OpenAI has acquired personal finance fintech Hiro, further entrenching itself in the financial realm.
The deal, announced on Hiro’s website, will shut down the Hiro application for users April 20. Users can export their data through settings until May 13, Hiro said.
Hiro, launched by Digit founder Ethan Bloch, billed itself as an “AI personal CFO” and said it helped clients manage more than $1 billion in assets.
OpenAI confirmed the deal to TechCrunch, which first reported it, but hasn’t made further public statements. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. As the Hiro app is shuttering and the entire Hiro team is joining OpenAI, TechCrunch called it an “acqui-hire.”
“For decades, personalized financial guidance has been too expensive, too generic, or too hard to access. ChatGPT is finally changing that,” Bloch wrote on LinkedIn.
This is OpenAI’s second fintech purchase, following its acquisition of personal finance app Roi in October.
Altman told Federal Reserve Vice Chair for Supervision Michelle Bowman last year that financial firms were some of OpenAI’s earliest adopters.
“Morgan Stanley, Bank of New York, these are major partners of ours that we’re doing fantastic work with. And we were kind of like, ‘Are y’all sure?’ and they were like, ‘Yeah, we really want to do this,’” he recalled at the time.
Those institutions and others figured out how to use the technology, and “how to structure it enough that they can rely on it” for critical processes, he said.
“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.
But a key difference between AI financial advisers and human advisers is fiduciary duty – or lack thereof.
“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. “The answer right now is, clearly, AI has the [financial] expertise.”
“What they don’t have is that fiduciary duty,” Lo said. “They don’t have the ability to suffer consequences if they make a mistake to the same degree that a human adviser does.”
Dylan Lerner, a Javelin Research senior digital banking analyst, told American Banker that OpenAI’s back-to-back fintech deals indicate that AI companies are moving into finance, versus the reverse.
“This acqui-hire move was an aggressive push into financial services,” Lerner said. “They are building capabilities related to financial intelligence, which is positioning them to own more of what I have been calling ‘share of mind.’”
