How BNP Paribas Uses AI to Speed Up Investment Banking
349BNP Paribas is exploring new ways to bring artificial intelligence into everyday investment banking tasks. The bank has introduced a new internal tool called IB Portal, which aims to make creating client pitches faster and less repetitive. This move reflects a bigger push to use AI to improve efficiency and reduce manual work in finance.
Streamlining Pitch Preparation with AI
In investment banking, preparing pitches is a key activity. Teams gather market insights, review past deals, and craft tailored stories for clients—all often under tight deadlines. Usually, this work involves rebuilding slides, charts, and analyses that might already exist elsewhere in the organization. IB Portal helps cut down on this duplication by searching through BNP Paribas’s existing pitch materials.
The system uses what the bank calls “smart prompts” to suggest relevant slides, data, and analysis for a new client mandate. Essentially, it acts like an AI-powered search engine, helping bankers quickly find what they need before meetings or pitches. According to George Holst, BNP Paribas’s head of corporate clients, the tool can reduce research time significantly, freeing up teams to focus on strategy and client judgment instead of hunting for information.
Implementing AI in Complex Workflows
One of the challenges with using AI in investment banking is ensuring it fits within the complex, regulated workflows. Pitch decks aren’t just generic documents—they include internal opinions, client-specific info, and compliance details. To be useful, the AI tool must be structured properly, with clear rules about what materials are searchable and who can access what data.
Traceability is also important. Bankers need to know where the information comes from, and everything generated by the AI still requires human review before it can be shared with clients. This approach helps prevent errors and protects sensitive information. It also ensures the final output meets internal standards and regulatory requirements.
BNP Paribas Building AI Capabilities In-House
IB Portal is part of BNP Paribas’s broader plan to develop AI tools on internal platforms. In June 2025, the bank announced its “LLM as a Service” platform. This infrastructure allows different business units to access large language models hosted securely within BNP Paribas’s own data centers. The platform supports various AI models, including open-source options and systems from Mistral AI.
The goal is to enable use cases like internal assistants, document drafting, and smarter information retrieval. The bank’s IT teams manage the platform to ensure data security and control. Plans also include adding models trained on BNP Paribas’s internal data to improve relevance and accuracy. Other big banks are taking similar steps, with JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and Reuters investing heavily in their own AI tools to stay ahead in this space.
Overall, BNP Paribas’s move to integrate AI into investment banking workflows shows how banks are embracing technology to boost productivity while maintaining control and compliance. As these tools evolve, they could become standard parts of banking operations, making processes faster and more efficient than ever before.
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