BNP Paribas Partners with Google for AI, but Keeps Data Private

BNP Paribas has established a five-year partnership with Google, focusing on cloud computing and artificial intelligence. This agreement provides the French bank with access to Google's public cloud infrastructure and its Gemini AI models. The collaboration aims to accelerate the development of AI agents for various internal functions, including corporate credit memos, sales, trading, and research.

Despite this significant collaboration, BNP Paribas's Chief Information Officer, Marc Camus, emphasized that the bank will not be migrating all operations to the public cloud. Sensitive customer data, such as medical information held by its insurance division, will continue to be managed on the bank's on-premise infrastructure. The bank also plans to continue using open-source models and maintain its existing partnership with Mistral AI, utilizing different providers for various applications.

The partnership will allow BNP Paribas to utilize Google's technology for less sensitive tasks, like invoice processing and data management. Google has assured that BNP Paribas will retain ownership of its data, and it will not be used for training or refining Google's models. The bank will implement robust security measures, including authentication, resource limitation, and monitoring for Google's AI agents.