Artificial Intelligence
Today
We tested OpenAI’s GPT-3 (one of the largest Artificial Intelligence (AI) language models ever created) on ten Spanish customer conversations about banking. Without any previous customization, re-training or transfer learning whatsoever, we asked it to generate summaries that would be useful to any bank agent who joins (or retakes) the conversation.
03 Feb 2021

Francisco Maturana
CEO BBVA AI Factory SL.
05 Jan 2021
Artificial Intelligence
Yesil Science, a company participating in Garanti BBVA Partners, presents a health app supported by AI
Yesil Science was created with the objective of developing innovative solutions to healthcare, combining medicine, art, and technology. In addition, it is a company that has participated in the Garanti BBVA Partners program.
27 Oct 2020
opinion
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Jesús Lozano
Digital Regulation
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Juan Murillo--
Head of Analytics Dissemination and Data for Social Good at BBVA Data & Analytics
26 Oct 2020
Sponsored by Garanti BBVA, the Turkish technology company Kodluyoruz has developed Alchemist, a series of 15 podcasts on technology and artificial intelligence.
18 Sep 2020
Blue is a virtual assistant that uses various artificial intelligence tools to help BBVA customers use the mobile application to complete tasks as well get detailed, personalized information about their accounts. This is how it works.
02 Sep 2020
Blue is pleasant, patient, and able to put itself in the shoes of others. It loves talking to humans and is always willing and ready to help customers. And it wants to learn lots of things in order to become even more insightful. These are just some of the personality traits that characterize BBVA’s new voice assistant, which came to life out of a complex process that factored even the most minor details.
28 Aug 2020
In 2016, U.S. consulting firm Gartner predicted that by 2020 the average citizen would have more conversations with bots than with his or her spouse or partner. They were not far off. Virtual assistants are increasingly present and integrated in our daily lives. If a few years ago it was strange for us to talk to robots, it is now commonplace to ask Siri what the most popular pop song is, to get help from Alexa on making a cheesecake, or asking Cortana the fastest way to get from point A to point B. Virtual voice assistants are increasingly more human, but with something in common: their sex.
04 Aug 2020
Internet sales have soared in recent months, resulting in growth in the ecommerce sector. But if new purchasing habits are to truly take root and survive in the post COVID-19 reality, businesses will have to carefully nurture the customer buying experience. Against this backdrop, artificial intelligence (AI) is not only a tool to help improve the user experience and increase customer satisfaction, it can also facilitate payment management and detect potential fraud.
20 Jul 2020
“Hello, I’m Blue, the BBVA virtual assistant. What can I do for you today?” This is how the first virtual assistant developed entirely by BBVA introduces itself. The newly launched virtual assistant responds to more than 100 customer requests among the 800 features that are integrated in the BBVA app. This makes Blue the most comprehensive virtual assistant on the market. The new tool takes advantage of natural language processing (NPL) and machine learning, which facilitates both voice activated and text-based customer interaction with the app.
13 Jul 2020
Big Data
BBVA and Universidad de Navarra work together to train their employees and support data science research
This partnership deal will let BBVA employees take an official master’s degree in Big Data, gain recognition as data scientists or achieve an industrial doctorate in data science. In addition, the agreement will enable students at Universidad de Navarra to carry out research alongside BBVA and even join the bank later on.
05 May 2020
Artificial intelligence is contributing to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. Projects directly related to pharmacology, medical and hospital care, or mobility analysis to reduce contagion have found a crucial ally in data science to make progress and deliver results.
17 Mar 2020
As long as bots continue to harbor gender bias, they will continue contributing to the perpetuation of gender inequality. This is why BBVA Next Technologies, BBVA’s advanced software company, is working to reduce this kind of bias, leveraging technology to bridge the gender gap.
27 Feb 2020
Audio
This week, the BBVA Mind Bank podcast features a special one-off interview between two people who firmly believe artificial intelligence has the potential to change the world for the better.
19 Feb 2020
Frontiers of knowledge
The Frontiers of Knowledge Awards recognize Guyon, Schölkopt and Vapnik for teaching machines how to classify data
The BBVA Foundation has awarded Isabelle Guyon, Bernhard Schölkopf and Vladimir Vapnik with the Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Information and Communication Technologies category, for helping advance the field of artificial intelligence with their seminal contributions to machine learning. Their work has been applied to fields as diverse as medical diagnosis, computer vision, natural language processing and the monitoring of climate change.
10 Feb 2020
Is it possible to take advantage of big data without it affecting the privacy of users? The answer may reside in “Privacy-enhancing technologies”, or PETs, a set of technologies that use different computational and mathematical approaches with the same purpose: extracting data value in order to unleash its full commercial, scientific and social potential, without jeopardizing the privacy and security of this information.
20 Jan 2020
The use of quantum algorithms in artificial intelligence techniques will boost machines’ learning abilities. This will lead to improvements in the development, among others, of predication systems, including those of the financial industry. However, we’ll have to wait to start these improvements being rolled out.
17 Jan 2020
A new toolkit designed to explain the power of artificial intelligence (AI) and to standardise its use has been launched by the World Economic Forum with help from BBVA.
08 Jan 2020
As part of Garanti BBVA’s goal to enhance customer experience on the go, the bank is now offering customer service on a corporate WhatsApp account. The new WhatsApp service allows customers to resolve their problems quickly and get detailed information on the bank’s products and services – all on a channel they already use on a daily basis.
07 Jan 2020
Over the next decade the labor market around Big Data will be shaped by artificial intelligence and automation. Experts predict that in the future there will be new data-related jobs, such as algorithm trainers and maintainers. These are new job positions that will emerge as information management becomes increasingly complex and valuable.
23 Dec 2019
One of the biggest challenges in advanced analytics is developing mechanisms to determine how reliable the decisions made by algorithms are. Now, research by BBVA’s Artificial Intelligence Factory is proposing a new method to make machine learning models capable of expressing the uncertainty in their predictions in a clearer manner. It’s an exploratory approach to make artificial intelligence more transparent, measure the reliability of its predictions and fine tune the accuracy of its results.
12 Dec 2019
Audio
Artificial Intelligence
Podcast: Alex Beard: Artificial intelligence, educating for the challenges of the future
Alex Beard has spent a decade dedicated to educational research. He is a member of Teach for All, a worldwide network of independent educational organizations that seek to ensure that all children are given the opportunity to fulfil their potential. He has traveled the world studying the most innovative, ground-breaking educational methods. Of everything he has learned on his travels, he stresses that we should “take creativity more seriously” and that we are at the threshold of an “educational revolution”.
26 Nov 2019
Artificial Intelligence
BBVA signs a strategic alliance with Intel to continue driving its technological transformation
The new global partnership will enable BBVA to optimize data storage and processing capabilities that drive its commitment towards innovation in financial services.
22 Nov 2019
Automatic learning is a prerequisite for intelligent systems. It enables data-driven predictions and creates new business opportunities. Banking in general, and BBVA in particular, is already taking advantage of this technology in order to improve products and services for its customers.
11 Nov 2019
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.
08 Nov 2019
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?
29 Oct 2019
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.
09 Oct 2019
Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence and green algorithms contribute to improved energy efficiency at BBVA headquarters
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.
24 Sep 2019
Software
BBVA Next Technologies achieves Amazon Web Services Machine Learning (ML) Competency Status
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.
23 Sep 2019
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.
19 Sep 2019
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.
16 Sep 2019
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.
09 Sep 2019
Big Data
Ricardo Martín Manjón (BBVA): "Success will mean data becomes fully integrated into the business at all levels"
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.
06 Sep 2019
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.
20 Aug 2019
Digital banking
BBVA will offer digital customer onboarding everywhere it operates by the end of 2019
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.
19 Aug 2019
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.
22 Jul 2019
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.
09 Jul 2019
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.
01 Jul 2019
Artificial Intelligence
"AI Factory's mission is to ensure that the impact of artificial intelligence can be felt across the entire organization"
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.
26 Jun 2019
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.
27 May 2019
Artificial Intelligence
Carlos Torres Vila: "Sharing knowledge improves and enhances opportunities for everyone"
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.
13 May 2019
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.
09 Apr 2019
Artificial Intelligence
Carlos Torres Vila: “BBVA sees data as working for equality and helping to make everyone count”
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.
05 Apr 2019
Artificial Intelligence
The danger of failing to interpret the predictions of your machine learning models
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.
28 Mar 2019
Artificial Intelligence
Algorithms that see better than humans: this is how facial recognition works at BBVA
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?
25 Mar 2019
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.
18 Mar 2019
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.
11 Mar 2019
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.
04 Mar 2019
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.
21 Feb 2019
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.