- Key insight: OpenAI acquired a second PFM app as it builds personal financial advice capabilities into ChatGPT.
- What’s at stake: Banks and fintechs are at risk of becoming disintermediated from their customers if they go to ChatGPT for finance advice instead of bank-embedded PFM tools.
- Expert quote: “The deal is less about OpenAI entering banking and more about what industry will own financial advice and engagement.” – Javelin analyst Dylan Lerner
OpenAI has acquired the AI-powered personal finance startup Hiro Finance.
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The deal, announced by Hiro co-founder and CEO Ethan Bloch on Monday, will bring Hiro’s team to OpenAI as the artificial intelligence company seeks to expand its “
“Personal finance has been one of the most talked-about use cases for generative AI since the beginning, and this deal reinforces that,” Pitchbook fintech analyst Rudy Yang told American Banker.
The Hiro Finance app will be shutting down its operations as part of the deal.
“Starting today, Hiro is no longer accepting new signups,” a message on the company’s website read. “The Hiro product will stop functioning on April 20, 2026. You can export your data from settings on Hiro’s web app until May 13, 2026, after which all personal data will be permanently deleted from our servers.”
Hiro user’s data will not be shared with OpenAI, according to the company.
“Building for you was a privilege,” Bloch said in a
The app’s sunset, according to CCG Catalyst managing partner Paul Schaus, indicates that the purpose of the deal was not to integrate an existing product into OpenAI.
“It is bringing a team and a founder who knows how to build consumer finance tools that people use,” Schaus told American Banker. “Ethan Bloch built Digit, sold it and now he’s at OpenAI. It seems the product was a vehicle to demonstrate the capability.”
Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, and Hiro has not disclosed how much money it has raised since the company’s founding in 2024.
The deal, according to Yang, could broaden the range of people who use personal finance management (PFM) tools, should OpenAI use Hiro’s team to build something similar under its own brand.
“Historically, personal financial management has been limited to spreadsheet-savvy users or people already seeking it out,” he said. “But major LLMs are already seeing
Bloch said in his LinkedIn post that his team will be coming with him to OpenAI, making the deal an “acqui-hire” for the artificial intelligence company — meaning that the deal was focused on talent recruitment over the product offering itself. OpenAI has a history of such “acqui-hires,” including
Hiro Finance’s
This is the second PFM-focused “acqui-hire” for OpenAI in the past six months. In early Oct. 2025, the company hired Sujith Vishwajith, co-founder and CEO of the personal finance app Roi. Vishwajith described the deal in a
According to Dylan Lerner, Javelin Research senior digital banking analyst, these two fintech startup deals from OpenAI indicate a broader trend of AI-tech companies moving into finance versus the other way around.
“This acqui-hire move was an aggressive push into financial services,” Lerner told American Banker. “They are building capabilities related to financial intelligence, which is positioning them to own more of what I have been calling “share of mind.'”
Financial institutions have historically competed for “share of wallet,” but being the first place a consumer goes when they have a financial question is just as if not more important, Lerner said.
“LLMs like ChatGPT have been primed for that kind of engagement, with deeper conversational and contextual abilities than your typical bank chatbot,” he said. “Where banks have long held an advantage is data and permissions. However, that advantage is narrowing with open banking frameworks and regulations like Section 1033, not to mention the growing ecosystem of financial connectivity breaking down such barriers. Once ChatGPT has access to consumers’ financial data, that friction effectively disappears.”
Should OpenAI successfully build a personal finance advisor native to ChatGPT, according to Lerner, the risk for banks lies in them becoming underlying financial infrastructure and becoming further disintermediated from their customers.
“The deal is less about OpenAI entering banking and more about who – or rather, what industry – will own financial advice and engagement,” he said.
For banks and fintechs working in the PFM space, the back-to-back talent acquisition deals for Roi and Hiro indicate that OpenAI views financial guidance as a core capability, Schaus said.
“When OpenAI makes its second fintech acquisition targeting financial math and scenario modeling, that’s a directional statement about where ChatGPT is heading,” he said. “Traditional PFM products tell the consumer where their money was spent. It appears OpenAI is building a system that models decisions before they’re made, such as scenario planning, debt payoff paths and savings projections in real time. That’s a fundamentally different value proposition, and most bank-embedded PFM tools aren’t close to it.
“If ChatGPT becomes the place people go to model whether they can afford a house, how to pay down debt or when they can retire, that’s a relationship that used to belong to the bank or credit union,” Schaus continued. “You can’t compete with that by adding a budgeting widget to your mobile app or your website.”
Hiro Finance officially launched a public beta version of its app in Nov. 2025. Shortly after the launch, Bloch told American Banker in a
“Hiro has been a dream I’ve had for around 15 or so years,” he said at the time. “[I] had this big question of, ‘How can I help people with their personal finances?’ That was actually the spark that led to Digit.”
Digit, Bloch’s first PFM startup, was launched in 2014 as a chatbot, “the first financial chatbot in the market way back then” according to Bloch.
“We started to really hit the limits on what was possible with the technology [in] that day in terms of conversations and neurolinguistic programming,” he said.
Digit eventually sunset its chatbot product in the late 2010s, but continued to operate as an automated savings tool. The company was acquired by Oportun in 2021 for around $211 million.
Not long afterward, OpenAI launched its first iteration of its large-language AI model ChatGPT.
“It was not obvious to me yet at all that that would be a new unlock for some of the stuff we were trying to do at Digit,” Bloch said.
He then spent nearly two years using various AI models — including, but not limited to, OpenAI’s GPT models — to build what he calls an “AI personal CFO.”
“We use other foundational models for different [things,] based on what’s the right use case,” he said in the podcast. “We’ll use the latest GPT-5, previously GPT-4, from OpenAI for a bunch of things. We actually use Gemini for some things, and we’re constantly testing.”
