News

Launching BankBridge: read-only bank access for AI agents

5 min read
BankBridge is a hosted MCP server that gives Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, Gemini, Codex, and 24 other AI agents read-only access to your bank accounts, transactions, and investments in real time. Connect your bank once, install the connector in your agent of choice, and ask money questions where you already work. $5/mo per connected bank, cancel anytime, AES-256-GCM encrypted access tokens, zero financial data cached on our side.

What we’re launching today

BankBridge is live. As of today, anyone with a US bank account can sign up at bankbridge.money, link their bank, and give the AI agent they already use the ability to read their accounts and answer questions about their money.

We’re a 1-person shop at Great Work and we built BankBridge because we kept doing the same dance ourselves: open the bank app, screenshot, paste into Claude, ask the question, get a half-answer because the screenshot didn’t have the date range we wanted, do it again. The agents got smart enough to be useful for money long before any of them could see your money. So we wrote the bridge.

What BankBridge actually is

BankBridge is a hosted MCP (Model Context Protocol) server. You connect your bank to it once. Then you install a one-line connector inside the agent of your choice. From then on, when you ask the agent a money question, it picks the right tool, calls it, gets the answer back, and replies. No app to open, no dashboard to check.

Twelve tools cover the questions almost everyone asks about their finances: list accounts, list transactions, search transactions, summarize spending, identify recurring charges, monthly cashflow, merchant history, categories, and the investment-side equivalents for holdings and investment transactions.

What you can do with it

A handful of the questions BankBridge users send their agents on day one:

  • “Am I net positive this month?”
  • “Which subscriptions am I paying that I haven’t used in 60 days?”
  • “Show me every charge over $200 since the start of the year.”
  • “What did I actually spend on groceries last quarter?”
  • “How are my Vanguard holdings doing against cost basis?”
  • “Anything weird in the last two weeks of transactions?”

The shape of the questions matters. These aren’t screens-of-charts questions; they’re prose, with conditions and exclusions and follow-ups. The agent is good at those. The bank app is not.

Which agents work today

We ship with one-screen install snippets for every host that speaks MCP today — 29 of them as of launch:

Every doc page pre-fills your real bbk_ key into the snippet when you’re signed in. You copy, you paste, you’re wired up.

How it’s built

Every tool call lives-fetches from your bank’s data feed via Plaid (Transactions + Investments products). We don’t cache accounts, transactions, holdings, or any other financial data on our servers. The only thing we persist is your subscription state and an AES-256-GCM encrypted access token used to talk to your bank on your behalf.

Auth is either a bearer key (bbk_ prefix, SHA-256 hashed in our DB, rotatable in one click) or OAuth 2.1 with Dynamic Client Registration plus PKCE for hosts that prefer it (Claude Desktop, ChatGPT Apps SDK). Each MCP request creates a fresh per-user server instance and re-validates credentials — no shared state, no leakage between users.

The stack: Next.js 16, React 19, TypeScript, Bun, SQLite (auth + subscriptions + encrypted tokens only), @modelcontextprotocol/sdk, NextAuth v5 with magic-link auth, Stripe for billing, Resend for email. Hosted on a hardened Ubuntu 24.04 box behind nginx + Let’s Encrypt.

What it costs

$5 per connected bank per month, billed via Stripe. One bank is $5/mo. Two banks is $10/mo. Cancel any time from the dashboard; billing stops immediately, no further charges. No refunds on already-billed months, but you keep access through the end of the period.

Launch promo:first month free for every signup through July 2026. Sign up, link a bank, the meter doesn’t start until day 31.

Why we built this

Two things converged in the first half of 2026. First, the agents got significantly better at the kind of structured, multi-step reasoning that money questions actually require — “exclude Whole Foods from grocery spend and compare to last March” is now a normal one-shot for Claude or ChatGPT, where a year ago it was a brittle five-step prompt. Second, MCP became the consensus way for agents to call out to external data, with every major host adopting it by Q1 2026.

That combination meant the bottleneck stopped being “can the agent reason about finances” and started being “can the agent see your finances at all.” Today the answer to the second one is also yes.

We did look at building this as an app, the way Copilot Money and Monarch and the rest of the category did. We decided not to. The agent is already an app. You already open it. You already trust it with bigger and weirder things than your checking balance. Asking you to open a second app to check on your money is a step backward, not forward. So we shipped the bridge instead.

Get started in five minutes

  1. Sign up at bankbridge.money/login — magic link, no password.
  2. Link a bank inside the dashboard. The first month is free.
  3. Pick your agent from the docs page and copy the pre-filled snippet.
  4. Open the agent, ask “list my accounts and balances,” confirm it works.
  5. Ask the question you actually came to ask.

The step-by-step walk-through for Claude lives at /guides/how-to-connect-your-bank-to-claude. For everything else, the docs page has a one-screen setup per host.

Questions, feedback, edge cases? Email hello@greatwork.company — we read every message.

Today is launch day. If you find a bug, tell us. If something is confusing, tell us. We’ll fix it.

FAQ

Is BankBridge actually live today?

Yes. As of June 30, 2026, anyone with a US bank account can sign up at bankbridge.money, link a bank, and connect their AI agent. The 29 host integrations and 12 MCP tools are in production. The demo bearer (Authorization: Bearer bbk_demo) is open for evals and reviews without creating an account.

What makes this different from a personal finance app?

There's no app to open. BankBridge is the bank-data layer; the UI is whichever AI agent you already use. You don't switch contexts to check your money — your agent answers in the same conversation where it's also answering everything else. That's the whole pitch.

Is my bank data safe?

We don't store balances, transactions, holdings, or any other financial data — every tool call live-fetches from your bank's data feed and the response flows straight to your agent. The only thing we persist is your subscription state and an AES-256-GCM encrypted access token used to talk to your bank on your behalf. You can rotate keys, revoke banks, and cancel from the dashboard in one click.

Can the agent move money?

No. Every BankBridge tool is read-only by design. There is no transfer tool, no bill-pay tool, no card-issue tool. The 12 tools cover balances, transactions, recurring charges, monthly cashflow, merchant history, categories, holdings, and investment transactions. That's it.

Which banks and brokerages are supported?

Whatever the upstream bank-connection layer supports — that's 12,000+ US institutions including Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Capital One, Citi, the major regional and credit-union networks, plus brokerage support for Fidelity, Schwab, Vanguard, E*TRADE, Robinhood, and Interactive Brokers. If you can connect it to Mint, you can connect it to BankBridge.

What's the launch promo?

First month free on every signup through July 2026 — just sign up and connect a bank. No code required. After that, $5 per connected bank per month, cancel anytime from the dashboard.