Emirates NBD Becomes First MENA Bank to Harness OpenAI’s Sovereign AI Infrastructure for customers in the UAE

2 Min | 19 October 2026

Dubai, UAE, 19 October 2026: Emirates NBD, a leading banking group in the Middle East, North Africa, Türkiye and South Asia (MENATSA) region, and OpenAI announced a new enterprise collaboration that will make Emirates NBD the first bank in the MENA region to deploy OpenAI's GPT models using in-country inference infrastructure in the UAE.

Banks operate in one of the world's most highly regulated industries, where security, governance and compliance are non-negotiable. Access to in-country inference allows financial institutions to adopt frontier AI at enterprise scale while supporting local regulatory expectations around data residency, privacy and operational resilience. This announcement represents an important milestone in advancing sovereign AI capabilities for financial services in the UAE.

Scaling AI enterprise-wide

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

Furthermore, Emirates NBD will connect OpenAI’s models with its internal systems, APIs and enterprise data, enabling the Bank to accelerate the development of new digital services, improve customer personalisation, boost engineering and operational productivity, and strengthen risk monitoring and financial crime controls.

The deployment supports the UAE's vision of building world-class AI infrastructure and accelerating responsible AI adoption across strategic sectors. It also aligns with the UAE’s National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence 2031 and reflects the growing availability of sovereign AI capabilities that enable organisations to deploy advanced AI while meeting local governance and regulatory requirements.

Miguel Rio-Tinto, Group Chief Digital and Information Officer at Emirates NBD, said: “Artificial Intelligence is central to the future of banking. Through our collaboration with OpenAI and access to in-country inference in the UAE, we are embedding frontier AI capabilities directly into our operating model. This ensures we can innovate at speed while maintaining the highest standards of governance, security and regulatory alignment. AI is not an experiment for us, it is a core capability that will define how we build, serve and scale.”

Farouk El Hamzawi, Head of Enterprise at OpenAI MENA, commented: “With this first-in-region approach, Emirates NBD is setting a benchmark for how financial institutions can deploy AI securely and responsibly at scale. We are proud to support that ambition with OpenAI models, tools and UAE-based inference, helping the bank meet regulatory requirements. We look forward to deepening our partnership to boost productivity, drive innovation and deliver better customer experiences.”