Moolala: Money Made Simple with Bruce Sellery
Sep 30, 2026 · 14 min · 8 segments
Could artificial intelligence soon help you budget, pay down debt and plan for retirement? Wealth management consultant Preet Banerjee examines Perplexity AI’s integration with the financial data…
Preet BanerjeeGuest
Bruce SelleryHost
What do you understand about the product [laughs] and, uh, how it exists today?
Well, this announcement from Perplexity raised a lot of eyebrows, 'cause people were just wondering, "Who is gonna make the first big AI push into personal finance and trying to disrupt and innovate this space, taking the jobs of many financial advisors and so on?" And so I took a look at this, and I actually tried to connect it to my bank accounts, 'cause that's what it says it can do.
You can allow it to connect to your bank accounts, your investment accounts, and it will do all this analysis for you and give you financial plans and tell you how to manage your money, how to pay off your debt, and whether or not you're gonna hit your retirement goals.
And it didn't work, it didn't work because of where you're located, or it didn't work because it's just a bad product?
It didn't work because while I was able to connect it to my actual Canadian bank account, uh, it then said, "Well, we can't actually read anything from it." So there's some, some early teething issues, but when I look at sort of the, the promos of what it says it will be able to do, uh, once things are up and going, I, I don't know if I, I share in the hype that, that came with this announcement.
I think that there is more hype than there is substance to, to this particular announcement and how people are using AI for managing their finances, and the, and the reason I say that is this.
There are a lot of people who, you know, they like to geek out and optimize their personal finances already, and they're using, uh, spreadsheets, tools.
They probably use ChatGPT and, and et cetera already, and they may use this new set of tools, and they might get something out of it.
But the vast majority of people are gonna get overwhelmed by the outputs, because all the examples that it provided was, you know, "Here's a heat map of the last 36 months of my spending data."
W- what are you gonna do with that, exactly? And I think that there's still a personal element to giving people guidance with managing their money that goes beyond just looking at raw numbers.
Now, I understand the concern about getting overwhelmed, but shouldn't that just be then a supplementary prompt that says, "Give it to me in three bullet points like I'm seven years old"? Surely the system would be sophisticated enough to do that.
Yeah, and I think that, you know, down the road, I think there is some promise to what can happen in this space, and I think particularly the promise will be in more of the mass market, uh, side of the industry.
So, you know, high net worth individuals, million dollar plus portfolios, they've got access to, you know, financial advisors with lots of experience and, uh, really well, um, created, uh, financial planning software that helps them create really personalized advice, and they have the, the economics to support spending that time with that, that household.
When it comes to people who have, you know, less than $100,000, most people feel that they're just getting a sales job when they speak to someone who has financial advisor on their business card.
And so this has long been where a lot of people thought, "Well, this is where the benefit can be, where we can get some kind of standardized advice that is free, hopefully, from some of the biases that exist, um, that people are exposed to right now." And so maybe people with more simple situations will be able to get more clarity with their money, but I still think it's gonna take some time.
Why is it taking so long? And I ask that because the robo-advisors have been around for what? 10, 15 years globally.
Not just in Canada but around the world, and there have been similar financial planning applications, like Planswell, and ones that are less about the investing and more about the financial plan.
It would seem like AI would be able to supercharge those kinds of efforts very, very quickly.
What do you understand about the product [laughs] and, uh, how it exists today?
Well, this announcement from Perplexity raised a lot of eyebrows, 'cause people were just wondering, "Who is gonna make the first big AI push into personal finance and trying to disrupt and innovate this space, taking the jobs of many financial advisors and so on?" And so I took a look at this, and I actually tried to connect it to my bank accounts, 'cause that's what it says it can do.
You can allow it to connect to your bank accounts, your investment accounts, and it will do all this analysis for you and give you financial plans and tell you how to manage your money, how to pay off your debt, and whether or not you're gonna hit your retirement goals.
And it didn't work, it didn't work because of where you're located, or it didn't work because it's just a bad product?
It didn't work because while I was able to connect it to my actual Canadian bank account, uh, it then said, "Well, we can't actually read anything from it." So there's some, some early teething issues, but when I look at sort of the, the promos of what it says it will be able to do, uh, once things are up and going, I, I don't know if I, I share in the hype that, that came with this announcement.
I think that there is more hype than there is substance to, to this particular announcement and how people are using AI for managing their finances, and the, and the reason I say that is this.
There are a lot of people who, you know, they like to geek out and optimize their personal finances already, and they're using, uh, spreadsheets, tools.
They probably use ChatGPT and, and et cetera already, and they may use this new set of tools, and they might get something out of it.
But the vast majority of people are gonna get overwhelmed by the outputs, because all the examples that it provided was, you know, "Here's a heat map of the last 36 months of my spending data."
W- what are you gonna do with that, exactly? And I think that there's still a personal element to giving people guidance with managing their money that goes beyond just looking at raw numbers.
Now, I understand the concern about getting overwhelmed, but shouldn't that just be then a supplementary prompt that says, "Give it to me in three bullet points like I'm seven years old"? Surely the system would be sophisticated enough to do that.
Yeah, and I think that, you know, down the road, I think there is some promise to what can happen in this space, and I think particularly the promise will be in more of the mass market, uh, side of the industry.
So, you know, high net worth individuals, million dollar plus portfolios, they've got access to, you know, financial advisors with lots of experience and, uh, really well, um, created, uh, financial planning software that helps them create really personalized advice, and they have the, the economics to support spending that time with that, that household.
When it comes to people who have, you know, less than $100,000, most people feel that they're just getting a sales job when they speak to someone who has financial advisor on their business card.
And so this has long been where a lot of people thought, "Well, this is where the benefit can be, where we can get some kind of standardized advice that is free, hopefully, from some of the biases that exist, um, that people are exposed to right now." And so maybe people with more simple situations will be able to get more clarity with their money, but I still think it's gonna take some time.
Why is it taking so long? And I ask that because the robo-advisors have been around for what? 10, 15 years globally.
Not just in Canada but around the world, and there have been similar financial planning applications, like Planswell, and ones that are less about the investing and more about the financial plan.
It would seem like AI would be able to supercharge those kinds of efforts very, very quickly.
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