Emirates NBD, a leading banking group in the Middle East, North Africa, Türkiye and South Asia (MENATSA), and OpenAI have announced a new enterprise-wide collaboration that will make Emirates NBD the first bank in the Middle East and North Africa to adopt OpenAI's GPT models using dedicated local infrastructure for inference inside the United Arab Emirates.

Banking is one of the most heavily regulated industries in the world, where security, governance and compliance are non-negotiable pillars. The ability to run inference locally allows financial institutions to adopt advanced AI technologies across the entire enterprise while supporting local regulatory requirements on data residency, privacy and operational resilience. The announcement marks an important milestone in strengthening sovereign AI capabilities for the UAE's financial services sector.

Scaling AI Across the Enterprise

Emirates NBD will apply OpenAI's models across multiple areas of its business, including enhancing intelligent customer engagement through digital channels, supporting risk management and compliance with advanced analytics, automating knowledge-intensive workflows and improving employee productivity.

Emirates NBD will also connect OpenAI's models to its internal systems, application programming interfaces (APIs) and enterprise data, enabling the bank to accelerate the development of new digital services, increase personalisation to suit customers' needs, raise engineering efficiency and operational productivity, and strengthen risk monitoring and financial crime controls.

The move supports the UAE's vision of building world-class AI infrastructure and accelerating the adoption of responsible AI in strategic sectors. It is also aligned with the UAE National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence 2031 and reflects the growing availability of sovereign AI capabilities that allow organisations to deploy advanced AI technologies while complying with local governance and regulatory requirements.

Commenting on the occasion, Miguel Rio-Tinto, Group Chief Digital and Information Officer at Emirates NBD, said: "AI has become a core pillar of the future of banking. Through our collaboration with OpenAI and the ability to run inference locally within the UAE, we are embedding advanced AI capabilities directly into our operating model, allowing us to innovate at speed while maintaining the highest standards of governance, security and regulatory alignment. AI is no longer an experiment for us; it is a core capability that will shape how we build, deliver and scale our services."

Farouk Hamzaoui, Head of Enterprise for MENA at OpenAI, said: "With this first-of-its-kind approach in the region, Emirates NBD shows how financial institutions can deploy AI at scale in a safe, responsible way that is aligned with regulatory requirements. We are proud to support the bank's ambitions with OpenAI's models and tools and our inference environment inside the UAE. We look forward to strengthening our partnership to drive productivity and innovation and deliver better customer experiences."

About Emirates NBD

Emirates NBD, listed on the Dubai Financial Market (ticker: Emirates NBD), is a leading banking group in the Middle East, North Africa, Türkiye and South Asia, with a presence in 13 countries, serving more than 25 million active customers. As at 30 June 2026, its total assets stood at AED 1.3 trillion (approximately USD 354 billion). The group operates in the UAE, Egypt, India, Türkiye, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, the United Kingdom, Austria, Germany, Russia and Bahrain, and has representative offices in China and Indonesia, with a network of 1,425 branches and 4,948 ATMs and cash deposit machines. Emirates NBD is the leading financial services brand in the UAE, with a brand value of USD 6.1 billion.

The Emirates NBD group serves retail, corporate, government and institutional customers and helps them achieve their financial goals through a range of banking products and services, including retail and business banking, corporate and institutional banking, Islamic banking, investment and private banking, asset management, global markets and treasury, and brokerage operations. The group is a major contributor to digital banking globally, with more than 97% of its financial transactions and requests conducted outside its branches. The group also owns Liv, Emirates NBD's digital bank, which has nearly half a million customers and remains the fastest-growing bank in the region.