# We built ChatGPT for banks before ChatGPT existed

Published 5 March 2026

[Originally posted on LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7435303858349760512/)

![Illustration of a bearded driver in a go-kart labelled Us lined up next to a Formula 1 car labelled OpenAI on a starting grid.](https://ovchyn.me/api/media/file/we-built-chatgpt-for-banks-before-chatgpt-existed-1.jpg?prefix=production)

In late 2018, I built what was basically "ChatGPT for banks", before ChatGPT existed. A self-hosted system that helped bank employees generate and validate investment and credit contracts in German, trained on several million banking documents, built by a team of maximum 17 people who were basically just enthusiasts. 😅

The numbers were solid:

errors in contracts down 70%+, creation time from 16 hours to 4.

It was successful enough that one of our banking clients acquired it for $2.5M in 2023, and that happened when ChatGPT already existed.

Shut down only in summer 2025 — that's when OpenAI finally started outperforming our solution.

**Here's the thing I only understood after the fact — not even when we sold it, but later, when it was already closed and I talked to people and started analyzing**.

We had a go-kart, they had a Formula 1 car. Technologically, if you compare how ChatGPT was built versus what we had, that's exactly the size of the GAP. And yet *our go-kart, in exactly the place it needed to be, was better*. At least for a pretty long time. 🎯

OpenAI had billions, and we had contracts worth maybe $30K.

ChatGPT is built tens of times more complex, smarter, more intelligent — but because it's **spread too thin**, it couldn't generate German-language banking documents and validate them with the **level of quality** we did. 🧠

The insight sounds obvious in retrospect. But I genuinely didn't see it while we were building it.

**The presence of billion-dollar competitors is not a death sentence — if you have the combination of narrow industry focus and deep expertise, both technical and domain**.

You just might not fully understand that's what you're doing until someone closes the project and you start piecing it together.

That's maybe the weirdest part of this story. 🤔