Perplexity Uses Plaid to Personalize Financial Insights

Managing money has always meant tracking accounts across multiple institutions. Most people never get a complete view unless they maintain spreadsheets. Perplexity now offers an alternative. The platform draws insights directly from a user’s own connected financial data, according to a Thursday (April 9) blog post.

In an expansion of its integration with Plaid, the artificial intelligence firm now lets users link bank accounts, credit cards and loans directly inside its platform, per the announcement. The two companies extended an earlier integration that had connected brokerage accounts.

Through Plaid’s network of more than 12,000 financial institutions, users can ask Perplexity to analyze spending, track liabilities, build a debt payoff plan or calculate net worth across every connected account. Users ask questions and get answers drawn from their own live financial data. The integration provides read-only access.

Perplexity said more than 75% of its users already ask finance questions monthly.

A Generation That Expects This

PYMNTS found that 62% of Gen Z consumers were open to using AI for “what if” financial planning scenarios, stress-testing how an interest rate move or income change might affect their finances. Another PYMNTS study found more than one-third of Gen Z consumers and “power users” turned to a dedicated AI platform as their first stop when tackling personal tasks.

For financial institutions, the concern isn’t only whether consumers use AI for money decisions. It’s who owns that relationship. Perplexity has positioned itself as an insight layer. It won’t move money or place trades. But the platform that answers every financial question, grounded in a user’s live account data, is moving to own the customer relationship.

Perplexity targets users who already trust AI for research and want a unified view without switching providers. Advanced analysis tools are available only to Pro and Max subscribers. Basic account linking and portfolio access are open to all signed-in users in the U.S. and Canada, with mobile and international rollout to follow.

But only about 1 in 5 consumers said they’d let an autonomous AI agent manage their banking. That hesitation held even as comfort with AI rose elsewhere. Perplexity’s advisory-only model fits that constraint for now.

Exposure That Comes With the Convenience

The same consolidation that makes the product useful also concentrates risk. A complete, real-time picture of someone’s financial life is exactly what fraud actors want.

Consumer fraud losses hit $12.5 billion in 2024, a 25% increase from the prior year, as Federal Trade Commission reported. The Deloitte Center for Financial Services projected that AI-enabled fraud could reach $40 billion in the U.S. by 2027.

In its connection with Plaid, data stays off Perplexity’s servers, according to the blog post. Connections run through Plaid’s infrastructure, which powered nearly 1 million new account connections daily. Still, FINRA in December flagged that member firms’ use of generative AI was outpacing their internal controls, and the SEC made third-party AI data handling an examination priority for 2025.

Other AI platforms have moved into similar territory. OpenAI released financial services tools. Anthropic moved into wealth management through Claude integrations. Financial advisors have been using ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity for investment research and portfolio analysis.

Plaid plans to add crypto wallets and real estate to the integration next. For Perplexity, that expansion would deepen the financial picture available to users and tighten its position as the place consumers go first when they have a money question. For institutions, it narrows the gap between insight and influence.