BNP Paribas, has signed a five-year agreement with Google Cloud to expand its AI capabilities and plan agentic AI deployments in its Corporate & Institutional Banking (CIB) division, starting with planned AI agents for targeted workflows, including the preparation of corporate credit memos to assist teams, the companies said.
The agreement gives the French bank access to Google Cloud’s AI-optimised infrastructure, its Gemini Enterprise platform for building and deploying custom agents, and its underlying Gemini models. BNP Paribas said further agentic AI use cases are planned across sales, trading, research and structuring activities within CIB, beyond the initial credit-memo work.
Gemini models will also be integrated into LLM@CIB, the division’s existing generative AI assistant, which BNP Paribas said is currently available to more than 65,000 employees.
Building on a live Nickel deployment
The announcement builds on an existing deployment rather than starting from nothing. Gemini serves as the foundational model for Nickel Assist at Nickel, BNP Paribas’ payment-account business within its Commercial, Personal Banking & Services division, where it helps 200 customer advisers find answers to customer requests based on Nickel’s own procedures and operating guidelines.
Marc Camus, group chief information officer at BNP Paribas, said the bank was deliberately spreading its AI bets rather than committing to one vendor.
“A multi-cloud and multi-model approach gives us the flexibility to select, for each case, the right model, infrastructure and level of control to meet our requirements for quality and security while delivering the best balance between cost and value,” he said. “This partnership strengthens that approach and expands the options available to our businesses.”
Thomas Kurian, chief executive of Google Cloud, framed the agreement as part of a broader shift in how banks use AI.
“Agentic AI marks a critical shift in how global financial institutions streamline operations, assess risk, and serve their clients,” he said. “Through this five-year partnership, BNP Paribas is combining its banking leadership with Google Cloud’s secure infrastructure and Gemini Enterprise to deploy intelligent agents within platforms across the bank.”
BNP Paribas said each AI agent will be authenticated individually and restricted to the resources needed for its assigned task, with connections between the AI agents and the Group’s information systems monitored and controlled. The bank’s existing security and data-governance requirements determine what data and workloads can be processed in a public-cloud environment, and certain categories of data won’t be stored there.
A broader concentration question
The agreement adds BNP Paribas to Google Cloud’s publicly disclosed financial-services AI activity, raising broader questions about concentration among the cloud and technology providers used by systemically important banks. Google Cloud said in August that Deutsche Bank had used Gemini Enterprise and its Agent Development Kit to build an “agentic resilience platform” for regulatory-compliance testing, a separate project built for a different purpose.
In a 2024 report, The Financial Stability Implications of Artificial Intelligence, the Financial Stability Board identified AI-related third-party dependencies and service-provider concentration as potential vulnerabilities, noting that markets for accelerated-computing chips and cloud services are dominated by a limited number of entities.
Neither company disclosed the financial terms of the five-year agreement, and the release gave no timeline for deploying the planned CIB agentic AI use cases.
