Sam Sidhu, CEO of Customers Bank.
Provided by: Customers Bank
Friday, nearly 30 minutes into a conference call to discuss first-quarter results with analysts. customer bank CEO Sam Sidhu made a point that he hadn’t really talked about up until that point.
“The prepared remarks you heard on my behalf today were delivered by my AI clone and were not read by me,” Sidhu said, noting that this could be the first earnings call for a public company.
He said the purpose of the stunt was to highlight broader changes occurring as Customers Bank, which provides $25.9 billion in asset financing to startups and small businesses, implements artificial intelligence.
Customers Bank has entered into a multi-year partnership with OpenAI, where the AI giant will embed engineers in the company to help automate lending and customer onboarding, CNBC exclusively reported.
The deal is part of Sidhu’s efforts to stay ahead of other banks in the race to transform the industry by leveraging AI agents as the new digital workforce. His strategy hinges on automating core banking processes, reducing loan timelines from weeks to days, for example, and scaling growth without adding staff at the same pace.
While many bankers describe AI in broad terms such as improving productivity, Sidhu connects AI directly to financial goals.
Sidhu told CNBC that the project will improve the bank’s efficiency ratio from about 49 to the low 40s, increasing the bank’s profits starting next year.
The bank’s CEO said the relationship with OpenAI will be symbiotic for the AI giant, which targets finance as one of its core industries and even employs former bankers to train its models.
“We intend to co-develop enterprise solutions that could potentially be sold to other banks in the future,” Sidhu said. “The goal here is an end-to-end automated agent-driven workflow for loans, deposits, and payments.”
OpenAI is proud to help Customers Bank “build a more intelligent operating model that empowers employees, enhances customer service, and sets new standards for local banking,” Chief Revenue Officer Dennis Dresser said in a statement provided to CNBC.
Always-on employees
The bank plans to deploy AI agents across lending, deposits and payments over the next six to 12 months.
If successful, Mr. Sidhu said, it would cut the time it takes to close a commercial loan from 30 to 45 days, including underwriting, document gathering and legal negotiations, to about seven days.
He said opening a complex commercial customer account, which can take more than a day, can be reduced to less than 20 minutes using conversational AI and automatic document collection.
“When you introduce autonomous agents, you are essentially creating digital workers… and they can work around the clock,” Sidhu says.
Customers Bank has been laying the groundwork for this announcement for years, using OpenAI for the first time in 2023. That’s because Sidhu made a small investment in the AI giant through his connections in the venture capital world. He said the OpenAI agreement signed last week expands the relationship between the two banks, allowing AI engineers to participate in the banks’ processes.
The bank is one of a handful of small lenders targeting startups and the venture capital community, and reportedly made a bid for Silicon Valley Bank in 2023 amid the local banking crisis that year.
Main benefits
Although it is a relatively small company compared to other companies, JP Morgan ChaseWith $4.9 trillion in assets, the customer bank has important advantages, said Mr. Sidhu, who started his career at the Bank of America. goldman sachs He said megabanks operate on a global scale, and the complexity and regulatory standards for AI implementation are much higher.
“Small banks cannot expect the same level of framework as many large banks,” he said. Regulators want regional and regional banks to be “able to compete with larger banks.”
He said the lender has already used AI to write half of its software code, saving 28,000 hours of work so far, the equivalent of not hiring about 15 full-time employees.
“This is an opportunity for us to potentially slow hiring and increase revenue per employee,” he said.
The bank is also considering entering new businesses that would have been prohibitively expensive to tackle before AI agents. In these AI-native business lines, small teams oversee automated systems that handle tasks that previously required large numbers of people, he said.
Unlike typical software license agreements, OpenAI has gained real-world use cases within regulated financial institutions, with both sides contributing resources to build new tools together, Sidhu said.
“It will be a win-win for our investors and a win-win for our customers,” Sidhu said. “Our regulators also expect us to be satisfied over time because they expect us to reduce risk.”
