By using AI to better understand customers financial lives, and to then offer them better advice and specific products, BBVA has been able to significantly increase digital sales.

Machines’ current ability to learn is present in many aspects of everyday life. Machine learning is behind the recommendations for movies we receive on digital platforms, virtual assistants’ ability to recognize speech, or self-driving cars’ ability to see the road. But its origin as a branch of artificial intelligence dates began several decades ago. Why is this technology so important now, and what makes it so revolutionary?

Representatives of three leading organizations – Google, Telefónica and BBVA – spoke during the Open Summit event about the different applications of artificial intelligence (AI) in the business world and how to extract tangible value from data for people and for society as a whole, at a scale and in a structured way.

Energy savings at BBVA’s headquarters is 5,766,731 kWh a year, equivalent to the consumption of 1,900 households. This equals 12 to 15 percent less than when the complex was inaugurated in 2015 and a 1,430-metric ton per year reduction of CO2 emissions. The building’s sustainable design and equipment are not solely responsible for this success: tools powered by artificial intelligence have also been used to optimize the bank’s energy use.

BBVA Next Technologies, a Premier Consulting Partner in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner Network (APN), announced today that it has achieved Amazon Web Services (AWS) Machine Learning (ML) Competency status. BBVA Next Technologies, a professional technology services company expert in cloud computing, big data and artificial intelligence, created to accelerate the technological transformation of BBVA and other leading companies, has achieved the AWS ML Competency . This Competency consolidates BBVA Next Technologies as one of the leading European companies in the design and exploitation of artificial intelligence products based on machine learning and highlights it potential in helping its clients digitally transform their businesses thanks to AWS’s ML capabilities.

Every second an enormous amount of data from around the globe is amassed. Companies need professionals with expertise in processing and converting this data into knowledge that will feed their decision-making and define their business strategies.

Cost and revenue factors impacting economic activities are often too complex to be properly modelled, in which case optimization through Artificial Intelligence (AI) can lead to academically correct solutions that fall far from being economically optimal solutions.

The extinction of species, the rise in temperatures and major natural disasters are some of the consequences of climate change. Countries and industries are aware and work to combat the planet’s accelerating pollution. Are there any viable solutions? According to some researches, using big data and machine learning could help drive energy efficiency, transforms industries such as the agriculture and find new eco-friendly construction materials.

Ricardo Martin Manjón was named as BBVA Global Head of Data in April this year, having previously been the bank’s Global Head of Data Strategy and Data Science Innovation. His role sees him lead the bank’s development, deployment and future thinking around how BBVA drives forward its use of data throughout the Group, so it can achieve its strategic objective of bringing the age of opportunity to everyone.

In this interview Martin Manjón outlines why BBVA has a strategic focus on data, how that manifests itself across the entire group, what it will mean for customers in the future and the critical importance scale plays in data management.

Experts in telecommunications, industrial engineering, and IT have developed the artificial intelligence that gives Google Assistant, Siri, and Bixby their voices. The most common techniques used to generate responses are based on templates that contain changing parameters.

The digital onboarding process based on biometric identification technologies, which is already available in Spain, will now reach other countries thanks to the reuse of globally designed components.

Many organizations now process huge amounts of data using artificial intelligence. So it is crucial to find ways to prevent unfair biases. New research by BBVA and the Universidad de Barcelona (UB) tries to achieve this with a model that automatically sorts more than 600 superheroes as “good” or “evil” while disregarding traits like gender or race.

For Professor Kevin Warwick, a cybernetics expert and Emeritus Professor at Coventry and Reading Universities, the future of humans is literally tied to artificial intelligence, with technologies that will allow us to link our brains to machines to augment our physical and mental abilities. He recently sat down for an interview with OpenMind, BBVA’s knowledge community, to share some of his insights into this fascinating topic.

Artificial intelligence systems that are capable of reasoning, creating art or even learning to teach other machines. These are a few examples of what could occur in the future with advances in deep learning. Three experts in the AI field shared their vision, concerns and hopes regarding the development of this technology during the launch of BBVA AI Factory.

In the formal launch event of BBVA’s new global development center specializing in artificial intelligence, the leaders of the three areas that have worked together to create it – Data, Engineering and Client Solutions – shared with the team their vision and goals to materialize the impact of this technology across the organization.

AI Factory is the global development center where BBVA builds the artificial intelligence capabilities that power both its customer solutions – for both the retail and corporate segments – and the Group’s streamlined internal processes. The new structure brings together, under the same roof, a cross-disciplinary team consisting of data scientists, teams from the Engineering area, and representatives from other business areas.

BBVA Executive Chairman Carlos Torres Vila today unveiled the book ‘Towards a New Enlightenment? A Transcendent Decade’ in Madrid. The book is the eleventh in a collection sponsored by OpenMind, the non-profit knowledge community created by BBVA. More than 20 authors contributed to this year’s edition, which fosters a broad based discussion about the new philosophical and ethical foundations that need to be established in order to sustain an economy, a society, a culture – and the corresponding regulation – as they adapt to the new scientific and technological contexts.

An exceptional user experience and value added features are the keys to differentiating a banking application from its competition. These are the elements that held the most sway when, for the second consecutive year, the consulting firm Forrester chose BBVA’s app as the best banking app in the world and gave the Garanti BBVA app in Turkey the best in user experience.

At an event organized by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston, BBVA’s Group executive chairman presented Openmind’s new book, ‘Towards a New Enlightenment? A Transcendent Decade‘. Carlos Torres Vila and two contributing authors, Joanna Bryson and Sandy Pentland, discussed the implications of big data and artificial intelligence in the current technological context and its role in the so-called fourth industrial revolution.

In recent months, BBVA Next Technologies has devoted some effort into researching tools and techniques for interpreting machine learning models. These techniques are very useful to understand the predictions of a model (or make others understand them), to extract business insights from a model that has managed to capture the underlying patterns of customers interest, and to debug models in order to ensure they make the right decisions for the right reasons.

In this article we will explain how we have applied these techniques to avoid deploying flawed models into production that seemed totally correct a priori according to standard validation methods.

The branch of artificial intelligence that focuses on teaching machines how to see is becoming increasingly sophisticated. It is already better than humans at telling one person from another. At BBVA’s headquarters, this technology is already being used to allow users to pay for their meals at Ciudad BBVA’s restaurants. But, how does it work?

The ways in which businesses use data to deliver on their strategies is almost as varied as the sources of data themselves. This was one of the key messages from last week’s Domopalooza event held in Salt Lake City in Utah.

When it comes to designing customer interaction with online services – whether from a GPS navigator or through a mobile banking app – it is more and more common to design automated features that anticipate customer issues.

Money is often cited as being one of the biggest causes of stress in people’s lives. So imagine a ‘Self-driving’ bank account that took away some of that stress by watching your finances 24/7 and acting on your behalf to make your money work harder for you. Well it’s a future that’s very close to becoming a reality with latest advances in Artificial Intelligence now able to do more for you than ever before.

In its most recent issue, The Fintech Magazine examines some of BBVA’s most recent technology advances, such as payments powered by facial recognition and the use of artificial intelligence in its mobile banking application.  The magazine also outlines the core of the bank’s digital strategy and describes how BBVA is taking steps to fulfill its vision of automated banking in the future.

Every parent has been in this position: the baby cries and cries, and we don’t know why. Is it hungry? Is it tired? Ana Laguna, data scientist at BBVA Data & Analytics, asked herself the same questions when her first child was born. Ana looked for an app that would help her understand why her baby was crying.  But she didn’t have any luck. Then she thought she could translate her baby’s crying and understand what it needed any time by using the artificial intelligence techniques that she uses everyday at work.

BBVA and OpenMind, in collaboration with Professor Rafael Yuste, held a conference in Brussels to discuss the potential legal implications stemming from the rapid development of Neurotechnology and Artificial Intelligence. Under the title “Do we need new human rights?” scientists, politicians and regulatory authorities described the current situation and pointed to problems that need to be addressed, offering possible solutions to an issue that is not without controversy.

Propel Venture Partners, BBVA’s San Francisco based venture capital investment vehicle, has co-led the latest funding round into a business seeking to link up psychology and machine learning.

In an article, Forbes praises BBVA’s digital strategy and technological deployment, as well as the AI-powered apps that the bank is already using to deliver better solutions to its customers.

Artificial Intelligence and online messaging platforms are joining forces to help users easily build their savings with chatbots. Millennials are accustomed to using these kind of channels to address personal admin chores, so it is logical that they tend to be the target market for tools like Charlie, a chatbot that is part of Propel Venture Partners’ investment portfolio.

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is a neurologic condition that causes people suffering from it to be dominated by anxiety and develop unwanted thoughts that they cannot get rid of. Researchers at the Universidad Carlos III are applying artificial intelligence techniques to detect which brain areas are affected by this disorder. Emilio Parrado, a data scientist at BBVA was one of the researchers that took part in the project and explains how machine learning can bring huge improvements to any activity, including finance.

According to a report by the independent research firm Forrester, 2019 will be the year that digital transformation aspirations translate into “pragmatic” actions.

Putting a machine at the wheel is an old automotive dream. Now self-driving cars are a closer goal, but it all began with small steps starting in the middle of the twentieth century.

More and more initiatives allow SMEs to use artificial intelligence without the need for programmers. Giants like Baidu and Google, as well as smaller companies like Lobe, are presenting their products.

BBVA customers can now use an app that predicts their future income and expenses (Bconomy). Now, BBVA has developed —together with Google Cloud— an artificial intelligence model that would allow them to improve the accuracy of predictions. This model is explained in a white paper that also offers users recommendations on ways to protect the privacy of their data.

BBVA Compass Head of New Business Development Pepe Olalla says in 2019 early stage technologies will mature – for example more use cases for blockchain – but it’s AI-related technology that will take center stage.

Space Apps Challenge is an annual global contest where scientists and innovators from across the world compete to solve challenges facing the aerospace industry proposed by NASA. In 2016, I was one of the scientists that won this prize thanks to an algorithm capable of detecting and classifying Near Earth Objects, or NEOs. Today, I work as a data scientist at BBVA, where I develop fraud detection models. This is my story.

BBVA-backed investment fund to support growth of advisory service Charlie, aimed at less financially astute U.S. consumers.

Companies like Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Spotify and Netflix use algorithms to try to offer their users personalized recommendations. Two Spanish researchers found that even in these personalized suggestions, the views of the majority carry a heavy weight.

The arrival of new blockchain platforms, advances in cloud computing and the consolidation of new machine-human interactions, are among the hottest trends according BBVA Next Technologies ‘Tech Radar 2018‘, a report that shines the spotlight on some the most relevant tools and practices in 2018, as well as those that will mark the next years in fields such as big data and artificial intelligence.

Driverless cars capable of behaving like bird flocks, software capable of playing sheets of music composed during the Renaissance, algorithms capable of analyzing emotions expressed by social media users and tools for boosting people’s learning abilities… These are just some areas on which the winners of this year’s edition of the Spanish Computer Science Society (SCIE) – BBVA Foundation Research Awards have focused their work.

It might seem like a strange question to be asking, but given the multiple elements that drive the success of a bank, and given also that increasingly location is a key determining factor in how you deliver great customer experience, its an important topic.

At BBVA Open Summit, Ricardo Forcano, BBVA’s Global Head of Talent and Culture; and Rob Brown, Global CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) at BBVA, chatted with the representatives of two startups that are working to leverage blockchain and AI technologies to enable new decentralized ways of working.

Devices with combined cloud technology and neural networks integrated into their hardware – to reduce potential stability, privacy, and latency issues – are now a reality.

The issue is no longer about using data, but doing it in a responsible manner that also has a positive impact on users’ lives.  This was one of the most relevant topics discussed during the second day of BBVA Open Summit, where Derek White, Global Head of Client Solutions at BBVA, stressed that user confidence is the key to success in this new digital playing field.

With investments on artificial intelligence expected to reach €10 billion by 2020, it is evident that the financial sector is very optimistic about these technologies. However, the level of uncertainty surrounding AI remains almost too high to justify this degree of enthusiasm. In a recently published paper, the World Economic Forum warns about how overhyped misconceptions of what AI really is and what it can deliver may undermine the potential benefits derived from the use of artificial intelligence in finance. In contrast with this vision, other experts concur that AI contributes more to prevent and mitigate risks than to generate them.

BBVA Group Executive Chairman Francisco González said to participants in the BBVA Open Summit in Madrid that “data will define the future of the world.” Addressing an audience of hundreds of entrepreneurs, BBVA chairman added that for BBVA, data belongs to the customer.

The Valencian company Emotion Research Lab has developed a system that studies human behavior through facial analysis.

According to Gartner, 38% of companies around the world are expected to use ‘conversational bots’ for customer service and managing corporate applications by employees.

BBVA Compass is far from experiencing an AI takeover of the sort Wikipedia describes, but teams from around the bank, including Mortgage, Finance and Compliance, have discovered the power and efficiency of automation.