Technology 5 min read By Bethany Hadley
OpenAI launches ChatGPT for financial services with Morgan Stanley input
OpenAI has unveiled a version of ChatGPT tailored for banks and financial firms, powered by its new GPT-6 Astra model and developed with Morgan Stanley and Evercore. The product is designed to accelerate enterprise revenue growth and challenge Anthropic's Claude for financial analysis.
OpenAI has launched a version of ChatGPT designed specifically for banks and other financial institutions, powered by its new GPT-6 Astra model. The product, developed in collaboration with Morgan Stanley and boutique investment advisory firm Evercore, marks a significant push by the artificial intelligence company into the enterprise finance sector.
The new offering is part of a broader strategy by leading AI companies to package their models for specific industry verticals, aiming to accelerate enterprise revenue growth. Nick Turley, OpenAI's vice president and head of ChatGPT, said finance is one of the verticals the company has chosen to build for, alongside cybersecurity and software engineering. «This is the canonical product we are hoping the industry adopts,» Turley said, expressing the ambition that it will be the only product large banks with tens of thousands of employees will ever need.
Turley has spent considerable time in New York, the centre of the US financial industry, working directly with Morgan Stanley and Evercore to determine the key features. «There's a difference between what looks good in a demo and what is actually a usable output, and you kind of rely on the experts» to achieve that, he told reporters. The product is a distinct offering from ChatGPT Work, though many features are derivative with a finance-specific bend.
Access is restricted to eligible institutions that must speak directly with OpenAI to be cleared. Banks need a ChatGPT enterprise account. The interface resembles the familiar ChatGPT chat window but includes new toggles for bringing in financial data. Banks can connect existing subscriptions to datasets from companies such as Bloomberg or FactSet. ChatGPT also offers pre-loaded data from Daloopa, PitchBook, Crunchbase, and LSEG News, as well as around 50 total connectors through MCP, an open-source protocol that allows AI models to connect to other software and data sources. When ChatGPT incorporates this data into its output, it provides detailed citations.
Users can specify whether the Astra model should approach a task with high, medium, or low effort. Higher effort uses more tokens and costs more, but OpenAI says it could mean better quality output. ChatGPT can generate PowerPoint presentations, Excel spreadsheets, and simple web-based dashboards. OpenAI showed reporters sample presentation slides that it said took about 10 minutes for Astra to create. While not instant, it could be faster than creating a new presentation from scratch.
«Teams can now quickly conduct deep research across multiple sources and create detailed artifacts in one shot,» OpenAI says. «For example, for an acquisition, they can compare the target with its peers, and test how revenue growth affects valuation, and turn the entire analysis into an editable model or pitchbook using their firm's templates, and review and refine it in their office tools.»
OpenAI is also seeking to change how work gets done, thinking beyond the mainstream Microsoft suite. Joseph Kim, Product Lead for ChatGPT for Financial Services, said a ChatGPT-coded dashboard might make it easier for finance professionals to simulate how different conditions affect projections, rather than fiddling with numbers in an Excel spreadsheet. «We're trying to think of new ways of doing the work, rather than just making the existing ways faster,» he said.
To ease adoption, company administrators can pre-load the product with their branded presentation templates. «A new intern on day one has all of this pre-loaded and ready to go,» Kim said. Data privacy is critical for financial institutions, OpenAI says. Data is encrypted and protected via ChatGPT Enterprise's SAML SSO, SCIM provisioning, and role-based access controls. Administrators can configure data retention and manage what skills and applications different roles can access.
The launch puts OpenAI in direct competition with rival Anthropic, which already offers a version of Claude for financial analysis, debuted in July 2025. OpenAI hopes its offering will become the standard for large banks. The move reflects growing pressure on AI companies to demonstrate returns on massive investments by targeting specific, high-value enterprise use cases.
