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A.I.

Customers Bank is embedding OpenAI engineers to automate commercial lending

The regional lender aims to cut commercial loan closing times from 30-45 days to about 7 days using AI agents

2 min read·Updated April 27, 2026
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Customers Bank has signed a multiyear partnership with OpenAI that will place the AI company's engineers inside the bank to help automate lending, deposit onboarding, and payments operations, the bank said.

The arrangement goes beyond a software licensing deal. OpenAI's technical teams will work on-site to build custom AI tools on the bank's own processes and data, Customers Bank said. Deployment of AI agents covering all three business lines is targeted for completion within a six-to-12-month window, according to CNBC.

Customers Bancorp CEO Sam Sidhu told CNBC the goal is "end-to-end, automated agentic led workflow" for lending, deposits, and payments. Commercial loan closings, which currently require underwriting, document collection, and legal negotiations over 30 to 45 days, are targeted to take roughly seven days once the lending workflow is automated, the bank said. On the deposit side, complex commercial account openings that currently consume more than a full day will shrink to under 20 minutes once conversational AI and automated document workflows are in place, the bank said.

The project is expected to improve the bank's efficiency ratio from about 49 to the low 40s, Sidhu told CNBC.

Customers Bancorp, the West Reading, Pennsylvania-based parent company of Customers Bank, has almost $26 billion in assets and trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker CUBI. The bank first adopted OpenAI tools in 2023 through ChatGPT Enterprise, and today 75% of its staff use tools powered by OpenAI, the company said.

OpenAI chief revenue officer Denise Dresser said in a statement that the company was proud to help Customers Bank "as they build a more intelligent operating model that empowers employees, strengthens client service, and sets a new standard for regional banking."

Sidhu framed the collaboration as mutually beneficial for OpenAI. "We're going to be co-creating enterprise solutions they could potentially sell to other banks in the future," he told CNBC. To date, those tools have freed up the equivalent of roughly 15 full-time positions, representing 28,000 hours of labor the bank no longer had to staff, Sidhu said.

The partnership news landed alongside a striking moment during the bank's first-quarter earnings call, where Sidhu told analysts near the end of the session that an AI-generated voice had delivered his scripted opening remarks in his place — something he described as potentially a first for any public company earnings call, according to CNBC.

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