OpenAI’s latest expansion of ChatGPT—new personal finance features now available in preview for U.S. ChatGPT Pro subscribers—marks a significant step in the company’s push toward specialized AI assistants. And Associate Professor of Marketing Daniel McCarthy at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business had a front-row seat. As a member of OpenAI’s early testing group for the new tools, McCarthy provided feedback on how consumers might use conversational AI to navigate complex financial decisions.
The new features allow users to link accounts from more than 12,000 financial institutions through a partnership with Plaid, giving ChatGPT access to portfolio performance, spending patterns, subscriptions and upcoming payments. The rollout follows OpenAI’s April acquisition of the team behind personal finance startup Hiro, whose expertise helped accelerate development.
For McCarthy, whose research often focuses on customer behavior, financial forecasting, and the value of firm–customer relationships, the tool’s potential lies in its ability to turn scattered financial data into intuitive, context-rich insights.
“Having this inside an app I already use every day, and being able to interact with it conversationally, is a huge win,” he told OpenAI (scroll to ‘…ChatGPT Pro community testers’ and click “Marketing Professor”) during testing. “I can ask a question in plain English and get an answer without navigating dashboards or exporting to a spreadsheet.”
On LinkedIn, McCarthy emphasized how natural-language queries—such as How much am I spending on subscriptions? or Show me all my airline travel over the past two years—produce immediate, sourced answers that previously required manual digging across multiple platforms.
He noted that the real significance lies in AI’s ability to reason effectively once it has the right contextual information. OpenAI says its new GPT-5.5 model is designed for exactly that, improving the accuracy of finance-related responses and enabling long-term planning tasks like preparing to buy a home. “Bigger picture, I’m increasingly of the view that so much becomes possible when the right context is in place,” McCarthy wrote. “Personal finance is a great example of this.”
OpenAI plans to refine the tools based on Pro-user feedback before expanding access to ChatGPT Plus subscribers.
Media Contact
Greg Muraski
Media Relations Manager
301-405-5283
301-892-0973 Mobile
gmuraski@umd.edu
About the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business
The Robert H. Smith School of Business is an internationally recognized leader in management education and research. One of 12 colleges and schools at the University of Maryland, College Park, the Smith School offers undergraduate, full-time and flex MBA, executive MBA, online MBA, business master’s, PhD and executive education programs, as well as outreach services to the corporate community. The school offers its degree, custom and certification programs in learning locations in North America and Asia.