Anthropic said on February 24, 2026 that Claude is getting a finance-focused expansion through Cowork, new plugins, and deeper access to institutional data systems. The update is built around a simple idea: finance work rarely happens in one file or one tool, so Claude needs to move across spreadsheets, presentations, market data, and research context without forcing users to restart the task at every step.

The most visible part of the release is cross-app context between Excel and PowerPoint. Anthropic says Claude can now carry context between the two applications so that a user can analyze earnings, update a model, and build a summary slide deck within the same session. The company is offering that Excel and PowerPoint workflow in research preview for all paid plans on both Mac and Windows.

Five Anthropic-built finance plugins

Anthropic is also releasing five in-house plugins for finance teams through a public repository. The baseline financial analysis plugin supports common analyst workflows such as market and competitive research, financial modeling, and PowerPoint template creation and quality checks. Beyond that, Anthropic is shipping plugins for investment banking, equity research, private equity, and wealth management.

Those plugins are designed around role-specific work rather than generic prompting. In the examples Anthropic gives, Claude can review transaction documents, build comparable company analyses, parse earnings transcripts, update models with revised guidance, evaluate deal materials, analyze portfolios, and generate rebalancing recommendations. The company’s pitch is that plugins should encode domain workflows and expected outputs, not just expose generic tool access.

New institutional data connections

The launch also adds new MCP connectors for FactSet and MSCI. Anthropic says the FactSet connector brings real-time market data, earnings estimates, fundamental analysis, and research content into Claude. The MSCI connector adds access to index data, constituents, exposures, methodologies, and performance information. Partner plugins from LSEG and S&P Global are also joining the same broader finance workflow.

Taken together, the release moves Claude further into a system-of-work role for finance teams. Instead of stopping at summarization, Anthropic is trying to connect research, modeling, presentation building, and institutional data access into one continuous flow. That matters because finance users typically work in tightly controlled processes where context switching is expensive and output quality is highly visible. By combining app-to-app context, plugins, and proprietary data connectors, Anthropic is making a direct bid for that production workflow.

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Claude adds finance plugins plus FactSet and MSCI connectors