BNP Paribas has put out a call for applicants to its latest U.K. fintech incubator, which will provide housing and mentorship for startups that have developed generative AI models for banks.
The chosen startups receive a co-working space, mentorship from senior financial services experts, pitch opportunities and one-on-one support.
The most promising applications will be put to the test with the 100,000 customers that use BNP Paribas’s myCreation app. MyCreation is a platform where the bank tests and refines new financial solutions, often involving AI, before rolling them out to its wider customer base. The deadline for applications is September 5.
In a similar initiative last year, BNP Paribas mentored a group of startups and chose four to put their apps on myCreation: Furbnow’s Home Energy Check Tool, which helps to make homes energy efficient; CarCloud, which provides car insurance, finance, admin and running costs in one place; Inicio’s virtual agent, Budgie, which helps customers complete a detailed affordability form; and Paylow, which analyses people’s habits and needs to provide a proactive autopilot for all recurring expenses.”For us to maintain our position as a leader in personal finance, it’s essential that we continue to adopt emerging technologies and embrace new ideas,” said Stephen Hunt, CEO of BNP Paribas Personal Finance U.K. “The use of AI is on the rise and it’s important that we consider how we can use it to supercharge our operations.”BNP Paribas, like other large banks, has been on a generative AI adoption journey.
In a recent research report, Boston Consulting Group estimated that banks’ generative AI investments will increase 60% in the next three years.
“The technology is at our fingertips,” said Vlad Lukic, managing director and senior partner at Boston Consulting Group, in an
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Last month, BNP Paribas deployed a large language model-as-a-service platform for employees, following in the footsteps of other large banks like
Like these others, BNP Paribas’s LLM as a Service platform is intended to give the bank’s businesses unified access to large-scale language models in a secure environment within the bank’s own infrastructure. It’s operated by BNP Paribas’s IT teams and LLMs in the platform can be directly integrated into other tools or processes around the bank.
The platform is hosted in the bank’s data centers, where computers are run with high-speed graphics processor units like Nvidia’s. It provides access to open-source models, models from partner Mistral AI, and soon models trained on internal datasets, the bank said.
Several generative AI use cases are already in production or experimentation within BNP Paribas, such as internal assistants, document generation and information retrieval in documents.
In late April, BNP Paribas
Under the expanded partnership, BNP Paribas is using an IBM Cloud zone as a disaster recovery site to which some of its most critical applications can be switched in times of emergency. These applications, which include payment systems, have higher service level agreements, according to Christophe Boulangé, chief technology officer, cloud at BNP Paribas.
“The ask from BNP Paribas has been to get the best of the both worlds – I mean, something that would be secure enough to look like a private cloud, while still benefiting from public cloud technology,” Boulangé told American Banker.
IBM’s “keep your own key” approach to encryption was a factor, he said. Encryption keys for applications in the cloud are owned and operated by the client, so that IBM cannot access client-owned data that is client owned.