September 2026): no statement from Anthropic on Claude Money, PSR agreed but not in force, FiDA still in trilogue
The leak is the thinnest source of the day
Everything known about Claude Money comes from a single source. Alexey Shabanov of TestingCatalog found the interface elements in the iOS app: a separate “Money” tab with a bank icon and a start screen headed “Understand your money with Claude”. BleepingComputer, The Independent, gHacks and several other outlets picked up the find, all of them citing TestingCatalog. Several articles here do not add up to a second piece of evidence. They retell one find several times. What the feature is meant to do remains open, according to the original source: “The exact account types, data provider, and supported actions remain unknown.” The Independent asked Anthropic for comment, and no reply appears in its article. The company’s news page carries nothing on Claude Money up to the time of writing.
There are, admittedly, signs that the feature has gone beyond a sketch. A dedicated tab in the navigation and a fully worded start screen are rarely built for an experiment nobody is meant to see, and BleepingComputer reports references appearing “ahead of the expected announcement”. Yet an expected announcement has not been made, and without a data provider, regions or scope, nothing can be said about the product that goes beyond three lines of screen text. Anyone who reads the leak as a sign that Claude will soon be reading German current accounts is stacking one assumption on top of another.
One detail in the terms of use shows how much would still need settling. Anthropic’s Consumer Terms prohibit relying on its services “to buy or sell securities or to provide or receive advice about securities, commodities, derivatives, or other financial products or services, as Anthropic is not a broker-dealer or a registered investment adviser”. An analysis of spending does not necessarily fall under that prohibition, while a question about the right savings plan comes closer. Between “ask Claude about spending, plans, and more” and that clause lies a tension that a product launch would have to resolve. So far, Anthropic has published nothing on it.
Through the adviser, Claude already reaches the balances
The official part of 14 September is less spectacular and more telling for banks. According to Anthropic’s announcement, Claude for Financial Advisors is “a suite of connectors and workflow skills designed to help with research, prep, and documentation tasks”, built for wealth advisers in the United States. The case made on the blog is about time: according to research by Kitces, a typical advisory practice spends only a sixth of its time in client meetings. The connectors link Addepar, BlackRock, Envestnet, iCapital, SS&C Black Diamond, Vanguard, Wealthbox, Orion, Salesforce and other systems. The Schwab connector reaches into custody. Schwab Advisor Services works with more than 16,000 independent wealth managers, known as registered investment advisers (RIAs), according to InvestmentNews. Through this single connector, Claude therefore reaches the account data of the end clients of a very large number of advisory firms, without any of those clients opening a chat app.
The contract is more striking than the reach. Alison Dooher, head of AI at Schwab Advisor Services, described two protective clauses to InvestmentNews. The first rules out training, explicitly going beyond the default settings: “The enterprise licenses, for what it's worth, with Anthropic already default to no model training.” She went on: “But there are other licenses that don't, and we wanted to ensure that we superseded that and there would be no model training as part of this.” The second limits the data itself: “So account numbers will be masked. We are not passing things like social security numbers or date of birth.” The custodian, in other words, negotiated exactly what flows through the interface and what may be done with it on the other side.
Retail users sit under different rules. Since October 2025, users of Anthropic’s Free, Pro and Max plans choose whether their conversations may be used to train new models. For those who agree, the company says it retains the data for five years, and otherwise for 30 days. The privacy policy contains no separate rule for financial data. OpenAI takes the same approach with its finance feature: “Your conversations with Finances follow the same model training settings you choose across ChatGPT.” Both providers state the choice openly. What it does show is where the bargaining power lies. A custodian with a large adviser network can secure clauses that no individual customer could demand, and in Europe that position would belong to the bank.
Acting already exists, through a partner
The most far-reaching link between an Anthropic model and customer accounts does not carry the Claude name. On 25 August 2026, Rocket Money, part of the listed Rocket Companies, launched an assistant called Rowan. The press release describes it as “an AI agent that goes beyond analysis, monitoring consumer's finances and even acting on their behalf” and names the technology in the same paragraph: “Powered by Anthropic, Rowan watches spending around the clock.” Users reply by text message, and Rowan acts: “It can renegotiate recurring bills, cancel subscriptions and even create automated savings transfers.” Aaron Dignan, who leads agentic products at Rocket Money, sums up the difference from earlier finance apps: “That's the difference between knowing and acting.” Rowan is initially available to selected subscribers on a new Premium Plus tier, with a wider roll-out promised for later in the year.
OpenAI has deliberately drawn the line elsewhere. Finances in ChatGPT launched on 15 May 2026 as a preview for Pro users in the United States and has been available on the Plus plan since 25 June, connected through the aggregator Plaid. It shows spending by category, upcoming payments, subscriptions, net worth and portfolio allocation. The help page is just as precise about what it cannot do: “ChatGPT cannot: Move money · Pay bills · Change account settings · Make trades […]”. Perplexity moved even earlier, extending its Plaid connection to current, savings, credit card and loan accounts on 9 April. Plaid, for its part, says that more than half of Americans with a bank account have used its service, which handles nearly a million new account connections a day.
All of these are admittedly offerings for the American market, some limited to paid plans or selected users, and none of them has touched a European bank. The direction, however, is written into the product descriptions themselves. The read-only features build the screen on which customers make sense of their finances. The acting assistants move the decision there as well. In both cases the bank is left as the data supplier, and Kieran Hines of the research firm RFI Global put the consequence plainly after OpenAI’s launch: “the bank's app becomes less important as a primary interface for financial insight.”
In Europe, the door runs through PSD2, not FiDA
If a service of this kind came to Europe, it would face a question that has not featured in the coverage of Claude Money so far: which legal basis allows a third party to retrieve data from a current account? The obvious candidate is the Financial Data Access regulation (FiDA). It does not apply. The Commission proposal covers credit agreements and accounts explicitly “except payment accounts as defined in the Payment Services Directive (EU) 2015/2366”. A current account is such a payment account, and FiDA is still in trilogue in any case, with the last documented Council paper dating from April 2026. Nor does the exclusion of so-called gatekeepers discussed in the trilogue reach Anthropic or OpenAI, because neither is among the companies designated under the Digital Markets Act. A separate article sets out the detail on FiDA.
The door is called the account information service. The Payment Services Directive (PSD2) defines it in Article 4 No 16 as an “online service to provide consolidated information on one or more payment accounts”, and the German Payment Services Supervision Act (ZAG) adopts the same definition in section 1(34) ZAG. The definition turns on function rather than technology: a chat that summarises balances and transactions meets it just as a budgeting app does. In Germany, a provider offering only this service needs no full authorisation under section 34 ZAG, but it does need registration by the Federal Financial Supervisory Authority (BaFin), professional indemnity insurance and at least two managing directors, with one sufficing for small undertakings.
Article 67 PSD2 sets out what such a provider may do. It needs the customer’s explicit consent, must identify itself to the account-holding bank on every call and, under paragraph 2(f), must not “use, access or store any data for purposes other than for performing the account information service explicitly requested by the payment service user”. Set beside the five-year retention for model training that is possible in the consumer business of the model providers, that creates immediate friction. It is open, however, whom the obligation binds. In the United States the large providers work with aggregators such as Plaid, and neither a court nor BaFin has yet said publicly whether a model provider that receives the data only through a registered service falls within supervision itself, or would have to be registered as that service’s agent under Article 19 PSD2. No entry for OpenAI or Anthropic could be found in the registers of BaFin and the European Banking Authority (EBA).
The successor rules leave this door unchanged for now. On 27 November 2025, the Council and the Parliament reached a provisional agreement on the Payment Services Regulation (PSR) and a new payment services directive. The Council’s press release puts fraud prevention, checking the IBAN against the payee’s name and transparency on fees at the forefront. The text has not yet appeared in the Official Journal, and according to the Parliament’s procedure file it is awaiting the Council’s first-reading position. For anyone considering a European launch in October 2026, PSD2 is the law that applies.
In the US the bank negotiates the price, in the EU registration decides
The comparison with the United States shows how much depends on that door. There, the rule of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) under Section 1033 of the Dodd-Frank Act was meant to govern third-party access to account data, and it was finalised in October 2024. Forcht Bank, the Kentucky Bankers Association and the Bank Policy Institute challenged it, a federal court in Kentucky blocked its enforcement, and the CFPB itself asked for a stay so that it could rewrite the rule. The 22 August 2025 advance notice lists, as one of four open issues, “the optimal approach to the assessment of fees”, in other words whether and how banks may charge for data calls. The agency had not published a new proposal in the Federal Register by the time of writing.
Banks have filled the gap with contracts. According to a CNBC report from 14 November 2025, JPMorgan Chase signed new agreements with aggregators “that make up more than 95% of the data pulls on its systems, including Plaid, Yodlee, Morningstar and Akoya”. Neither the bank nor the aggregators disclosed any figures. The bank’s spokesman Drew Pusateri summed up the outcome in a sentence that captures the American position: “The free market worked.” Brian Shearer of the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator, who previously worked at the CFPB, expects other large banks to follow. Anyone who has run a derivatives book knows the pattern: whoever controls access to the flow sets the price, for as long as the other side has nowhere else to go.
PSD2 took that negotiation off the table in European law. Article 67(4) states: “The provision of account information services shall not be dependent on the existence of a contractual relationship between the account information service providers and the account servicing payment service providers for that purpose.” Paragraph 3 requires the bank to treat data requests from a registered service “without any discrimination”. A European bank therefore cannot control a registered account information service’s access through a contract it negotiates. Its leverage lies elsewhere: in the identification of every call, which the service owes under paragraph 2, and in the quality of its own screen. The United Kingdom shows how large regulated data access can become. At the end of July 2026, Open Banking Limited reported more than one billion payments and more than 100 billion API calls since 2018. How London intends to deal with payments made by agents is covered in the 2 October article on the HM Treasury consultation.
The banking app loses the narrative before it loses customers
In Germany, demand is already there before any offering is. According to a representative survey by the industry association Bitkom from May 2026, 25 percent of people aged 16 and over have already asked a chatbot such as ChatGPT for financial advice, and that without access to their account data. 27 percent can imagine letting AI make most of their financial decisions, while 49 percent reject AI for financial matters altogether. The first two figures measure different things, one actual use and the other a hypothetical willingness, and they cannot be added together. Taken together, they show that a quarter of customers already ask questions about their own money in a place where the bank is not listening.
A bank does not lose deposits or payment flows as a result, of course. The account stays where it is, and payment initiation is a separate service under section 1(33) ZAG. In retail banking, though, the customer relationship has for years been decided less by who keeps the account than by who owns the screen, and that is exactly where the American offerings take hold. Whoever sorts a customer’s spending into categories, finds the subscriptions and drafts the cancellation takes over the moment in which the bank used to offer its next product. Kieran Hines of RFI Global frames it for banks as a matter of time: “The window to do this on their own terms is narrowing.” No public statement by the large banking associations on Finances in ChatGPT could be found up to the time of writing.
The European legal position gives banks time more than protection. A model provider that wants to read current accounts here needs to register, or to work through a registered partner, and must meet the purpose-limitation and identification requirements. So far, none of the American providers has announced a European launch. That is a lead of uncertain length. Once a provider goes through that door, Article 67(4) applies to the bank, and from then on there is nothing left to negotiate.
Recommendations
Under Article 67 PSD2, every service identifies itself on every call. A bank’s own API statistics therefore already show which aggregators call how often. It makes sense to extend that analysis to the question of which aggregators serve applications built on language models, so that a European launch by a model provider does not first become known through the press.
The American offerings rely on features every bank can build on its own data: spending by category, recurring payments, subscriptions, upcoming debits. A bank that makes these accessible in its own app through a language model answers the customer’s question where it owns the screen, and under its own rules on data protection and retention.
Banks that connect Claude, ChatGPT or other models to customer data internally should make the protective clauses of the Schwab contract their minimum standard: an explicit exclusion of training for all licence tiers, not only enterprise licences, and masking of account numbers and identifiers before any data flows.
In the Council’s public communication, the 27 November 2025 provisional agreement is above all a fraud package. The obligations the final text places on interfaces and account information services will set the framework in which a model provider would enter Europe. Reading it therefore belongs on the plan as soon as the text appears in the Official Journal.
Glossary
Account information service (AIS): an online service that consolidates information on one or more of a customer’s payment accounts held with other payment service providers, Article 4 No 16 PSD2, section 1(34) ZAG. Subject to registration in Germany under section 34 ZAG
Payment initiation service (PIS): a service that, at the customer’s request, initiates a payment order from an account held with another payment service provider, section 1(33) ZAG
Aggregator: a provider such as Plaid, Yodlee or Akoya that maintains connections to thousands of banks and passes account data on to applications
Registered investment adviser (RIA): an independent wealth manager registered in the United States that often holds client assets with a custodian such as Charles Schwab
Section 1033: the provision of the Dodd-Frank Act under which the CFPB is to govern third-party access to bank accounts