BNP Paribas and Google Cloud announced a five-year partnership on 24 September to expand the bank’s access to Gemini AI models and cloud infrastructure, with BNP Paribas projecting $853 million in value creation, Global Finance reported.
Key points
- BNP Paribas plans to use AI agents to help prepare corporate credit memos.
- The bank says Gemini models will be integrated into LLM@CIB, an assistant available to more than 65,000 employees.
- BNP Paribas says its Nickel Assist tool already uses Gemini to help 200 customer advisers.
- The Google Cloud agreement follows a three-year extension of the bank’s arrangement with Mistral AI, Global Finance reported.
BNP Paribas puts $853 million against AI plans
BNP Paribas is treating its AI programmes as investments with financial targets. Charles Holive, chief AI officer of its corporate and institutional banking business, said large programmes are tied to revenue, cost-saving or risk-avoidance goals. Marc Camus, the bank’s group chief information officer, described a finance committee that challenges value-creation estimates submitted by business units and other functions, Global Finance reported from a 24 September press conference.
Camus said value creation need not take the form of lower costs. He gave pricing optimisation as an example of potential revenue generation and process improvements as a source of savings. The $853 million is a projection for the Google Cloud partnership, rather than a reported financial result.
The agreement gives BNP Paribas expanded access to Google Cloud’s AI-optimised infrastructure, Gemini models and Gemini Enterprise, the companies said. Google Cloud says Gemini Enterprise will allow the bank to build, evaluate and deploy agents for particular business tasks. The agreement extends an existing cloud relationship as BNP Paribas pursues wider use of AI agents.
Gemini agents start with CIB credit memos
BNP Paribas plans to begin in Corporate & Institutional Banking, or CIB. The bank says agents will assist staff preparing corporate credit memos, with further applications envisaged in sales, trading, research and structuring. Those uses remain plans in the companies’ announcement.
The bank also plans to incorporate Gemini models into LLM@CIB, its internal generative AI assistant. BNP Paribas says the assistant is already available to more than 65,000 employees. The planned integration would place Google’s models inside a tool with an established audience, while the credit-memo agents address a defined workflow.
Holive said BNP Paribas assesses the technology for each use case against the needs of the business and deploys it within the bank’s governance framework. The bank’s stated approach makes the credit-memo work one application of the agreement rather than a commitment to use Gemini for every AI task in CIB.
Mistral AI remains in BNP Paribas’s model mix
The Google Cloud deal follows a three-year extension, signed four months earlier, of BNP Paribas’s 2024 groupwide agreement with Mistral AI. That arrangement covers the design and development of generative AI offerings using Mistral’s large language models to meet the bank’s operational and regulatory requirements.
Camus said BNP Paribas chooses among partners, on-premises systems and public-cloud services according to the requirements of each use case. In the Google Cloud announcement, he said a multi-cloud and multi-model approach lets the bank weigh model quality and security against cost and value. Google Cloud chief executive Thomas Kurian said the companies intend to deploy agents within the bank’s platforms.
Nickel Assist already serves 200 advisers
BNP Paribas says Google Cloud and Gemini are already in use at Nickel, its payment account business. Gemini is the underlying model for Nickel Assist, which helps 200 customer advisers find answers to customer requests using the business’s procedures and operating guidelines. That deployment is an existing use of the technology, distinct from the planned CIB agents.
The bank says its security and data governance requirements will determine which workloads can run in a public cloud. Under its planned controls, each agent will receive access only to the resources needed for its task, and its connections to bank systems will be monitored. BNP Paribas says certain categories of data will remain outside public-cloud storage.
