Financial firms are building new businesses from the layers beneath their products
- Intuit is opening up its financial intelligence to AI agents, while SoFi is making its infrastructure programmable.
- Both firms are betting that the layers beneath their products can become businesses in their own right, creating value across new interfaces, businesses, and customer relationships.
Financial technology is moving toward a model where products and capabilities can be applied well beyond their original use cases. For Intuit and SoFi, that shift is leading to two different pathways.
Intuit is opening up its financial and business software to an agentic AI environment through a new partnership with Perplexity. SoFi, meanwhile, is turning its financial infrastructure into building blocks that other companies can use to create their own products. Each move signals a different vision for how the company can remain relevant as customer needs evolve.
Intuit is making its financial intelligence usable beyond its own software
Intuit’s partnership with Perplexity is, at its core, a bet that business software will increasingly be accessed through AI rather than through the traditional software interface. Perplexity has evolved from an AI-powered search and answer engine into an agentic assistant that can work across applications and execute multi-step tasks.
Announced August 31, the partnership integrates QuickBooks and Mailchimp into Perplexity Computer, the AI company’s agentic assistant. Using Model Context Protocol connectors, customers can access Intuit’s functionality directly within their Perplexity workflows.
The difference between this and a conventional AI search experience is what users can do. A business owner can use the integration to manage cash flow, follow up on overdue invoices, set up recurring billing, and distribute payment links – all within Perplexity. They can retrieve pay slips and employee payroll information, while marketing teams can track campaign performance and analyze data to identify actions that could generate revenue.
Intuit sees an opportunity to take that capability further, moving from executing individual tasks to handling more complex work on a business’s behalf. “By pairing their AI platform with the rich data and deep domain expertise behind our trusted financial system of intelligence, we’re empowering customers to seamlessly execute complex tasks to successfully run and grow their businesses,” said Alex Balazs, Intuit’s Chief Technology Officer.
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