At Grasshopper Bank, a digital bank based in New York City, Chief Technology Officer Pete Chapman started noticing that the bank’s startup and tech company clients were using large language model chatbots like Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT for almost everything. “One of our beta clients uses Claude to help build her end-of-month financial reporting for her board every single month, and she’s had to extract her bank account data and download it into an Excel spreadsheet, then plug it manually into that board packet,” Chapman told American Banker. This week, Grasshopper announced that it’s letting such customers load their bank account data directly into Claude, using a feed built by its tech partner Narmi. Now the bank’s beta user, who previously relied on manual processes, feeds her bank data directly into Claude to create monthly financial reports. “Ultimately, we’re trying to listen to our clients,” Chapman said. “We know our clients do things elsewhere, and we’d rather enable them in a safe and secure manner. This is just the next step in that evolution.” This is part of a broader AI adoption journey at Grasshopper that until now has focused on using AI to drive efficiencies in the company’s back office. “We spent the better part of a year and a half undergoing that effort, and we’ve made a lot of progress on that, but we always said to ourselves, at some point, we would like to take Gen AI and be able to deliver a better client experience,” Chapman said. No other U.S. bank has publicly announced that it’s letting customers access their bank data through a large language model. While many banks have enthusiastically embraced generative AI for the sake of internal efficiency, most have hesitated to let customers interact with their bank that way – the risks of error, hallucination or bias are still considered too great. Grasshopper is not using Anthropic’s Claude as a customer service chatbot to answer questions about the bank or as a replacement for call-center representatives. It’s giving business customers the option to connect their bank account information to the Claude chatbot and query and analyze their own financial data by asking questions, similar to the way they might bring their bank account data into QuickBooks or a personal financial management app.