Frontier Intelligence & Financial Services: Katy Elkin, GTM Lead, OpenAI

TL;DR: OpenAI’s GTM Lead for Financial Services, Katy Elkin, shares how frontier AI is reshaping the industry through three core themes—rethinking teams, reworking workflows, and embedding AI into products—with real‑world examples from NatWest, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, and Revolut. ## Three Questions Every Financial Institution Asks Katy Elkin, OpenAI’s GTM Lead for Financial Services, opened by noting that the leaders she works with consistently ask three questions when they think about AI: 1. How should we restructure our teams to get more value from AI? 2. How can workflows better capture the impact of AI? 3. How do we embed AI more deeply into our products to compete and win? She then walked through how some institutions are already answering those questions effectively. ## 1. Driving Value Through AI Workflows Risk, compliance, and operations have long been constrained by cost and complexity. Financial institutions can now re‑architect their workflows from the ground up. **NatWest** is a prime example. The bank is working with OpenAI to help customers navigate everyday financial challenges—from mortgages and banking to money management. NatWest has explored more than 200 AI projects, with over 25 now in production. Their AI assistant **Cora+** has helped lift customer satisfaction scores by more than 150%—a remarkable result. ## 2. Amplifying Team Impact Inside financial institutions, AI is becoming a “never‑offline colleague” that executes tasks, surfaces insights, and multiplies output. This frees up the best employees to spend more time building client relationships and focusing on revenue‑generating activities. **Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA)**, Australia’s largest bank, has rolled out ChatGPT Enterprise to 50,000 employees. Their focus is AI literacy at scale—helping teams use ChatGPT, custom applications, and agents in daily work for customer service, fraud prevention, digital banking, and operations. CBA has also partnered with OpenAI to deliver a cybersecurity program to over 1 million small businesses. Katy described CBA as “a textbook example” of a regulated bank rolling out AI across the entire organization. ## 3. AI as a Product Differentiator AI will redefine how institutions build services, deliver advice, and win customers. Personalization once reserved for high‑net‑worth clients can now be extended to all customers. **Revolut** is embedding AI into every part of the customer experience—from AI‑driven financial‑crime detection to their AI assistant **Rita**. The results include stronger fraud detection, less operational friction, and faster support for millions of customers. Beyond these examples, Katy highlighted other real‑world initiatives across Europe and globally: - AI for trading research - Modernizing code infrastructure (including legacy COBOL mainframes) - Personalized wealth management These are active programs OpenAI is building with clients. ## The Model Behind the Progress: GPT‑5.5 Staying at the frontier is essential. AI is advancing faster than any previous technology, and it all starts with the model. **GPT‑5.5** is OpenAI’s most powerful model for professional work such as financial analysis and code generation. OpenAI uses its internal evaluation framework—**GDP Valve**—to test models on economically valuable tasks like spreadsheets, presentations, and research. By that measure, GPT‑5.5 is at the industry’s leading edge. Katy, who began her career as a business analyst, noted she finds this “incredibly exciting.” Alongside raw performance, OpenAI has made model interactions more intuitive and efficient, while reducing cost with each generation. ## Security: Codex Security & Trusted Access As AI becomes smarter—with advanced coding and computer‑use capabilities—financial leaders are more focused on cybersecurity than ever. Two months ago OpenAI launched **Codex Security**, a tool that helps find and patch vulnerabilities directly in software. And today, the company announced the **Trusted Access Program**, giving enterprise customers access to a special GPT‑5.5 cybersecurity model. This enables institutions to red‑team their infrastructure and applications for vulnerabilities before malicious actors can exploit them. ## Enterprise‑Grade Controls & Data Residency All of this runs on a world‑class enterprise security and governance framework: - End‑to‑end encryption for data in transit and at rest - Enterprise key management support - Broad **data residency** options for European institutions For the first time today, OpenAI announced **inference data residency in Europe**, meaning the GPUs powering all intelligence are located directly inside Europe. The overall vision is to help institutions govern, monitor, and scale AI through an enterprise intelligence platform. ## Closing Thoughts Katy ended by reiterating the goal of the event: to share the vision and show how financial services organizations can achieve meaningful results in teams, workflows, and products. The audience would see live demonstrations, hear directly from customers, and even see how OpenAI’s own finance team uses the platform. > “We can’t wait to show you this—and even more, to build these solutions with you.” --- **Source:** [Frontier Intelligence & Financial Services: Katy Elkin, GTM Lead, OpenAI – YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykNmTvRcqPQ)