BNP Paribas is testing how far AI can be pushed into the day-to-day mechanics of investment banking. According to Financial News, the bank has rolled out an internal tool called IB Portal, designed to help bankers assemble client pitches more quickly and with less repetition.
Pitch preparation sits at the centre of investment banking work. Teams pull together market views, deal history, and tailored narratives under tight timelines. Much of that effort repeats work that already exists elsewhere in the organisation. Slides, charts, and precedent analysis are often rebuilt from scratch, even when similar material has been used before by another team or office.
IB Portal is meant to reduce that waste. The system searches BNP Paribas’s past pitch materials and uses what the bank describes as “smart prompts” to surface relevant slides, analysis, and supporting content for a new mandate.
George Holst, head of the corporate clients group at BNP Paribas, said the tool functions like an AI-powered search engine that helps bankers find what matters ahead of a pitch or client meeting. In his words, it can cut research time by days, giving teams more room to focus on strategy and client judgement.
The use case matters because it places AI inside real, constrained workflows rather than around them. Pitch decks are not generic documents. They reflect internal viewpoints, client-specific details, and regulatory requirements. Making an AI tool useful in this setting depends less on conversational flair and more on structure. That includes deciding which materials are searchable, setting clear access controls in regions and business lines, and defining how retrieved content moves from internal draft to client-ready output.
In practice, that also means traceability. Bankers need to see where information comes from, and anything produced by the system still needs human review before it leaves the firm. Without those checks, the risk of errors or inappropriate disclosure rises quickly.