Ask Claude what you spent on groceries last month, which subscriptions crept up, or whether you can afford a holiday — answered from your real accounts rather than a guess. The connection reads. It cannot act.
earmarkIQ already holds a read-only Open Banking connection to your accounts. Context opens a second, narrower door on top of that: it lets an assistant you choose read the picture earmarkIQ has built, under scopes you grant one at a time.
Your bank is never involved in this second step. The assistant never sees your banking credentials, never talks to your bank, and cannot reach anything you have not granted.
An earmarkIQ account on Pro, with at least one bank connected, and an assistant that supports custom MCP connectors. Context is a Pro feature; it is not on the free tier or on Plus.
This is the same for everyone. It is not a secret and it is not a token — authorisation happens in the next step, and the connection is bound to your account then.
Pick your assistant below for the rest.
Five scopes, each granted and revoked on its own. Grant one, grant all five, or change your mind later.
| Scope | What it lets the assistant read |
|---|---|
| Spending | Category totals and how they move over time — groceries, transport, eating out. |
| Transactions | Individual transactions: merchant, amount, date, category. |
| Balances & assets | Account balances, property values and the net worth figure built from them. |
| Income | Pay, when it lands, and how regular it is. |
| Subscriptions | Recurring payments, what they cost, and price rises. |
Transaction history goes back 12 months by default and is capped at 24 months. There is no setting that lifts the cap.
Context is read-only by construction rather than by policy. There is no tool in it that writes, moves or changes anything, because no such tool has been built — and a test fails the build if one is ever added. That is a stronger guarantee than a setting you could switch off by accident.
Read-only describes what Context can do to your data. It says nothing about what happens to the conversation once your data is inside the assistant. Whatever you ask Claude, ChatGPT or any other assistant is handled under that provider's privacy terms, not ours — and may be retained or reviewed according to their policy, not this one.
Grant the narrowest scopes that answer your question, and read the assistant provider's own terms before connecting anything. We would rather say that plainly than let read-only sound like a privacy guarantee it is not.
Every request an assistant makes is recorded and readable by you in the app: which tool ran, which scope it used, and when. It is not a summary or a sample — it is the list.
That matters more than any promise on a marketing page. A read-only claim you cannot audit is a claim you are taking on trust; a log you can open yourself is a claim you can check. If you connect an assistant and later wonder what it looked at, the answer is already written down.
Two routes, both immediate:
Revoking access to Context does not touch your bank connection or your earmarkIQ account. It only closes the door the assistant was reading through.
Assistants that can touch your finances fall into two camps. Some can act: tag spending, create rules, schedule a transfer for you to approve. Others can only read. Era, for instance, offers UK Open Banking through MCP with the ability to write as well as read.
earmarkIQ is firmly in the second camp, and that is the point rather than a gap in the roadmap. An assistant that cannot act cannot act wrongly. If you want something that moves money on your behalf, earmarkIQ is not it.