Meet Pocket AI: answers about your money, in plain English

Most of what you want to know about your money is already in your account. How much you spent on eating out last month, whether rent will clear before payday, which of those small monthly charges you still use. The answers are there, but finding them means scrolling, filtering and doing sums in your head.

From today, Pocket AI does that work for you. It lives in the Pocket app, behind the sparkle button at the top of your home screen, and it can now do three new things: find subscriptions you have forgotten about, forecast your balance, and answer questions about your money in plain English. It is rolling out to every personal account over the next two weeks, at no extra cost on any plan.

Three things it does well

Finds subscriptions you forgot about

Pocket AI looks for payments that repeat on a regular schedule, even when the merchant name changes slightly from month to month or the amount creeps up. It groups them into one list with what each costs you a year, when it last charged you and when it will next.

In our beta, the average person found 2.4 subscriptions they did not know were still running, worth €212 a year. The most common were free trials that had quietly turned into paid plans, and apps people had stopped opening months ago. From the list, you can freeze the card used for a subscription, move it to a single-use card or set a reminder three days before the next charge.

Forecasts your balance

The forecast looks at your income, your bills and how you usually spend through the month, and shows where your balance is likely to be each day until your next payday. If it looks like you will dip below a level you choose, Pocket AI tells you a few days ahead, not on the morning a direct debit bounces.

It is a forecast, not a promise, so we show it as a range rather than a single line. The range narrows as the month goes on and Pocket learns more about your patterns.

Answers questions about your money

Type or say a question and Pocket AI answers with the figures and the transactions behind them. Every answer links to the payments it used, so you can check its working.

What you can ask

We watched what 40,000 beta testers asked in their first week. Most questions fell into a handful of groups:

• Spending. "How much did I spend on takeaways in September?" or "What did the trip to Lisbon cost, all in?"

• Comparisons. "Am I spending more on groceries than I was in the spring?"

• Planning. "Can I afford a €600 flight and still have €1,000 left at the end of the month?"

• Rates. "Tell me when the pound is worth more than €1.20", which sets a rate alert you can edit later.

• Unusual activity. "Is there anything strange on my card this week?" Pocket AI already flags payments that do not look like you, and you can ask it to explain why.

I asked it what I'd spent on coffee this year and immediately wished I hadn't. Then I asked it to set up a vault for the difference, which felt better.

Beta tester, Utrecht

How privacy works

We built Pocket AI on a simple rule: it should know about your money and nothing else, and what it learns should stay yours. In practice, that means:

• It only reads your own Pocket data. Your transactions, balances, vaults, cards and scheduled payments. It cannot see your other bank accounts, your contacts or anything outside the app.

• Your data never trains shared models. We do not use your questions, answers or transactions to train models that other customers use, and the AI providers we work with are contractually barred from doing so.

• Conversations are yours to delete. Your history is kept for 90 days so you can scroll back, and you can delete any conversation, or all of them, from settings.

• It cannot move money on its own. Pocket AI can suggest a transfer or prepare a vault, but nothing happens until you confirm it, with the same checks as any other payment.

• You can turn it off. One switch in Settings, under Privacy, turns Pocket AI off entirely. The button disappears, nothing is analysed, and the rest of the app works exactly as before.

Our security page covers how we encrypt and store your data in more detail, including what our regulator requires of us.

What it gets wrong

Pocket AI is good at sums and patterns, and less good at guessing what a payment was for. A transfer to a friend might be rent, a shared dinner or a birthday present, and it cannot know which. When it is unsure, it says so and asks, rather than filling the gap with a confident guess. You can recategorise any payment and it will remember next time.

It also does not give regulated financial advice. It can tell you how much you have saved and how fast, but not which fund to put it in.

What's next

Over the coming months we are bringing Pocket AI to business accounts, where it will match receipts, answer questions about team spending and forecast cash flow across currencies. If you have a question it cannot answer yet, tap the thumbs-down under the reply and tell us. We read every one.

You can find out more about what Pocket AI can do on the assistant page.