The news: OpenAI announced ChatGPT integrations for Excel and for several financial data platforms, including FactSet, S&P Global, and LSEG.

The Excel integration competes directly with Anthropic’s Claude for Finance and Claude in Excel, and is a sign that OpenAI wants to compete seriously in the enterprise market after initially gaining ground primarily as a consumer chatbot. It also suggests that AI bots are becoming centers of complex data ecosystems—not just standalone models that scrape the internet.

How they work: Claude embeds deeply in the financial tools stack. It is pitched as a solution for financial analysis that consolidates data from external and internal databases, including a long list of financial data platforms and internal data storage applications like Databricks and Snowflake.

Anthropic markets it for uses including market research, competitive benchmarking, and financial modeling. ChatGPT is moving in a similar direction, but Anthropic appears more embedded into finance work today.

Zoom out: Anthropic’s recent product announcement fueled speculation that AI could disrupt software, legal services, and financial data providers, contributing to an AI scare trade.

But the trend is toward integration, not replacement: Anthropic has also partnered with LSEG and S&P, among other data providers. Claude Cowork plugs into Microsoft applications, making it easier to extract and format data. Some large banks have been working with AI firms to use their own data.

Implications for banks: Putting internal data to work is a tall order. Zero-party, second-party, and behavioral data on customers are not widely collected, and fragmented systems prevent them from using the data they do have, per our August 2025 report Unlocking Data and AI’s Promise in Banking.

Nearly 40% of financial services professionals worldwide said that data sets from different sources do not match, and 36% said that they manually consolidate data from multiple platforms.