Northbank Private replaces three SaaS copilots with one appliance
A 120-seat European private bank migrates from fragmented SaaS AI tooling to a single on-prem Operayde appliance — keeping every client conversation on the bank's own network while cutting AI spend by 41%.
- SaaS copilots retired
- 3 → 1
- AI spend reduction
- 41%
- Time-to-enrol
- 27 min
- Prompts leaving the bank
- 0
Why Northbank chose on-prem
Northbank Private runs 120 relationship managers across Luxembourg and Geneva. By late 2025 they were paying three different SaaS vendors for copiloting, summarisation, and KYC triage — each of which silently retained prompt data for up to 30 days, each with a different DPA, each routable to a different cloud region depending on the quarter.
The compliance team's audit concluded that "three separate transfer impact assessments, renewed annually, is not a sustainable posture for a regulated private bank." Northbank's engineering lead looked at two paths: build a self-hosted stack on their own Kubernetes cluster, or bring in an appliance.
What we deployed
A single Operayde S1 appliance — 2× L40S GPUs, installed in the Luxembourg DR room — serves all 120 seats. Every request, every document, every audit line stays on Northbank's LAN. The central plane holds only metadata: which appliance is healthy, which policy bundle version is active, which operator signed off on yesterday's model rotation.
Federation to the bank's Entra ID tenant took one afternoon. The legacy SaaS copilots continued to run in parallel for two weeks so managers could A/B their own prompts; the switchover was unremarkable.
Outcomes at 60 days
Three SaaS contracts terminated with effect from the renewal boundary. Monthly AI spend dropped from roughly €38k (SaaS) to €22k (Operayde + amortised hardware) — a 41% reduction with the appliance paid off inside 19 months at the current usage curve.
No prompt data has left the bank's network since cutover. The compliance team replaced three transfer impact assessments with one internal DPIA.