How to text your AI about your money with Poke and Era

Era Team

Product

30 April 2026

Updated 13 May 2026

You can text a question like "what did I spend on groceries this month?" and get a real answer — pulled live from your connected accounts. Poke is an MCP-compatible messaging client from The Interactive Company. Connect it to Era Context once, and your finances — current accounts, savings, credit cards, and more — are a text message away.

What is Poke?

Poke is a messaging-first AI client built by The Interactive Company. Instead of opening a dedicated AI app, you send a message — the way you already communicate. Poke supports the Model Context Protocol (MCP), which means it can connect to external data sources like Era Context and pull real information into its responses.

Why text your money?

Most personal finance questions are quick. You don't need a full app session to answer "did my direct debit go through?" or "how much have I spent on coffee this month?" A text-message interaction strips away the friction. You ask, you get the answer, you move on.

Era Context gives Poke 33 tools across 7 groups — accounts, transactions, insights, activity, rules, and more. Poke can call the right tool automatically based on what you ask. You never need to know which tool it uses.

What you need

A Poke account
An Era account (the Basic tier is free)
About five minutes

How to connect Era Context to Poke

Create your Era account. Sign up at era.app. The Basic tier is free and includes two connected accounts with read-only MCP access.
Connect your accounts. From Era Context, start the connect flow. Era uses MX, a regulated financial data provider, to securely link your institution. You can connect current accounts, savings accounts, credit cards, and investment accounts — all in one place. Your bank credentials are never stored by Era — MX handles the authentication handshake.
Set up the Era integration in Poke. Open Poke, navigate to Settings → Integrations, and click New template. Add Era Context as the MCP server using this URL:
```
https://context.era.app
```
Save the template. That's the entire configuration.
Complete the OAuth authorisation. When Poke connects for the first time, you'll be redirected to an authorisation screen. Review the permissions and confirm. This explicit authorisation step applies every time you connect a new AI client — nothing happens silently.
Send your first message. Try: "What are my current account balances?" Poke pulls live figures from all your connected accounts and replies.

What can you ask over text?

Once connected, you can ask Poke anything you could ask any Era-connected AI:

"How much did I spend this month compared to last month?"
"Show me all my recurring charges"
"What did I spend at restaurants this week?"
"What's my cash flow for the past 30 days?"
"Did any transactions come in over £200 today?"
"What are my biggest spending categories?"

Poke picks the right Era tool for each question. You just send the message.

Can you set up recurring financial updates?

Yes. Poke supports recurring messages, so you can schedule financial check-ins the same way you'd set a reminder. Some useful recurring setups:

Monday morning recap — "Send me a weekly spending summary every Monday at 8am"
End-of-month review — "On the last day of each month, show me my top 5 spending categories"
Daily balance check — "Text me my current account and credit card balances every morning"
Subscription watch — "Every Sunday, remind me to check for any new recurring charges"

Set these up in Poke once and Era Context handles the data pull automatically each time. No manual check required.

Cross-agent memory: your context follows you

Era Context shares memory across every connected AI client. Tell Poke something once — a savings goal, a budget preference, context about a transaction — and every other connected agent knows it too. Switch to Claude or ChatGPT later, and they already have your context.

You can 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.

Is it safe to text your financial data?

Your bank credentials never pass through Era or Poke — they're handled entirely by MX during the initial connection. After that, Era holds read access to your account data, protected by:

AES-256 encryption at rest
TLS 1.3 in transit
Revocable access — disconnect Poke from Era Context at any time, instantly
Activity log — every action Era takes on your behalf is recorded and visible to you

Era Financial Advisors LLC is SEC-registered (CRD #334404). For a deeper look at how the security model works, see Is it safe to give AI your financial data?.

What tier do you need?

The Basic tier (free) gives Poke read-only access to two accounts. That covers balances, transaction search, spending insights, and cash flow — enough to answer most questions you'd ever text.

For automation — creating rules, tagging transactions, getting write access — you'll want the Organise tier at $9.99/month. See the full breakdown on the pricing page.

Not just Poke

Era Context works with any MCP-compatible client. If you use Claude, ChatGPT, OpenClaw, Cursor, or any other agent that supports MCP, the same bank connection works for all of them. Connect your bank once through Era, and every agent you trust can access it.

For setup guides specific to other clients, see:

The phone in your pocket is now connected to your financial life. Ask it.