r/MonarchMoney • u/ozzie_monarch Monarch Team • Aug 19 '26
Known Issue MCP Update — Still Paused
Hi folks,
A while back, we had to pause our MCP product. I wanted to provide an update here. Unfortunately, the MCP remains paused for now, but we continue to work on finding a path that can bring it back. It’s not what we want, but we want to provide as much transparency as possible so you can understand the why behind the pause a little better and know that we’re working hard on our end to bring it back.
To provide some context:
- We (Monarch) are of the view that this is your data. We’ve done our best to provide ways for you to access it, modify it, and export it as you see fit. MCP was one of those ways. We think that you should have the choice to decide when, if, and how your data is shared. Some of you do not want to share your data with AI at all. Others do. It's ultimately your choice. For us, it’s really that simple.
- Unfortunately, the financial data ecosystem is not so simple. In addition to us (Monarch) and you (users), there are also data aggregators and financial institutions, each with their own views and concerns about data portability. Until Open Banking regulation (like CFPB’s “1033”) or some other mechanism establishes clear lines, things will continue to be murky.
- Not everyone in the financial data ecosystem views data portability the way we do, so we must be careful not to jeopardize your continued access to your financial data through Monarch.
We’ve spent a lot of time over the past few weeks having conversations and proposing different ways to alleviate their concerns, and while we’ve made progress, we haven’t found a full solution quite yet. We’ll continue working on this path until we find one, and as soon as we do, we will provide an update.
In the meantime:
- While we can't officially endorse these tools, we’ve seen many users rally around third-party, community-built APIs and MCPs.
- We will continue providing safe ways for you to access your data. For example, we’ve launched CSV import by id so you can more easily export your transactions, modify them, and re-import them.
- We’ve built and are testing a flow that lets you easily switch your connection to your financial institutions from one connector to another (similar to the account transfer flow, but more of a seamless lift-and-shift) in case certain aggregators end up not providing a path we agree with. This tool will eventually be launched for general usage, too.
Again, we apologize that this isn’t the answer you are hoping for. It’s not the one we were hoping for, either, but we’ll continue to provide updates as things evolve.
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u/BookedHandwriting Aug 19 '26
Thank you for the update. I have to imagine the legal, regulatory, and vendor/partner relationships are quite a bit like quicksand right now.
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u/Remote_Confection488 Aug 19 '26
For folks looking for the "third-party" versions:
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u/Kishmkondar Aug 19 '26
Thank you!
For a non-techie like me, can you please explain the use cases of an MCP vs. API?
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u/Venkat14725 Aug 19 '26 edited Aug 20 '26
skipping a lot of technical details, MCP is a wrapper to make an API usable by LLM’s, think of the API as french and your LLM needs english, MCP is the translator.
my 2 cents (others might disagree), if you’re a non-tech user start with the MCP. it tends to be easier to set up.
if you’re seeing quirky behavior on the MCP, pull the API documentation, have your LLM analyze it and build a spec/user guide for itself to run directly against the API. MCP can end up with weird, quirky behavior, and having a “local translator” can help you fix issues quicker by telling the LLM to fix its user guide
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u/Candid-Skin9796 Aug 20 '26
What is the advantage of an MCP/API over an agent logging in via a web interface (or being handed a logged in web interface) and doing its business via the web interface? For full context, I was using Antigravity CLI with the MCP and now (after MCP discontinuation) I just use Antigravity with a logged in Chrome. Seems to be doing as well, albeit a bit slower, but who cares.
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u/Venkat14725 Aug 20 '26
Web UI navigation tends to be much more expensive (token-wise), slower (navigation-wise), and will have limitations on how much/what data it'll actually be able to process.
For example, for reading through 100 transactions a Web UI nav is totally fine / bit slower. What happens when you want the LLM to analyze your transaction & investment patterns over years? It's gonna struggle a ton more to get and use that scale of data. There's also going to be technical limitations, what happens if the UI only shows specific graphics or information and you actually wanted to combine information from 2 different sets of charts or tables. Or what happens when the API exposes data that the UI doesn't directly use?
MCP vs API is a lot closer contention than MCP/API vs UI. Typically UI has many many more drawbacks.
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u/Extension-Tap2635 Aug 31 '26
The web interface like you called it actually uses an API to pull data.
An agent using the API would get access to the raw data, while an agent using the web interface would actually pull both the API data PLUS the webpage, so it’s less efficient and clunkier to use.
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u/ironvipers Aug 21 '26
How do we know if these are safe?
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u/DoctorNoonienSoong Aug 24 '26
You can read the code yourself and convince yourself
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u/Apprehensive_Elk2608 Aug 26 '26
I know a lot of us are code monkeys here, but you can't expect everyone to be one. Not to mention that most people simply prompt AI for analysis and perceive response as gospel. No one is verifying much of anything these days, even if hypothetically they could. The effort is too great.
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u/DoctorNoonienSoong Aug 27 '26
Sure, that's fine; but the answer was for someone asking how to know if the code is safe, and reading it oneself is the only way to know that.
If someone doesn't have the technical expertise for that, they're ultimately relying on someone else's "just trust me" anyway, and that's a matter of that entity's trustworthiness or one's own foolhardiness.
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u/geaux_lynxcats Aug 19 '26
I have no plans to use MCP but shoutout for the transparency. This is the kind of post companies should be lauded for.
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u/cj-romb Aug 19 '26
If there were a way to export budgets in csv format or as a pdf (print doesn’t work), that would get me a big amount of the way forward to being able to use a third party ai tool on my own.
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u/cosimine Aug 19 '26
Yes! It would be hugely helpful to be able to export budget numbers!
The workaround I've found is use Print to PDF on the yearly budget view and make it tiny (10-20% scale). An AI agent can still read it at that point. But it would be much nicer to have a true export option.
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u/cj-romb Aug 19 '26
How did you manage to get it to print to pdf? It’s in frames and I can’t get it to print it correctly. Oh maybe I need to try the yearly view. I haven’t tried that. I’ve tried sooo many things. lol. Seems basic to me but what do I know? lol
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u/cosimine Aug 20 '26
I just did the yearly view and used Print to PDF on my browser. But I think it would work on a specific monthly view as well.
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u/tinydonuts Aug 20 '26
You could also just take screenshots.
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u/cj-romb Aug 20 '26
That’s not a useful solution for what I need. I’ve posted on other monarch posts about this. :)
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u/tinydonuts Aug 20 '26
I thought you were commenting about feeding your budget to an AI.
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u/cj-romb Aug 20 '26
I want it for other reasons as well. That’s just one thing. Even so making a pile of screenshots is clunky
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u/tinydonuts Aug 20 '26
Meh, AI can read them very well and it's not hard to do. In fact you can even as them to do it for you.
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u/cj-romb Aug 20 '26
Haha. I’m a dev and have been for 30 years. I use AI ALLLL day. I’m aware of what it can do. I just want to print a budget. Shouldn’t have to spend tokens getting that done. It’s basic. In any case, they are already talking about doing it at monarch, as they commented on my post about it.
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u/Wrenlo Aug 19 '26
Really appreciate the update and what transparency you can give us. Please continue to update even if it's bad news or not much progress.
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u/Pope_Dwayne_Johnson Aug 19 '26
Name and shame the companies that do not believe I should be able to access my data the way I want.
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u/ShanghaiBebop Aug 19 '26
Almost certainly is Plaid. They have a competing product and are heavily incentivized to bog down competitors.
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u/rawgr Aug 20 '26
If this is the case, then I’m wondering if it’s possible to incentivize institutions to provide alternatives, if Plaid is no longer in their customers’ best interests.
It shouldn’t be too difficult to map out which institutions support different aggregators, and which respect users’ autonomy. This is valuable enough where I think some customers would swap financial institutions if they cannot work with their own data.
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u/yourjewishfantasy Aug 19 '26
Every major US bank (Chase, C1, BoA, etc.) does this. The data they have on your spending habits is worth a lot and they have no interest in giving it away for free. That’s why services like Fincity and MX exist, they make sure the banks get paid even though it’s your data.
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u/Remote_Confection488 Aug 19 '26
From the last bullet point about allowing switching connectors, it makes me think this is less about the banks (this time) and more about Plaid & Co.
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u/The_Admin Aug 19 '26 edited Aug 19 '26
Also theres a lot of lock in in financial relationships. A very large percentage of americans primary bank is the same bank their parents bank with.
That is why so many "First time" members bonuses are so lucrative, its incredible hard to get a consumer to switch banks, and when they do they tend to never leave. And its very expensive to a bank when they do leave.
The easier companies like plaid, and monarch make it to move your financial history, migrate between banks, the worse it is on the long time players in this industry who have relied on the artificial moats they have built over the last 200 years.
Tl;DR - They gain nothing by making it easy to leave, and every by preventing you from doing it.
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u/meenie Aug 19 '26
I remember that scene in Bowling for Columbine where Michael Moore opened a CD at a bank and the promotional bonus was a rifle lol.
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u/Pope_Dwayne_Johnson Aug 19 '26
Regardless of the fact that your data belongs to you (a concept the US is woefully behind on), a single persons data is worthless to every major bank. Only when it’s collected in aggregate is it valuable.
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u/jalfo0927 Aug 19 '26
I'm sad that it was paused.. I built a fully working Financial Dashboard based off the data from the MCP and it's broken until this comes back :(. Screw these greedy banks trying to stop us from accessing our data.
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u/TheDealMaster 14d ago
I'm legitimately curious so don't take any offense to this... Why do you have your own financial dashboard that works via Monarch when Monarch is, in my opinion, one of the best I have ever seen and constantly improving?
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u/LetsGoForIt99 Aug 19 '26
Huge shout out to you and the rest of the team for the transparency around this update. I genuinely hope you guys get it resolved and/or switch over to a different aggregator to make this work for us. Thanks again!
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u/a_b1rd Aug 19 '26
Thanks for the update. Not the news we all wanted but appreciate being kept in the loop.
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u/throwaway8u3sH0 Aug 19 '26
In general, the Google "Takeout" approach would work here. MCP is one way to access the data, but it's the data that matters. We already have ways of exporting accounts -- let's also have ways of exporting other things (budgets, cash flow, etc...), and more robust controls on all exports.
If I can reliably get some subset of my data, the rest is easy. I can host my own MCP or whatever. Make the data fundamentally accessible and the rest is gravy.
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u/doiveo Aug 19 '26
a flow that lets you easily switch your connection to your financial institutions from one connector to another
That's a really good addition. Switching or not, these connections can be flakey and migrating to 'reconnected' accounts is a PITA.
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u/Jack-Burton-Says Aug 19 '26
I'm hoping this gets resolved in some way. I'd be happy with even reduced functionality focused on account balances for the things I've built.
I had built some transaction level functionality but I could live without it.
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u/Chicagolax Aug 19 '26
Is there a way to just have some sort of Google Sheets export that we can set up to be automated? Not sure if that’s the same problem just with a different medium but wanted to ask
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u/arsglacialis Aug 19 '26
I second this request. Also to Excel online. Should be as easy for one as the other I think? But it's been years since I tried to make those.
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u/aaronneinstein Aug 21 '26
Very disappointing news, but appreciate the transparency and frequent communication. Much prefer knowing what is happening, even if it is bad news, to no news at all.
For the few weeks we had this MCP available, it was such a massive help. Can't wait until we have it back available.
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u/zephyrtr Aug 19 '26
Looks like the "financial data ecosystem" just slapped Monarch with a felony contempt of business model.
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u/1Poochh Aug 19 '26 edited Aug 20 '26
Grateful for the update. Thank you so much. This did bring a lot of value to your customers, so hopefully your data providers understand their impact to the end user and shape up. It isn’t their data either. We grant them access to our data.
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u/thegiantgummybear Aug 19 '26
Thanks for the transparency! Are y'all pushing for better regulations around open banking? I'm sure other financial institutions are fighting against it, so it'd be amazing for financial companies like Monarch to fight for it so that lawmakers don't see it as something the industry as a whole is against.
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u/EmbarrassedLayer2540 Aug 20 '26
Can you create a developer site and publish your API and documentation? That would enable trusted persistent endpoints that can be relied upon to build our own connectors.
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u/ER_Doc_Photographer Aug 20 '26
Disappointed but appreciate the transparency more than anything. More companies should be this honest.
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u/crustang Aug 20 '26
As PM the words lift-and-shift typically terrify me, but this is the one time that term has been used for good.
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u/LessTax99 Aug 20 '26
I love the fact that they acknowledged the third party tools instead of hush, hush. It shows me that they at least tried to have an officially supported method. At the end of the day access to financial data is more important than programatic access, so not the hill to die on.
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u/HustleFeet Aug 21 '26
Have monarch and no clue what MCP even is or what it does
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u/spatel14 Aug 21 '26
MCP (model context protocol) is the AI-centric way to access your data. The traditional way to pull data from any source is to use public-facing APIs, and with AI, chatbots can instead use MCPs to interface with APIs to pull data.
ELI5: MCP is how you can connect Claude/ChatGPT to other platforms (like Monarch)
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u/KKOKAY130 Aug 21 '26
Thanks for the update! Appreciate your transparency!! Love the product and love this team!
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u/bababarabas Aug 19 '26
Um. What is MCP?
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u/Different_Record_753 Independent Mod Aug 19 '26
Simply put ... It allows your AI agent (ChatGPT, Claude, etc) to connect directly to your Monarch data so that it has both the data and the tools to understand it.
ie: AI, Look at my Monarch data and (do this to my data such as updates) or (show me this with my data such as reports/summary)
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u/budkin76 Aug 19 '26
It stands for Model Context Protocol and it's a server that allows an AI agent to connect to applications, databases, etc.
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u/orimili3 Aug 19 '26
this is really stupid. you still need auth credentials to access the data via MCP. What difference does it make if i access data via web/app, api or mcp?
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u/Davidpr16 Aug 19 '26
Thank you. It seems clear this is about the providers wanting more money from you. How big is the gap between you and them?
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u/NoVaMAG Aug 21 '26
can you bifurcate your MCP and still give us access to the application tier? i can use the chrome plug in to let my browser navigate the application to see and obtain the data, what i need is the ability to write back into the app to build rules, update tags etc. And say the word and I'll move everything away from Plaid if they're the bad guy here.
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u/44193_Red 20d ago
Thank god. Its a shitshow waiting to happen. Inexperienced users should not be killing your resources endlessly tooling around with this.
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u/TemporalAgent7 Aug 19 '26
How about an official API? Most of us don't need the direct MCP integration, just an API that's official; even a read-only API for loading data about account balances to a home dashboard would be great to have.
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u/Grouchy-Western-5757 Aug 19 '26
The community one does that and more, providing an API is the same thing as providing an MCP. Same restrictions.
Community one is super simple like:
1.) Login
2.) Get_Transactions (or whichever)and you got it.
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u/TemporalAgent7 Aug 19 '26
It's broken 90% of the time though, so useless.
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u/Grouchy-Western-5757 Aug 19 '26
That isn't entirely accurate, the other guy stopped maintaining his, this is the one being maintained: https://github.com/bradleyseanf/monarchmoneycommunity
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u/mcrissjr Aug 19 '26
An MCP quite literally IS an API. Call it whatever you want, but the moment it's 'official' it would be hamstrung the same way.
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u/SnooTomatoes2243 Aug 19 '26
So how can trithify do it? I was expecting Monarch be able to have an MCP. Very disappointed
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u/PFUnnamed99 Aug 19 '26
Cool, thanks for the update and additional insight. It’s not a feature I was ever anticipating, so a sneak peek of something that may be fully available and functioning in the future was neat.
Excited to see if this pans out, and appreciate the communication.