Plaid users can now connect brokerage accounts to Perplexity Computer, an AI platform orchestrating 20 frontier models. On the same day, Truist expanded its open banking deal with Plaid. The message: open banking rails are becoming the default plumbing for AI agents.

Open banking was built for a specific purpose: give consumers control over their financial data and let them share it with the services they choose. For a decade, that meant fintech apps, budgeting tools, and lending platforms.

This week, the destination changed. Plaid announced that users can now connect their brokerage accounts to Perplexity Computer, an AI platform that describes itself as combining "highly accurate AI search, an orchestration harness of 20 frontier models, and agentic internet access."

An AI agent can now see your portfolio. The implications of that sentence are worth sitting with.

Perplexity Computer is not a chatbot with a brokerage plugin. It is an AI platform that orchestrates 20 frontier models, combining search, reasoning, and the ability to take actions on the internet on a user's behalf.

Connecting Plaid means Perplexity Computer can access structured financial data: brokerage holdings, account balances, transaction history. Combined with its search and reasoning capabilities, it can analyse a portfolio, cross-reference holdings against market data, and potentially suggest or execute actions.

The "agentic internet access" part is the key phrase. This is not a read-only integration. Perplexity is building a platform where AI agents act on information, not just display it. Brokerage data through Plaid gives those agents something financially meaningful to act on.

On the same day, Truist Financial expanded its open banking partnership with Plaid, giving customers broader data access through API-first infrastructure.

Truist is the seventh-largest US bank by assets. Its decision to deepen its Plaid integration signals that major banks are accelerating open banking not because regulators are forcing them to, but because they see where data requests are heading.

Increasingly, those requests are coming from AI platforms. When a consumer connects their bank account to an AI assistant, the data flows through the same Plaid pipes that power fintech apps. The infrastructure does not care whether the requestor is a budgeting tool or a 20-model AI orchestration platform. The data access is identical.

That is both the power and the risk of open banking in the AI era.

Open banking's consumer protection model rests on informed consent. You connect your account, you see what data will be shared, you approve. The assumption is that you understand what the receiving application will do with your information.

That assumption strains when the receiving application is an AI agent with autonomous capabilities. When a consumer connects their brokerage to Perplexity Computer, do they fully understand that an AI system orchestrating 20 models will analyse their holdings? Do they grasp what "agentic internet access" means for how their data might be used?

The consent screen looks the same. The capabilities behind it are fundamentally different from what open banking was designed for.

As we explored in our coverage of the identity-payment convergence, the boundaries between identity verification, data access, and payment authorisation are blurring. Plaid's move with Perplexity is a concrete example of that convergence in action. The same API that verifies your identity and connects your account now feeds data to an AI agent that can act on your behalf.

The Plaid/Perplexity integration is a leading indicator for the broader financial services industry. If brokerage data can flow to an AI platform today, current account data, mortgage information, insurance details, and pension holdings can follow.

Every financial institution that offers open banking connectivity needs to consider that AI platforms will be the fastest-growing category of data consumers. The infrastructure decisions banks make now, which APIs to expose, what data granularity to allow, what consent frameworks to require, will determine how much control they retain when AI agents become the primary interface between consumers and their financial lives.

Plaid sits at the centre of this shift. It already connects over 12,000 financial institutions. As AI platforms proliferate, Plaid becomes not just a fintech infrastructure company but the data access layer for agentic finance.

Regulatory scrutiny. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and European regulators will need to address whether current open banking consent frameworks are adequate when the data recipient is an AI agent with autonomous capabilities. Expect updated guidance.

Data scope expansion. Brokerage accounts are the starting point. Watch for Perplexity and competing AI platforms to request access to current accounts, credit cards, and lending data through Plaid and similar providers.

Competitive response. If Perplexity gets brokerage data through Plaid, OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic will pursue similar integrations. The race to be the AI platform with the deepest financial data access is starting.

When AI agents can access your brokerage, your bank account, and your transaction history, is "informed consent" still meaningful?