[mahemm]

I'm surprised y'all stopped at the personal finance layer. I've been thinking for awhile that LLMs would be really effective as personal financial advisers, and this kind of hookup (plus I guess another one for investment accounts?) seems like all that's needed to bootstrap reasoning.

[mbm]

Yup! Actually starting to experiment with that now.

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.

[satvikpendem]

A company Maybe.co recently shut down trying to do this exact same thing and couldn't make the economics work.

[mbm]

Thanks for sharing! Would be curious to learn more.

[justinclift]

> I've been thinking for awhile that LLMs would be really effective as personal financial advisers

Why would you be thinking that?

[atonse]

I’ve thought the same. Because the main thing a financial advisor does is have the knowledge of different financial instruments and pair it with your situation right?

An LLM would do that extremely well but can also do it more often. not once a year appointments. You could have active portfolio management for a negligible fee.

[justinclift]

Who accepts the liability when the LLM does its typical occasional massive judgement fuck up?

Asking that because even the very best, commercially available, state of the art LLMs (presently Claude Opus 4.7 (1M) with Max effort enabled) still occasionally fucks up its decisions and judgement in significant ways.

So, it's kind of horrifying to me that people would consider this for actually potentially life-impacting ways. Especially as it sounds like the consideration is to advise people in area's they don't themselves have the skill and knowledge to catch bad advice on. :(

[mbm]

Yeah, investing over time in such a way to beat the S&P is actually incredibly challenging (having tried it myself). I’m very skeptical an LLM can do better than that unless it has a very large, expensive firehose of data.

It may be that more mundane analysis ends up being the most useful. For example — for years, we had some money in a money market fund earning basically no interest. It just wasn’t on the radar.

Had even a not very smart LLM nudged us to put the money into a HYSA earlier, we would have made thousands per year in interest.

My wife also recently used our tool to do some simple investing optimization that’s going to save us a few thousand per year on taxes.

Thing like this aren’t sexy but do have value, and don’t take GPT Pro.

[karp773]

"You are absolutely right! This is a very deep, professional level insight. Yes, I have blown up your account but we can try more of my investment ideas. What would you like to do next?" /s

[mbm]

Yeah, I actually agree with you -- this is something that needs a ton of guardrails. It'll take a lot of thought to build correctly.