Connecting Claude to your bank account with Era

Era connects Claude to your bank accounts, credit cards, and investments through the Model Context Protocol (MCP), giving Claude secure, read-only access to your financial life in under five minutes. No CSV exports. No copy-pasting statements. Just ask Claude about your money, and it answers with real data.

This guide covers setup for both Claude Desktop and Claude Code. By the end, you'll have Claude pulling live balances, analyzing spending patterns, and answering questions about your finances in natural language.

Add to Claude

What you need before you start

• A Claude Desktop or Claude Code subscription (any plan works)
• A bank account, credit card, or investment account at a supported institution (Era supports thousands of financial institutions through its banking data provider)
• About five minutes

That's it.

Step 1: Create your Era account

Go to era.app and sign up. The Basic tier is free and includes two connected accounts with read-only MCP access — enough to follow this entire guide.

You'll verify your email and land in Era Context, your personal financial hub. Era Context is where you manage connections, review activity, and control what your AI agents can access.

Step 2: Connect your bank

From Era Context, tap the connect flow to link a bank account. Era uses MX, a regulated financial data provider, to establish a secure connection to your institution. Your bank credentials are never stored by Era — they're handled entirely by MX during the authentication handshake.

Select your bank, sign in with your online banking credentials, and complete any multi-factor authentication your bank requires. Most connections are live within 30 seconds.

Once connected, you'll see your accounts and recent transactions appear in Era Context. If you have a checking and savings account at the same bank, both will show up automatically.

Step 3: Add the MCP config to Claude Desktop

Open Claude Desktop and navigate to Settings, then the MCP Servers section. You can also Connect Claude to Era Context directly from here. Add a new MCP server with the following configuration:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "era-context": {
      "url": "https://context.era.app"
    }
  }
}

That's the entire configuration. The URL is https://context.era.app — nothing else to add.

Save your settings. Claude Desktop will attempt to connect to the Era Context MCP server.

Step 4: Complete the OAuth consent

When Claude Desktop connects to Era Context for the first time, you'll be redirected to an OAuth authorization screen. This is where you explicitly grant Claude permission to access your financial data through Era.

Review the permissions, confirm, and you're connected. Every AI agent interaction requires this explicit authorization — nothing happens silently.

Step 5: Try your first query

Open a new conversation in Claude Desktop and try something like:

"What's my checking account balance?"

Claude will pull your live balance from Era Context and respond with the current number. No plugins to configure, no APIs to learn. Claude now has real financial context.

Here are more things to try:

• "How much did I spend on dining out this month?"
• "Show me my recurring charges"
• "Compare my spending this month to last month"
• "What's my cash flow look like?"
• "List all my transactions from Amazon this year"

Each of these queries hits Era Context's MCP tools — 33 tools across 7 groups covering accounts, transactions, insights, automation, and more. You don't need to know the tools exist. Claude picks the right ones automatically based on your question.

Setting up Claude Code

If you use Claude Code (Anthropic's CLI for developers), the setup is just as fast. Add Era Context to your MCP configuration:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "era-context": {
      "url": "https://context.era.app"
    }
  }
}

Complete the OAuth flow when prompted, and you're live. Claude Code is particularly useful for developers who want to query financial data while working — checking whether a subscription charge went through, reviewing expenses before submitting a report, or building personal finance scripts with live data.

Try asking Claude Code:

• "Analyze my spending categories for the last 90 days"
• "What recurring subscriptions am I paying for?"
• "Show me my daily financial summary"

Cross-agent memory: tell Claude once, every agent knows

One of Era Context's most powerful features is cross-agent memory. When you tell Claude something about your finances — a savings goal, a budget preference, context about a transaction — Era Context remembers it. And that memory persists across every connected AI agent.

Tell Claude "I'm saving for a house and trying to keep dining under $400/month." Switch to ChatGPT tomorrow, and it already knows. No re-explaining. Your financial context follows you across agents.

You can also ask any agent to forget something, and it's gone everywhere. Your memory is private to you — never shared with other users, never used to train models.

Troubleshooting

Claude says it can't find the MCP server Double-check that the URL in your config is exactly https://context.era.app. No trailing slash, no path, no /sse.

OAuth screen doesn't appear Make sure you're signed into your Era account in the same browser that handles the OAuth redirect. Try signing in at era.app first, then retry the connection in Claude.

Transactions aren't showing up New bank connections can take a minute to fully sync. If your accounts appear in Era Context but transactions don't show in Claude, wait a moment and try again. If the bank connection shows as disconnected in Era Context, reconnect it — Era preserves your transaction history even when reconnecting.

"Permission denied" or similar errors Your Era plan determines which MCP capabilities are available. The Basic (free) tier provides read-only access to two accounts. If you're hitting limits, check your plan in Era Context.

Multiple accounts at the same bank Era pulls all accounts from a connected institution automatically. If you only want Claude to see specific accounts, you can choose which accounts are active in Era Context.

What Claude can do with your financial data

With Era Context connected, Claude can:

• Check balances across all your connected accounts
• Search transactions by merchant, category, amount, or date range
• Analyze spending patterns and trends over any time period
• Compare periods — this month vs. last month, this quarter vs. last quarter
• Forecast spending based on your historical patterns
• Identify recurring charges and subscriptions
• Provide cash flow summaries showing money in vs. money out
• Remember your preferences and financial goals across conversations

On the Organize tier ($14.99/month), Claude can also help you create automation rules in plain English — "tag all Uber transactions as commuting" or "flag any charge over $500" — which you review and approve before they activate.

Security and privacy

Era takes security seriously:

• AES-256 encryption at rest
• TLS 1.3 in transit
• Bank credentials are never stored — they're handled by the regulated data provider
• Your data is never sold, never used for advertising, never shared without your explicit permission
• Revoke access anytime — disconnect any AI agent from Era Context whenever you want

Era Financial Advisors LLC is SEC-registered (CRD #334404). This isn't a weekend project. It's a regulated financial service built by a team from Stripe, Robinhood, CashApp, Apple, and Google.

Next steps

You're connected. Claude can see your money. Here are some ways to go deeper:

• Connect more accounts — add credit cards, investment accounts, or accounts at other banks
• Explore the Organize tier — unlock automation rules, unlimited categories and tags, and full financial metrics
• Try other AI agents — Era works with any MCP-compatible client, including ChatGPT, Cursor, OpenClaw, Manus, Gemini, and more. One Era account, every agent.
• Set financial goals — tell Claude what you're working toward and let cross-agent memory keep every agent aligned

The whole point of Era Context is that your AI already knows how to reason about money. It just needed access. Now it has it.