OpenAI Buys Personal Finance Platform Hiro

OpenAI has acquired artificial intelligence-(AI) powered personal finance startup Hiro Finance.

The deal will see Hiro’s team join OpenAI, founder Ethan Bloch said in a LinkedIn post Monday (April 13). Bloch said the deal provides the opportunity to expand Hiro’s vision of creating an “AI personal CFO.”

“For decades, personalized financial guidance has been too expensive, too generic or too hard to access. ChatGPT is finally changing that,” Bloch wrote.

“The mission that brought us to Hiro, and to Digit before that, has not changed: improving people’s financial well-being. If anything, it feels even more important now.”

Terms of the deal were not released. The company’s LinkedIn profile says it has under 50 employees. Founded in 2023, Hiro’s tool allowed users to plan their finances by gaming out various scenarios according to their income, debt and spending patterns.

Before Hiro, Bloch founded the aforementioned Digit, a neobanking platform which provided personalized savings, investing and banking tools. That company was acquired by FinTech Oportun in 2021 for $211 million.

Bloch said Hiro would begin shutting down operations April 20, and would erase all data from its servers on May 13. Customers can export their data prior to the shutdown.

The acquisition follows OpenAI’s purchase last year of personal finance app Roi, with that company’s co-founder and CEO joining the ChatGPT maker.

“We started Roi 3 years ago to make investing accessible to everyone by building the most personalized financial experience,” Sujith Vishwajith wrote in a post on X. “Along the way we realized personalization isn’t just the future of finance. It’s the future of software.”

These deals come as experts are raising questions about a limit to AI’s ability to provide financial advice: it has no sense of fiduciary duty, meaning no obligation to act in a client’s best interests.

“The problem that we have to solve is not whether AI has enough expertise,” Andrew Lo, a finance professor and director of the Laboratory for Financial Engineering at the MIT Sloan School of Management, told CNBC last week. “The answer right now is, clearly, AI has the [financial] expertise.”

But what they “don’t have is that fiduciary duty,” Lo added. “They don’t have the ability to suffer consequences if they make a mistake to the same degree that a human advisor does.”

Research by PYMNTS Intelligence has shown consumers are increasingly turning to AI for tasks like organizing their personal finances.

For instance, the data shows that 62% of Generation Z consumers said they were willing to use AI for “what if” financial planning.