BBVA creates a model to scale AI across the Group and drive its customer-centric transformation
BBVA has presented the evolution of its artificial intelligence (AI) strategy at an event with analysts and investors, introducing ‘The Frame’, a new common framework for creating, deploying, managing and governing AI agents at scale. After focusing its efforts over the past year on developing specific use cases, the bank is now advancing this standard to extend the technology across the organisation and move forward with its transformation. Carlos Torres Vila, Chair of BBVA, explained that this capability will be critical to delivering more proactive and personalised banking, always for the benefit of customers.
During the Strategic Talk, which also featured Antonio Bravo and Carlos Casas, Global Heads of AI Transformation and Engineering, respectively, BBVA’s Chair said the bank aims to replicate with artificial intelligence the success of its digital transformation, which enabled BBVA to grow, attract more customers and become more efficient. Today, with more than 80 million customers, “artificial intelligence offers us an exceptional opportunity to create value for our customers, employees and shareholders. AI multiplies our capabilities,” Carlos Torres Vila said.
Artificial intelligence is raising customer expectations by giving them access to more information and a greater ability to compare products, services and prices, which in turn is increasing competition across the industry. Against this backdrop, BBVA sees a need to move from digital banking towards intelligence-driven banking. This technology is also ushering in an era of greater abundance of capabilities in banking. BBVA believes ‘The Frame’ can turn this abundance into a competitive advantage to drive growth.
To achieve this, BBVA can draw on capabilities built over recent years that will be key to this new transformation. These include an organisation with more than 4,000 data specialists across the Group, a global cloud-based data platform and close collaboration with some of the world’s leading technology and artificial intelligence providers.
Over the past year, BBVA has focused its efforts on a set of workstreams designed to apply AI to customer relationships, processes and employees’ day-to-day work. The first use cases are already delivering tangible progress: assistants now filter more than half of the conversations received by relationship managers through the app in Spain; voice agents successfully resolve close to 90% of interactions in production pilots in Peru and Mexico; and the time required to register complaints has been reduced by nearly 80%. In addition, software developers have improved their productivity by around 28%, while 75% of employees use AI on a recurring basis, saving an average of 2.4 hours per week on repetitive, lower-value tasks.
BBVA also showcased progress on Blue, its financial assistant: a new multimodal personal adviser available 24/7, with personalised information on each customer. The bank plans to gradually roll out the assistant to individual and business customers in 2027.
Also in 2027, BBVA plans to expand AI tools for retail banking relationship managers and scale new capabilities across its Commercial Banking, Corporate & Investment Banking (CIB) and Risk areas. The bank is also extending AI agents to cross-cutting processes such as claims and financial crime prevention.
A common standard for building a new bank
Antonio Bravo, Global Head of AI Transformation, explained that the main lesson from this first phase is that the creation and management of agents involve many common elements, ranging from reusable components to shared functionalities and management requirements. ‘The Frame’ is the result of this learning: the common standard through which BBVA aims to accelerate the creation and deployment of AI agents.
Its goal is to enable solutions to be built faster, embed control and governance by design, and preserve technological independence so that BBVA can work with the most relevant models, tools and platforms available in the market. To achieve this, the bank is building a common, secure technology environment that will enable teams to develop and deploy agents without having to start from scratch in each case. This technology foundation will be complemented by common processes and ways of working, with clearly defined roles and responsibilities.
Each agent will have clearly defined access to systems and data, as well as operational boundaries, including which actions it can perform autonomously and which will require human oversight. Performance will be continuously evaluated and monitored, while cost and business impact will be systematically measured. All of this will operate within a common framework for security, governance and compliance.
“‘The Frame’ will allow us to build many more agents, faster, in a way that is secure, repeatable and manageable, while maintaining control and creating value,” Bravo said. For BBVA, the ability to do this at scale is what could make the difference in this new era of artificial intelligence. In this regard, he added that “everyone has access to AI models. The difference will lie in who is able to integrate them into their systems at scale, manage them safely and responsibly, and use them to create value for their customers.”
Industrialising the creation, deployment and management of agents is therefore a means to achieve a deeper transformation that will involve reinventing all of the bank’s processes. BBVA’s vision is to move towards a hybrid bank in which people and intelligent agents work together to better serve customers.
The bank is well positioned to capture the abundance of capabilities that AI offers. To do so, trust will be essential to providing personalised advice based on deep customer knowledge, Antonio Bravo noted.
This strategy positions BBVA as one of the world’s leading banks in its approach to integrating AI into its business, as recognised by Evident’s AI Index for Banking. The ranking places BBVA first among eurozone banks in terms of the maturity of its artificial intelligence strategy.
Software development, resilience and security
Software development is one area where collaboration between intelligent agents and people is already a reality. “Our ambition is very clear: to multiply our capacity to deliver solutions and shorten release cycles from months to weeks, with AI agents helping to orchestrate and execute the development lifecycle while people retain control over context, decision-making and oversight. This will allow us to respond much faster to our customers’ needs, bring new capabilities to our teams sooner and, above all, adapt much more quickly to an environment that is constantly evolving,” concluded Carlos Casas, Global Head of Engineering at BBVA.
The other side of this transformation is the challenge of ensuring the proper functioning of the bank’s infrastructure that supports its day-to-day business. Resilience is critical to this process and must keep pace with the speed of change, Casas stressed. In this regard, over the past three years, BBVA has reduced significant technology incidents affecting service availability by 53% and cut average recovery time by 52%.
This performance is underpinned by a global technology platform that BBVA is transforming to increase capacity, efficiency and speed of execution without compromising resilience or security. In 2025, close to two-thirds of online transactions were already processed in the cloud, and the bank expects that proportion to reach 90% by 2029.
BBVA’s Engineering strategy also includes strengthening protection against emerging AI-related risks through resilient systems for agents, controls applied during their execution, and advanced detection and prevention capabilities to address external threats enabled by this technology.