Data

The first edition of Global Finance AI in Finance Awards named BBVA the best bank in Spain for its artificial intelligence strategy, both within the organization and in its financial solutions for individuals. The publication also recognized one of BBVA’s revenue forecasting tools as the top AI risk management solution in Mexico and Latin America.

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Maya Ackerman, known for her research in algorithmic music composition, reflected at BBVA's FinAI Summit on whether artificial intelligence is creative and how it can help humans achieve better results when developing their own creations.  Far from competing with human ingenuity, AI is emerging as an ally capable of unlocking ideas, inspiring new approaches, and enhancing our creative potential.

BBVA’s smart  ‘discrete mode’ in its app detects when more than one pair of eyes is looking at the screen and hides sensitive information. Therefore, you can do your banking and view and manage your cards anywhere, while keeping your financial data private, making it illegible to onlookers and possible cybercriminals. Below we tell you how to activate this feature.

The bank has expanded its partnership with the tech giant from 3,300 to 11,000 ChatGPT Enterprise licences, as part of its plan to extend generative AI capabilities across the entire organisation. Employees report that automating routine tasks with this tool allows them to save an average of nearly three hours of work per week, which they can then dedicate to strategic tasks. More than 80% of licensed users use it daily. BBVA offers training, has created a community to share best practices, and encourages internal innovation through idea ‘hackathons’.

The first edition of BBVA’s FinAI Summit brought together international experts in artificial intelligence to address how its transformative potential should advance in parallel with its ethical, safe and responsible use. The financial sector must carry out its transformation without losing customers’ trust. Doing so requires a gradual, regulated approach that maintains human interaction, just like BBVA is already doing. Over 6,000 people attended the event in person and online.

You can watch the full event at finaisummit.com

From May 5 to 8, BBVA will organize the first FinAI Summit, featuring talks, panel discussions and master classes, in an event designed to be the key forum on how AI could reshape financial services and products, and how this could impact society at large. Speakers will include international experts such as Kay Firth-Butterfield, previously head of artificial intelligence at the World Economic Forum. The public can attend online by registering on the FinAI Summit website.

You can register for the event at this link

Guardrails are mechanisms to guide the responsible development of AI so that it does not become a technological, social, or security threat. Classical and generative AI require different types of guardrails, as the latter’s ability to engage directly with end users has introduced a whole new set of challenges for developers—such as the mass production of fake news or the creation of new methods for perpetrating cybercrime.

BBVA has adopted a data and AI governance strategy that lets it widen the use of artificial intelligence safely and responsibly.  The bank follows industry best practices and international regulations, keeps an inventory of its AI systems, and monitors them regularly to assess their accuracy, spot errors and ensure they remain current.

The Bot Talent internal competition has demonstrated the creativity of BBVA employees to come up with innovative and secure uses of generative AI for their daily work. The bank will study the viability of three winning projects from Peru, Mexico and Spain, which propose using ChatGPT Enterprise to enhance customer service for sales agents, streamline the process of granting loans to SMEs, and detect official communications, supposedly from BBVA, that are actually hiding fraudulent messages to steal users’ financial data.

The use of ChatGPT Enterprise is already saving BBVA employees an average of two hours of work per week. In tandem, the bank has been busy preparing new agents, built on artificial intelligence (AI), to help its managers provide better service to business customers. These were some of the examples cited by Álvaro Martín, head of Data for Business Clients and Sustainability at BBVA, at the Mobile World Congress, in showing that AI will entail a new transformation process spanning the entire Group. Meanwhile, Ignacio de Loyola Gil, head of the Digital Banking Business in Europe, explained BBVA’s strategy to reach new European markets thanks to the scalability of the digital platform developed in Spain.

Garanti BBVA, one of Türkiye’s leading banks with its investments in technology, has once again earned Tier IV Certification of Operational Sustainability – Gold TCOS from Uptime Institute, the highest certification for data center infrastructure worldwide. With this achievement, Garanti BBVA’s data center is now one of only 24 in the world to boast this accolade.

The mass deployment of more than 3,000 ChatGPT Enterprise licenses across the BBVA Group has unleashed a wave of innovative ideas on how to apply generative AI to improve productivity. Quickly locating information to answer legal queries from customers, increasing the visibility of marketing actions, streamlining the management of large volumes of data or helping code development are just four examples of the more than 900 use cases of strategic interest that have already been implemented by the bank’s employees.

Researchers at BBVA and IBM Research have designed a dataset that functions as a stress test to measure the presence of discriminatory bias in the responses given by generative artificial intelligence models in languages other than English. The BBVA team’s stress test measures biases that could exist in GenAI in Spanish. The work was shown at NeurIPS, the world’s biggest AI conference, and was made available to the open source community to continue the research.

With the creation of the new Analytics Transformation Unit, BBVA brings together its global team of over 2,500 data scientists and specialists, aiming to advance the development of data-driven services by leveraging the latest innovations in artificial intelligence.

In 2023, BBVA chose Amazon Web Services (AWS) to accelerate its data-driven transformation. A year later, and the bank’s global cloud data platform is a reality. Following a process that involved multiple use cases and numerous teams, BBVA has successfully completed the full migration in Europe and Uruguay to its ADA (Analytics, Data, AI) cloud platform. The project involved the complex task of migrating tens of thousands of processes and thousands of users, all with no service interruptions. Given its success, the BBVA Group is now preparing to expand ADA in 2025 to the other countries in which it operates, including Mexico, Colombia, Peru and Argentina.

Reorienting the workforce, attracting talent and improving energy infrastructure are some of the key areas the consulting firm McKinsey & Company has identified for the European Union can unleash its potential in artificial intelligence. This would allow labor productivity in Europe to increase by up to three percent annually by 2030, while reducing the gap with more competitive countries in AI, such as the United States.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming the way we interact with the world. At BBVA, the Behavioral Economics team works to leverage its potential in a safe and responsible way by improving customer experience and process efficiency. How? By shaping AI development and adoption.

Just five months after BBVA distributed 3,000 ChatGPT Enterprise licenses among its employees, 83 percent have incorporated it into their work routine and have created nearly 3,000 GPTs—customized adaptations of the tool for specific tasks, ranging from financial data analysis to help to solve legal questions from clients in less than 24 hours or provide customer insights.

BBVA is the world’s thirteenth most advanced bank on account of its ongoing efforts to integrate data and AI technologies, according to the Evident AI Index. More precisely, the bank ranks first in Spain and fourth in Europe, where it is widely recognized as offering outstanding professional development opportunities for its AI specialists and for having defined a Group-wide strategy that permeates the upper echelons of the organization.

BBVA’s AI Factory, a center dedicated to developing artificial intelligence (AI) solutions, expands to Mexico and Türkiye in order to create products globally and leverage knowledge across the Group. With these new centers, BBVA aims to accelerate the adoption of AI-based solutions to improve customer experience and optimize internal processes. In addition, the bank has hired 230 AI experts, doubling the headcount of these ‘factories’ to more than 400 professionals.

David Puente has been heading up Client Solutions at BBVA for five years. It is an area which, in his words, “drives growth and innovation” at BBVA. He is tasked with developing the value proposition for private and corporate clients, as well as non-clients. His remit includes overall product design, customer experience, relationship and distribution model, as well as building new capabilities and exploring new business opportunities.

Machine learning has no end of business applications. Consumers and citizens stand to benefit from this technology, which lets them manage their financial health, streamlines their digital processes, or makes their online experience smoother across multiple platforms, among other uses. A basic premise has emerged from this boom: there is nothing mysterious or magical about artificial intelligence (AI), and nor should it seem so. For more complex algorithms, data scientists develop tools to help us understand how they make their decisions.

Artificial intelligence is increasingly mainstreamed in society and used to make decisions that affect people´s lives in areas such as  their workplace or  the justice system. This presents the challenge of biased algorithms, which are mainly caused by biases or distortions in the training data. Proposals are already in place that caution against bias and seek to mitigate its harmful impact on society.

Opening imagen created with Midjourney (AI)

BBVA has taken a firm step toward the future by expanding its Data University program, which now features new courses on generative artificial intelligence (generative AI). As part of the agreement signed with OpenAI, the bank is calling on its employees, from data scientists to any other member of the team, to apply the latest advances in AI, machine learning and advanced analytics in developing innovative financial products. BBVA’s Data University has already impacted more than 50,000 employees in 6 years, of whom nearly 5,000 have completed specialized courses. BBVA is also looking to strengthen its educational ecosystem through partnerships with prestigious institutions such as the University of Navarra, Telefónica and Coursera.

Online courses promoted by universities, business school training and even materials offered by technology giants are some of the ways to learn to master artificial intelligence. Beyond programming, AI professionals can receive training in other areas, such as computational linguistics and ethics. Thanks to this trend, Europe currently has over 120,000 professionals who are highly qualified to work in AI.

After years at the forefront of artificial intelligence (AI)-based research and projects, BBVA has taken another big step forward in the use of generative AI in its main markets. Not only has it prioritized around 100 projects to be developed with various tools that employ this new technology, it has also signed a strategic agreement with OpenAI —the creator of ChatGPT— to start deploying this cutting-edge tool among its employees. The aim is to explore, in a safe and responsible way, how generative AI can expedite processes, improve productivity and foster innovation thanks to its abilities to create text and images and process information, among other features.

The international publication has granted two ‘Innovators Awards’ to BBVA for its crypto asset service in Switzerland and for an automated process the bank has developed to guide the creation and application of machine learning models for the early detection and management of debt.

BBVA’s app is the main channel customers use to contact the bank. Over 75 percent of customers around the world use the app. With this level of outreach, the current challenge for BBVA entails getting customers to use the new features and do more mobile transactions. To achieve this, the bank has developed a strategy to improve the digital intensity of its customers, with which it has increased interactions on the app by 32 percent in just one year, largely driven by the financial health services.

Data is a strategic lever for BBVA, which has been working for years to make it accessible across the entire organization so that it supports every business decision. In this endeavor, Domo has become an essential tool, as Elena Alfaro, Global Head of Data and Advanced Analytics in Client Solutions at BBVA, explains in this new success story, which showcases the value of this platform in monitoring progress toward strategic objectives, spotting trends and enabling the bank to swiftly tailor products and services to customer needs.

The bank offers its data scientists and engineers an extensive and continuous training ecosystem, both in-house and in partnershipwith top international universities and educational institutions,so that they may apply the latest advances in artificialintelligence, machine learning and advanced analytics in thedevelopment of cutting-edge financial products. In addition, italso offers training to other professional profiles so that they canuse data analytics to solve business challenges in their areas.In just 5 years, the BBVA Campus has trained more than50,000 employees, including 900 data scientists, through theData University.