OpenAI Launches ChatGPT for Financial Services Targeting Wall Street Junior Banker Tasks

The rollout puts OpenAI deeper into work traditionally handled by Wall Street's entry-level bankers, the recent college graduates called analysts and associates that the industry has employed for decades to research deals and create pitchbooks. It also shows OpenAI's continued push into enterprise offerings as the company prepares for what is widely expected to be a blockbuster IPO.

"We're effectively teaching ChatGPT to research like an analyst and back up its conclusions like an analyst as well," Nick Turley, OpenAI's vice president of product, said during a briefing announcing the product.

OpenAI has spent much of the last year competing for business customers against rivals including Anthropic and Google. Anthropic announced its own tailored solution for Wall Street, Claude for Financial Services, last year. Sarah Friar, OpenAI's finance chief, told investors in August that the company's enterprise business accounted for more revenue than its consumer business, which took off following the launch of ChatGPT in 2022. Turley told reporters during the briefing that OpenAI plans to release tailored solutions for "a number of sectors" beyond financial services.

In a live demonstration, Turley showed the platform analyzing a potential M&A target, pulling financial figures from industry-standard data sources and creating a formatted PowerPoint deck based on a bank's preformatted style guide.

"It's very easy to make slides that look good, but it's much harder to make slides [that] actually make sense," Turley said. "To get here, ChatGPT had to choose the relevant peers. It had to pull the prices into a spreadsheet. It had to check the chart against the data, and it had to explain the selloff and the rebound."

What separates this version from ChatGPT Work, the product it is based on, is native data access from LSEG, Daloopa and Pitchbook that gives the system financial statements and earnings transcripts, as well as automated access to users' existing data subscriptions. Other finance-specific features include citations that let users trace data back to source filings and audit charts, and administrative controls for sensitive deal materials.

The version is initially geared toward investment banking and equity research. Turley said there was "a ton of demand" for it but declined to name banks that have signed on.

Asked by CNBC whether the product would reduce the need for investment banks to hire junior bankers, Turley framed the release as an efficiency boost that maximizes productivity per employee.

"If you study the life of an analyst or of a banker, depending on the industry, they're working 100-hour weeks," Turley said. "I think in the same way that Microsoft Excel transformed the industry and allowed them to produce better analysis faster, you will see technology like this do the same."

The product raises questions for an industry long built on a rigorous apprenticeship model. If generative AI can execute multistep tasks such as research and pitchbook formatting in minutes, Wall Street will be forced to rethink how it trains, and how many it needs, of its next generation of dealmakers.

Last month, Chris Churchman, the Goldman Sachs partner in charge of one of the bank's flagship AI projects, warned that the automation of tasks that help train junior bankers risks causing "cognitive atrophy" in the next generation of financiers.

"Reasoning is still important," Churchman said at the time. "You still need to reason about [problems] and structure it into an argument, and now we're delegating reasoning."