BNY Mellon, America’s oldest bank, has announced a multiyear strategic collaboration with OpenAI, marking a significant step in the financial sector’s AI evolution. The partnership will provide BNY Mellon with access to OpenAI’s cutting-edge AI tools, including Deep Research and its most advanced reasoning models, further strengthening the bank’s proprietary AI platform, Eliza.
While the financial details of the agreement remain undisclosed, both organizations see this as a transformative opportunity. BNY Mellon aims to leverage OpenAI’s expertise to enhance internal operations, improve workflow efficiency, and drive AI-driven innovation, while OpenAI looks to gain deeper insights into how its models perform in complex real-world financial applications.
Financial institutions have been at the forefront of AI adoption, with banks emerging as top innovators, patent holders, and recruiters of AI talent. Sarthak Pattanaik, Head of BNY’s AI Hub, emphasized AI’s strategic importance:
“We believe AI has transformational power and will be embedded in every product and service we offer.”
OpenAI’s Chief Operating Officer, Brad Lightcap, acknowledged the financial industry’s rapid AI adoption, citing existing partnerships with Morgan Stanley, BBVA, and Klarna. He noted the BNY Mellon collaboration as particularly valuable due to the bank’s advanced AI maturity and existing infrastructure.
“We’ve seen significant demand from the banking sector, and we don’t expect that to slow down,” Lightcap said. “BNY Mellon has already built an impressive AI platform, and we’re excited to see how our models can extend its capabilities.”
Launched last year, Eliza serves as both an AI chatbot trained on BNY Mellon’s internal knowledge base and a development platform where employees can build AI-powered tools. The platform is accessible to all 52,000 employees, with over 50% actively using it to create AI-driven applications, such as lead generation tools for sales teams.
As part of the OpenAI partnership, BNY Mellon will also gain access to ChatGPT Enterprise, OpenAI’s enterprise-grade AI platform designed for large corporations. While some of its functionalities overlap with Eliza, BNY Mellon plans to complement its AI capabilities by granting ChatGPT Enterprise licenses to select developers, product owners, and business leaders.
One of the most significant benefits of the collaboration is BNY Mellon’s access to OpenAI’s application programming interfaces (APIs), enabling direct integration of advanced AI models into Eliza.
BNY Mellon will also be among the first institutions to explore OpenAI’s latest AI-powered tools:
- Deep Research – An agent capable of processing vast amounts of information for complex, multi-step research tasks.
- Operator – A tool in early research preview that can interact with the web by scrolling, clicking, and typing like a human, expanding AI’s ability to gather and process information dynamically.
With access to OpenAI’s most sophisticated AI models, BNY Mellon is set to further enhance its AI-driven decision-making, automation, and innovation capabilities reinforcing its position as a leader in AI-powered financial services.
This partnership signals a new era in banking and AI, where cutting-edge technology meets the financial industry’s need for efficiency, security, and advanced intelligence.
