Emirates NBD and OpenAI said on 19 October that the bank would become the first in the MENA region to run OpenAI’s GPT models through UAE-based inference, in an enterprise collaboration.
Key points
- OpenAI will provide models, tools and UAE-based inference for the bank’s planned deployment.
- Emirates NBD plans uses across digital customer channels, risk and compliance, internal workflows and employee productivity.
- The bank says 97% of its financial transactions and requests already take place outside branches.
- PCMag Middle East reported that the announcement gave neither a deployment launch date nor a cost.
GPT requests will be processed in the UAE
The companies said the arrangement would allow Emirates NBD to process requests to OpenAI’s models inside the UAE. Inference is the stage at which a model handles a request and produces an answer. Processing that stage locally is intended to keep the bank’s prompts and associated data in the country, PCMag Middle East reported.
Emirates NBD and OpenAI said in their announcement that in-country inference would support the bank’s requirements around data residency, privacy and operational resilience. They also said the deployment aligned with the UAE’s National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence 2031. The arrangement puts the location of model processing alongside the models themselves in the bank’s plans for wider use of AI.
OpenAI will supply the models, tools and UAE-based inference, according to PCMag Middle East. The publication reported that the announcement gave no date for the deployment to go live and no cost for it. It also reported that the release set no timetable for a customer-facing feature.
Emirates NBD targets four areas of work
Emirates NBD plans to apply the models to customer engagement through digital channels, risk and compliance analytics, knowledge-intensive workflows and employee productivity, the companies said. The bank also plans to connect the models to its internal systems, application programming interfaces and enterprise data. Those connections are intended to support new digital services, customer personalisation, risk monitoring and financial crime controls.
Miguel Rio-Tinto, Emirates NBD’s Group Chief Digital and Information Officer, said the bank was embedding AI in its operating model through its collaboration with OpenAI. “AI is not an experiment for us, it is a core capability that will define how we build, serve and scale,” he said in the announcement.
Farouk El Hamzawi, Head of Enterprise at OpenAI MENA, said OpenAI would support the bank with models, tools and local inference. He described the arrangement as a way to help Emirates NBD meet regulatory requirements while pursuing productivity gains and changes to customer services. Both executives described an intended deployment rather than results from the four areas of work.
OpenAI expands its banking push
OpenAI is also pursuing banks through ChatGPT for Financial Services, while Google Cloud is pitching Gemini Enterprise to the sector. Emirates NBD’s proposed deployment adds UAE-based processing to OpenAI’s offer to this customer. The companies’ announcement describes an enterprise collaboration spanning customer and internal uses, rather than a single customer-service application.
The bank says 97% of its financial transactions and requests are conducted outside its branches. Its existing volume of remote activity places the proposed customer-facing work within digital channels it already uses, while the separate plans for compliance and internal workflows would extend the models to other parts of the business.
Emirates NBD has a presence in 13 countries and serves more than 25 million active customers. It said it had 1,425 branches and 4,948 ATMs and self-service machines. At 30 June 2026, the group reported total assets of AED 1.3 trillion, equivalent to approximately USD 354 billion.
