OpenAI partners with Customers Bank in push to automate finance
Sam Sidhu, CEO of Customer Bank.
Courtesy: Customer Bank
We’re barely half an hour into a conference call with analysts on Friday to discuss first-quarter results. Customer Bank CEO Sam Sidhu revealed something unusual; He hadn’t actually been talking until that moment.
Sidhu said this was a potential first for a public company earnings call, adding, “The prepared remarks you heard from me today were not read by me, they were delivered by my AI clone.” he said.
The purpose of the show, he said, was to highlight a broader change happening right now. Customer BankThe $25.9 billion asset lender serving startups and small businesses is embracing artificial intelligence.
Customer Bank It has signed a multi-year partnership with OpenAI in which the AI giant will place engineers at the company to help it automate lending and customer onboarding, CNBC has learned exclusively.
The deal is part of Sidhu’s effort to leapfrog other banks in the industry in the race to transform itself by using AI agents as a new digital workforce. Its strategy is based on automating core banking processes (for example, reducing loan times from weeks to days) and scaling growth without adding staff at the same pace.
While many bankers define AI in broad terms such as increased productivity, Sidhu ties it directly to financial goals.
Sidhu told CNBC that the project will increase the firm’s efficiency rate from 49% to the low 40s and increase the bank’s returns starting next year.
Relationship with OpenAI, which targets finance as one of its core industries, even hiring former bankers train According to the bank CEO, their model will be a symbiotic model for the artificial intelligence giant.
“We will co-create enterprise solutions that they can potentially sell to other banks in the future,” Sidhu said. “The goal here is an end-to-end, automated, agent-driven workflow for loans, deposits and payments.”
OpenAI is proud to help Customer Bank “build a smarter operating model that empowers employees, strengthens customer service and sets a new standard for regional banking,” said OpenAI Chief Revenue Officer. Denise Dresser he said in a statement provided to CNBC.
Workers working all the time
The bank plans to introduce AI agents in lending, deposits and payments in the next six to 12 months.
If they’re successful, closing a commercial loan will go from taking 30 to 45 days to about seven days, including underwriting, document gathering and legal negotiations, Sidhu said.
He said the account opening process for complex business clients, which can take more than a day, will be reduced to under 20 minutes using conversational AI and automatic document collection.
“When you have an autonomous agent, you are essentially creating a digital worker, and they can work any time of the day,” Sidhu said.
Customer Bank has been laying the groundwork for this announcement for years, first tapping OpenAI in 2023 as Sidhu has what he describes as a small investment in the AI giant through his contacts in the venture capital world. He said the OpenAI deal signed last week expanded their relationship and enabled AI engineers to be involved in the bank’s processes.
between bank A handful of small lenders targeting the startup and venture capital community, and reportedly offered For Silicon Valley Bank, it’s 2023, in the midst of that year’s regional banking crisis.
Key advantage
Although it is a relatively small company compared to its peers JPMorgan ChaseAccording to Sidhu, who started his career at, Customer Bank, with assets of $4.9 trillion, has a significant advantage. Goldman Sachs Megabanks have expanding global operations and have much more complex and regulatory standards for AI application, he said.
“Small banks will not be expected to have the same level of frameworks as most of the larger banks,” he said. Regulators want community and regional banks to be able to “compete with larger banks.”
The lender is already using AI to write half of the firm’s software code and has saved 28,000 hours of work so far, the equivalent of not hiring about 15 full-time employees.
“This is an opportunity for us to potentially slow down hiring and generate more revenue per employee,” he said.
The bank is also exploring entering new business areas that would be prohibitively expensive to tackle before AI entrants. For these AI-driven lines of business, he said, smaller teams oversee automated systems that run jobs that previously required large numbers of people.
Unlike typical software licensing deals, Sidhu said both parties contributed resources to build new tools together, and OpenAI gained real-world use cases within a regulated financial institution.
“It will benefit our investors. It will benefit our customers,” Sidhu said. “We hope our regulators will also become happier over time because they will see that we, too, are mitigating the risk.”
