Green Lending and AI Driven Banking Transformation

Ireland leads the way on green lending

Personal loans reached a record high in Ireland in 2025, with banks and credit unions adding that what they call green lending also reached a record high. Green personal loans include finance for an electric vehicle or funding to carry out works to make a home more energy efficient. “The banks said the number of green personal loans taken out last year shot up by 26pc compared with the previous year,” reports the Irish Independent. Credit unions have also reported a leap in demand for energy-saving home upgrades. “Green loans taken out from credit unions are averaging more than €20,000. The Banking and Payments Federation Ireland said the average green loan its members issued was relatively high at €23,000 in the last three months of last year.” Ireland has the highest energy prices in the EU, prompting consumers to invest in electric cars and green home improvements such as solar panels for heating water. The green loans are typically twice the average value of other types of personal loans. Ireland’s credit unions have collaborated to serve the opportunity. “Greenify is a national green lending initiative made up of 34 credit unions that came together to form what they call Collaborative Finance. It was set up to offer standardised green-loan products with a common rate. Greenify is a consumer loan product with a 5.5pc rate for people who want to make their homes more efficient or to buy an EV.” The trend shows no sign of letting up, as experts expect further jumps in energy prices as supply tightens due to the conflict in Iran.

The Wells Fargo scandal has a final twist

More detail has emerged about the infamous Wells Fargo fake account opening scandal after the SEC cut the amount of the award granted to the whistleblower who helped expose the scheme. In the US, whistleblowers are awarded a portion of the fine issued by the SEC for exposing corporate wrongdoing. The whistleblower, identified as former Wells Fargo security chief Michael Bacon, who ran the bank’s internal investigations unit, had his award cut by more than $100 million from $180 million down to $55 million. The cut came two weeks after Paul Atkins took up the role of head of the SEC last year, and criticised the amount of whistleblower awards as encouraging ‘overindulgence’. Bacon is now appealing the decision.

“Bacon was chief security officer at Wells Fargo until 2014 in a role that involved probing sales abuses by staff and collating data on the prevalence of the problem,” says the FT. “He provided prosecutors with testimony and documents setting out how executives had been aware of the abuses and failed to get the problem under control for more than a decade, according to depositions and interviews that Bacon gave to American Banker magazine in 2023 after the final cases were resolved. ‘This was simple. It was easy to detect,’ he told the magazine. ‘Executives knew it. And they chose not to act’.”

AI players are starting to focus on financial services

Why would you go to a financial adviser when you can simply get financial advice from ChatGPT? Well, your financial adviser probably won’t hallucinate your financial future, but that hasn’t stopped a large percentage of chatbot users from trusting advice about their hard-earned cash to our new robot overlords. Studies of sample groups using ChatGPT find users looking for financial advice ranging from managing household expenses to managing wealth or pension funds. A study of 5,000 people commissioned by Lloyds Bank found half were using ChatGPT for financial advice. However, a December 2025 report from the Financial Conduct Authority carried a warning that consumers should not rely on ChatGPT which can create or hallucinate material, but deliver it so confidently that users take it as truth.

But prompts for help sends OpenAI looking for specialist help. And while there’s no specialist finance management function in ChatGPT (yet), OpenAI has responded by acquiring personal finance startup Hiro, and partnering with Customers Bank. Hiro, acquired in April 2026, has been closed down and will be integrated into ChatGPT. It was founded by Ethan Bloch in 2023, after he previously founded and sold Digit, a finance app that helped to automate savings, and was bought by fintech Opportun. Industry analysts are suggesting that OpenAI is acquiring a financial management talent team rather than technology. “In October 2025, OpenAI hired Sujith Vishwajith, co-founder and CEO of personal finance app Roi,” writes Clarqo. “The pattern is deliberate: OpenAI is assembling a financial reasoning team capable of building deep, personalized money management features into ChatGPT. The competitive pressure here is real. Google has been quietly building financial features into Gemini. Apple Intelligence has access to transaction data through Apple Card and Apple Pay. Several fintech startups, including Monarch Money and Copilot, have built AI-native budget management tools that have gained traction.”

Separately, OpenAI has established a partnership with Customers Bank, now led by Sam Sidhu. “All AI capabilities will be deployed within Customers Bank’s existing secure enterprise infrastructure, with data governance, access controls, and risk management built into the design from the outset,” reports Fintech Global. “The bank has indicated that AI is already live in production and advancing across the three focus areas. The collaboration represents an expansion of a relationship that began in 2023, when Customers Bank was an early adopter of ChatGPT Enterprise. Today, 75% of the bank’s workforce uses tools powered by OpenAI. The bank has described the arrangement as a step toward becoming one of the first AI-native regional banks in the United States, with the longer-term vision of having its bankers spend more time on client-facing work by the end of 2026.”

“The deal is part of Sidhu’s effort to get ahead of other banks in the industry’s race to transform itself using AI agents as a new digital workforce. His strategy hinges on automating core banking processes — slashing loan timelines from weeks to days, for instance — and scaling growth without adding staff at the same pace,” said CNBC.

OpenAI’s main competitor Anthropic is also looking to get itself some enterprise-level banking contracts. Anthropic has this week launched what it says are 10 AI agents designed for specific finance and banking tasks – and specifically to replace or augment “labour-intensive workflows”. “Tuesday’s product launch filled in what the joint venture will actually be deploying,” reports Fortune. “At the core is a library of roughly 10 pre-built AI agents designed for the most labour-intensive workflows in finance: pitchbooks and earnings analysis, credit memos, underwriting, KYC, month-end close, statement audits, and insurance claims.”

For retail banks, it’s credit memos, underwriting and KYC that seem to be the most relevant. But while that work may be labour intensive, it’s not just labour intensive. It also requires skill, judgement and decision-making, and someone to put their name to the job and be responsible for the consequences. Regulators will be looking at the transparency of these operations to ensure that audit trails can show how and why decisions were made on underwriting. Anyone with insights can drop us an email to news@lafferty.com.