BBVA and OpenAI Seal a Strategic Alliance to Redefine Banking with Artificial Intelligence

The agreement comes after nearly two years of joint work and represents a strategic collaboration, with teams of OpenAI and BBVA working towards shared objectives and making joint investments. OpenAI will help advance BBVA’s AI strategy, through which the bank is transforming the customer experience and, in doing so, enabling new ways of working and optimizing internal operations.

“We were pioneers in the digital and mobile transformation, and we are now entering the AI era with even greater ambition. Our alliance with OpenAI accelerates the native integration of artificial intelligence across the bank to create a smarter, more proactive, and completely personalized banking experience, anticipating the needs of every client,” remarked Carlos Torres Vila, Chair of BBVA, during the signing of the agreement at OpenAI’s headquarters in San Francisco.

A distinctive element of this alliance is the role OpenAI will play in co-creating solutions that enable BBVA to accelerate its AI-driven transformation strategy, recently announced by the bank. This means BBVA will have preferential access to OpenAI’s most advanced capabilities—including expert talent and cutting-edge models—and will work hand in hand with its engineering, research and solutions development teams.

Among the various workstreams, the agreement aims to create an intelligent conversational assistant capable of supporting customers in their financial day-to-day, setting a new standard for customer engagement and enabling a truly differentiated level of service. In addition, both companies will jointly develop other solutions to help relationship managers serve customers in a fully personalized way.

OpenAI and BBVA will also work together on building systems to streamline risk-analysis processes and to transform the bank’s operations in areas as critical as software development or the everyday tasks of employees. This includes creating a digital “alter ego”—a proactive second self that learns each employee’s way of working, remembers their projects and executes tasks with their authorization and oversight.

“BBVA is a strong example of how a large financial institution can adopt artificial intelligence with real ambition and speed. With the expansion of our work together, BBVA will embed our AI at the core of its products and operations to enhance the overall banking experience for their customers,” said Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI.

Access for All Employees

In addition to the joint work previously mentioned, BBVA will extend the use of ChatGPT Enterprise to its more than 120,000 employees, making it one of the largest corporate deployments of this technology globally. The large-scale rollout—designed to transform ways of working—comes after an initial adoption phase involving 11,000 BBVA employees, during which ChatGPT Enterprise proved highly effective across all business areas. Eighty percent of users access the assistant daily and report saving an average of three hours per week on routine tasks.

With the deployment of ChatGPT Enterprise across the organization, BBVA is taking a decisive step toward an entirely new productivity model powered by AI.

In addition, BBVA is working to integrate its products and services directly into ChatGPT, enabling any user to interact with the bank through OpenAI’s conversational assistant. The bank has already showcased a demo of its ChatGPT-integrated app for its digital banks in Italy and Germany.

The strategic agreement between BBVA and OpenAI aims to set a new benchmark for transformation in the financial industry, driving innovation and generating tangible value across all BBVA business lines. It is an alliance designed not only to accelerate BBVA’s transformation, but also to redefine what will be possible in banking over the next decade.