Just this morning, we stood up a demo email agent (basically, email back and forth with Claude with our MCP server connected, providing the data) and it's strangely comforting to chat with it. There's something about the medium of email and how it just works because that's where you're already used to talking with your financial advisor.

There's a lot of nuance in how it's built though, and everyone has different preferences, so to start with the focus is really on building an agent-friendly MCP.

For the non-Plaid assets eg., home, car, etc., we just added custom asset MCP tools so you can manually add those and they're included in your computed net worth.

I'm doing something similar with Tiller (which I've been using since Mint was acquired by Intuit).

It's neat to see how OP did this using a Claude Routine though. My version locally uses a local qwen model + an API key (annoyingly created using OAuth) with sheets access. A Claude Routine would've been significantly easier

I actually built it for myself initially, and my wife. So I just built what we needed/wanted.

There will be a huge variety of products in this space and ours is just one take on the problem. I love seeing anything that's taking a shot at it.

It's the ease by which LLMs can ingest and combine various data sources.

Dear company who has extensive military contracts and is founded in stealing data from people here is every single financial transaction I have ever made! Please don't use it for surveillance pricing tee hee.

At least apple credit cards give you money for that rather then the other way around.

- We have a built-in CSV export tool in beta right now for cash transactions, and plan to add this for other datasets as well. You should be able to download your data when you want it. It's yours.

- Yes, tracking is great, but it also has a dark side. My sort of vision, at least for what I want, is less of a gamified finance tracker and more of an ambient, always-on agent that's watching for me. It knows my preferences, it knows what I care about, and it tells me when it finds something.

- Before we get there though, for now, it's really interesting to sort of tinker and build your own custom finance automations. As a programmer, it just feels liberating to get the data out of some closed banking app and into a space I'm comfortable in.

- Especially from an investing standpoint, it's been neat to pair our MCP with a much smarter model like 5.4 Pro and have it do long-horizon research tasks that require a lot of web research and correlation.

And I totally hear you -- we had this happen in our family as well, and it was really sad. Security is a massive priority for us, but it's always going to be a cost-benefit analysis for each person.

Happy to share more about our infra in a follow-up post.

The problem is that there sort of isn't a better way right now in the US, and for now, Plaid or a Plaid-like competitor is the safest way. Eventually, it would be awesome if there were clean, open APIs, and standards around this, but for now, it's the best we have.

The alternative of course for the DIY-er is some sort of browser automation, which honestly, is what I tried first. I really wanted it to work, but it didn't - which led us to Plaid.

When we built our Plaid integration it used OAuth and a redirect. Plaid just got an access token, you enter your user/pass on the bank site.

Edit: Seems like smaller banks are probably the ones that won't support OAuth. We didn't support those.