Through its Moneysmart website, ASIC posted the tips in response to the growing number of people using the technology for financial information, with one in five Australians using AI platforms for this purpose already.
Additionally, roughly two-thirds said they trust AI platforms for financial advice and are confident in the accuracy of the financial advice they provide.
ASIC warns that users of AI need to be careful of the advice it gives, its lack of credentials and credibility, while also raising the concern of privacy, encouraging users not to share unnecessary personal or financial information with AI tools.
That being said, it acknowledges that the technology does have applications for financial advice, stating that AI tools can summarise large amounts of data, answer questions or provide definitions, highlight market trends and point users in roughly the right direction on where to look for more specific and tailored advice.
“While AI can be used as a learning tool, it should always be checked against trusted, independent sources to verify claims before acting on any information it gives you. We always encourage consumers to research broadly and not to rely on one source (whether AI or otherwise) when making decisions about their finances,” ASIC said in a press release.
ASIC’s advice comes as OpenAI partnered with Plaid to let users link their bank accounts to ChatGPT so the chatbot can provide financial advice.
However, just prior, Plaid finally revealed a cyber incident that occurred almost two years earlier.
The incident, which occurred in December 2024, was only recently discovered in April 2026. The disclosure on the Maine Attorney General’s website found that the incident impacted 294 people, with the only description of the breach being “inadvertent disclosure”.
In a letter to those impacted, Plaid said it conducted an investigation, which determined the incident was not a cyber attack, but an internal technical issue related to phone number recycling.
“The company conducted a thorough investigation and determined the issue stemmed from a phone carrier practice called number ‘recycling’ – when a mobile carrier reassigns a disconnected phone number to a new person. The investigation identified that, in rare cases, this may have resulted in a mismatch of some Plaid accounts tied to those phone numbers,” the notice said.
The Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) has also launched a new AI companion in its app that can answer financial questions referring to a customer’s banking data.
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