Is BNP Paribas Letting Robots Do the Pitching Now?

BNP Paribas is giving its bankers a new sidekick — IB Portal, an AI tool that helps them make client pitch decks without losing precious hours (or their sanity).

Normally, bankers spend ages hunting for old slides, market charts, and deal info that already exist somewhere in the bank. IB Portal fixes that. It searches past materials and serves up ready‑to‑use pieces, kind of like a super‑focused search engine for bankers who’ve had enough of “starting from scratch.”

George Holst, who leads BNP’s corporate clients group, says it can save days of research time — meaning bankers get to spend more time thinking and less time copying and pasting.

Of course, this isn’t a free‑for‑all. Everything the AI finds still gets checked by humans before heading to clients. Traceability and data security matter — nobody wants a confidential deal deck showing up where it shouldn’t.

IB Portal is part of BNP’s bigger AI plan. The bank’s building its own internal “LLM as a Service” system to safely run large language models in its own data centers. It’s using a mix of open‑source models and tech from companies like Mistral AI.

Other big banks are doing it too — Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, UBS — everyone’s racing to get their own in‑house AI tools that won’t leak secrets.

The goal’s simple: cut the repetitive work, reuse what’s already built, and leave bankers more time for strategy (and maybe sleep).

If IB Portal sticks, it’ll prove that AI doesn’t need to be flashy — just smart enough to make PowerPoint a little less painful.

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