BNY and OpenAI have entered a multiyear agreement through which the bank will use OpenAI's technology to enhance the generative AI tool it provides to all employees, called Eliza. The New York bank declined to share how many years the contract covers, nor its monetary value.
The agreement gives BNY access to OpenAI's application programming interface and ChatGPT Enterprise. The bank will use these to enhance Eliza with some of the more advanced features of ChatGPT Enterprise, like its reasoning engine and ability to fine-tune answers. Under the agreement, OpenAI will give BNY early access to new models and capabilities.
"AI is reshaping the landscape of financial services and helping us to move quicker, be more efficient and resilient," said Leigh-Ann Russell, chief information officer and global head of engineering at BNY. "This new collaboration with OpenAI, in combination with our existing AI technology, will allow us to not only power our innovation, but actively shape it."
BNY developed Eliza in 2023 using Nvidia chips and cloud infrastructure from Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. Today, Eliza runs on an Nvidia supercomputer that BNY
In November, the bank
"We are always working to further enhance Eliza to add additional functionality and incorporate the latest technology," a bank spokesman said. "This work with OpenAI is one part of those efforts."
Advances such as the new reasoning capability in ChatGPT Enterprise are attracting the attention of other tech leaders in financial services.
"Whenever we reach some form of innovation, then all of a sudden a new wave comes in, and it seems to set a new bar for where the state of the art is," said Marco Argenti, chief information officer at Goldman Sachs, in a recent interview. "And that's exactly what's happening today with models. We were used to seeing incremental improvements until maybe three, four months ago. And then you get this new wave, a new generation of models that have reasoning capabilities, which are reopening so much innovation at that layer."
According to OpenAI, the reasoning engine in ChatGPT Enterprise enhances the model's ability to tackle complex problems, perform multistep reasoning and analyze structured data such as tables and charts more effectively. It can handle logic-based, mathematical and analytical challenges more efficiently. It can break down problems, follow logical sequences and maintain coherence across long chains of thought. It reduces errors in tasks that require precision, such as calculations and structured decision-making.
A bank might use the reasoning engine in ChatGPT Enterprise to assess the risk of loan applicants, by evaluating credit score, income stability, debt-to-income ratio, and past loan repayment history, weighing those factors using a predefined decision matrix and regulatory guidelines. If the loan is declined, the model could generate an explanation for the customer. The reasoning engine could also be used in fraud detection or regulatory compliance checks.
The governance platform is meant to prevent hallucinations, errors, bias and other problems, and to track model activity to make sure nothing goes awry.
"Working closely with BNY is a great opportunity to build and deploy AI that meets the bespoke needs of one of the largest financial institutions in the world," said Brad Lightcap, chief operating officer at OpenAI. "As the financial services industry pushes the forefront of AI adoption, we look forward to continuing work with BNY to ensure its employees have access to tools that enable innovative use cases."
BNY is one of several large banks giving employees access to generative AI in a controlled environment.
"BNY is further setting best practice by building upon its AI platform with generative AI," said Alenka Grealish, principal analyst at Celent. "By democratizing generative AI access to all its employees via Eliza, it is a pacesetter in realizing the future of work, which will be bankers with multiple AI agents delivering a variety of skills, ranging from basic knowledge search to complex content generation and data analysis."
All BNY employees have access to Eliza. As of February 25, more than 50% of employees are using it regularly and 15% of those are proficient enough to build agents on their own, a spokesman said. Some employees use it to streamline workflows. All employees can use the Eliza Virtual Assistant, which is powered by Eliza but is available to employees through the bank's intranet, to ask questions about BNY procedures.
"AI is no longer a tool for engineers. It's enabling every one of us to be more productive," a spokesman said.
BNY has 40 AI-enabled solutions in production that help enable predictive analytics, automation, anomaly detection and enhanced access to information, among other things.
BNY also introduced GitHub Copilot in 2024. Today more than 80% of its developers use it daily, to write code more quickly. Employees also use Microsoft 365 Copilot as an AI productivity tool.
As the bank increases the number of use cases in production, it's starting to track metrics like efficiency gains, cost savings and quality improvement, the BNY spokesman said.
