Emirates NBD has become the first bank in the Middle East and North Africa to run OpenAI's GPT models on infrastructure physically based inside the UAE, the Dubai-headquartered lender announced on Monday.
The arrangement lets the bank keep customer data within the country's borders while meeting local regulatory requirements on data residency, rather than routing information through servers abroad. Emirates NBD said it plans to roll the models out across four areas: customer engagement on digital channels, risk and compliance analytics, automating knowledge-heavy internal workflows, and lifting staff productivity.
The AI models will be wired into the bank's internal systems, APIs and enterprise data, enabling faster development of digital services, deeper personalisation for customers and smoother day-to-day operations, according to the bank.
Miguel Rio-Tinto, Emirates NBD's Group Chief Digital and Information Officer, said artificial intelligence had moved beyond the experimental stage for the bank. "AI is not an experiment for us, it is a core capability that will define how we build, serve and scale," he said.
Farouk El Hamzawi, head of enterprise for OpenAI in the Middle East and North Africa, described the deployment as a template for the wider financial sector. "Emirates NBD is setting a benchmark for how financial institutions can deploy AI securely and responsibly at scale," he said.
The move follows a broader push by UAE banks over the past two years to localise artificial intelligence infrastructure and align it with the country's data sovereignty rules, as lenders race to automate services while satisfying regulators that sensitive financial data stays onshore.