In artificial intelligence, getting a prediction right or detecting complex patterns does not always mean understanding the underlying events that occurred to lead to that result. Understanding causal relationships is the core idea addressed by the doctoral thesis of Jesús Renero Quintero, who is part of the AI adoption team at the bank. The thesis was developed within the industrial PhD program in Data Science promoted by the University of Navarra and BBVA. The goal is to design AI that is more reliable and transparent.

FC Internazionale Milano and BBVA have officially presented their partnership at a media event held at the club’s headquarters in Milan. The event also coincides with the launch of new BBVA offers in Italy, where the bank is now approaching one million customers.

Global Finance’s awards assess the innovation structures shaping the future of financial services. Garanti BBVA Partners has been recognized in Global Finance’s World’s Best Financial Innovation Labs 2026 in the Financial Services Company (Working With External Startups and Scale-ups) category, placing it alongside the innovation labs of the world’s leading financial institutions.

Twenty-one leading international financial institutions have committed to establish a new company in H2 2026, subject to closing conditions, to support the issuance of a stablecoin solution.

Two generative AI assistants developed by the teams managing BBVA’s contact centres in Italy and Germany—the Group’s two fully digital banks—have reduced the average handling time for the most common customer enquiries about products, services and general procedures by more than 15%. By speeding up information retrieval and response preparation, these AI copilots enable customer service agents to resolve routine enquiries more quickly and dedicate more time to more complex cases that require deeper analysis and personalised support.

BBVA and FC Internazionale Milano have announced a new partnership built on a shared vision: using innovation and technology to create experiences that strengthen the connection between people and the brands they trust. As part of the agreement, BBVA will become the Official Sleeve Partner of Inter’s Men's First Team, Inter Women, Inter U23, Inter U20 and Inter Legends. In addition, BBVA will serve as the Front Jersey Partner of the club’s youth academy teams, from U18 downwards, across both the men’s and women’s divisions, reflecting the two organizations’ shared commitment to younger generations and families.

Satisfaction surveys are no longer the only way BBVA gains insight into its relationship with customers. The bank is now using generative artificial intelligence to analyze hundreds of thousands of customer interactions, providing a more complete picture of the customer experience. It harnesses this technology to process selected conversations in Spain across channels such as phone calls and chats between customers and relationship managers through the bank’s app, as well as more than 220,000 monthly calls between customers and remote relationship managers in Mexico. The goal is to identify customer needs and pain points more quickly and reliably, enabling more personalized and effective service. These capabilities are deployed in compliance with applicable data protection regulations. This solution is one of the 1,127 AI use cases that BBVA already has in production, serving both customers and the business.

At BBVA, the development and use of artificial intelligence are underpinned by a responsible AI framework based on eight principles that promote transparency, security, privacy and human oversight. The aim is to create sustainable value, uphold security standards, regulatory compliance and customer data protection, in order to preserve customer trust in the bank’s services in an increasingly automated environment.  These principles are implemented through technological capabilities, governance mechanisms, and training and support programs for employees.

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Carlos Torres Vila hailed the transformative, unifying power of science and culture at the ceremony for the 18th BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Awards. At a time marked by complexity and uncertainty, the President of the BBVA Foundation reminded the audience that progress springs from human creativity, from rigor, and from collaboration between people, disciplines and countries.

Artificial intelligence will bring about a faster and more profound transformation than the digital revolution, drastically altering customer relations, value propositions and the way organizations operate. This was the message BBVA CEO Onur Genç delivered in his presentation at the fintech conference Money2020, where he stressed that differentiation in this new era will hinge on how capable organizations are of transforming and scaling AI across their operations, an area where BBVA is already taking decisive steps.  In addition, he underscored that the bank has established a very clear roadmap to build a more personalized, accessible and proactive banking experience for its clients.

Javier Rodríguez Soler, Global Head of Sustainability and Corporate & Investment Banking (CIB), has been named to American Banker’s inaugural “50 Most Innovative People in Finance” list. The recognition highlights his leadership in accelerating BBVA’s transformation through the integration of artificial intelligence, advanced analytics and sustainability across the bank’s global operations. American Banker also recognized BBVA’s deployment of generative AI tools and continued investment in digital banking and sustainable finance solutions.

The AI Transformation area, which sits at the top level of the organization and will be led by Antonio Bravo combines the current Data area with critical technological capabilities to industrialize the creation, deployment and management of artificial intelligence (AI) agents across the organization. This evolution will accelerate the bank’s transformation and enable smarter, more proactive and highly personalized financial services for its customers.

Agorá has demonstrated the potential of blockchain and programmable technologies to improve the efficiency of international corporate payments while preserving the safety and integrity of the transactions. BBVA is participating in the project along with central banks and more than 40 international financial institutions. The project has validated the feasibility of conducting settlements across currencies and jurisdictions using tokenized central bank reserves and tokenized commercial bank deposits. In upcoming phases it will advance to real-value testing.

BBVA has announced its participation as a founding partner in the OpenAI Deployment Company, the new company launched by OpenAI, together with 18 leading investment firms, consultancies and system integrators. With a total investment of more than $4 billion, the OpenAI Deployment Company will provide services to facilitate the deployment of artificial intelligence across enterprise organizations.

BBVA has received The Banker’s award for Best Technology Bank in Western Europe, along with Best Bank-Fintech Partnership for its strategic agreement with OpenAI. These accolades from the Financial Times Group publication are a testament to the progress made in its artificial intelligence (AI) strategy, the launch of its new app, and its digital model for entering new markets such as Germany.

Iain McGilchrist is a psychiatrist, neuroscientist and philosopher specialising in the brain hemispheres and their influence on the human body, well-being, and social and cultural change.

Harvard Business Review has identified BBVA as an example of how expanding access to generative AI tools can channel internal demand, transforming it into a driver of innovation. All Group employees currently have access to generative AI tools, including those in the commercial network, and over half of them use these tools on a weekly basis.

BBVA’s Blue assistant, its new app known as Futura, and seven other AI-driven solutions from the Group have been recognized among the most innovative initiatives at The Innovators 2026 awards run by Global Finance. The publication also singled out Garanti BBVA Partners and AI Factory as leading financial innovation labs.

Germany is rapidly becoming one of the bank’s most important strategic growth markets in Europe. Since the launch of its digital retail bank in June 2025, BBVA has surpassed a six-figure customer base. Notably 90% of these customers have “activated, funded their accounts, and are actively using them,” Murat Kalkan, BBVA’s Global Head of Digital Banks, said today at FIBE in Berlin. That strong early confidence is further underscored by the fact that 23% (as of early 2026) of BBVA’s customers in Germany hold more than €100,000 with the bank. Kalkan emphasized that  BBVA’s ambition is to become a genuine primary banking alternative for German customers.

BBVA has secured 3rd place among the best banks in Italy in the 2026 edition of the 'World’s Best Banks' list published by Forbes. This result marks an improvement over last year, when the bank ranked at the fifth place, and further strengthens its position among the leading financial institutions in the country.

The BBVA Bot Talent competition, through which the bank promotes AI adoption across the organization, received 315 proposals from over 1,200 employees in its second edition. The six finalists presented solutions ranging from risk analysis and customer extortion detection to the translation of financial content into indigenous languages and meeting optimization. The winning project, PresentAltor, automates corporate content creation in seconds, helping to reduce manual tasks and enhance team efficiency.

Garanti BBVA has expanded its export financing solutions by making its Turkish lira (TRY) Export Loan accessible through digital channels. Clients can now draw on their existing limits without visiting a branch and meet their financing needs quickly and easily, with financing terms of up to 24 months.

Responsible AI is not only a matter of rules or governance. It is also a technical challenge. That was one of the main messages from Clara Higuera, BBVA’s Responsible AI Lead, at QCon London, a leading international conference for engineers, software architects, and technology leaders. Her talk focused on how to turn concepts such as fairness, transparency, and security into methods, metrics, and controls that can be applied throughout the AI development lifecycle.

The BBVA Foundation has awarded its Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Music and Opera to Unsuk Chin. The South Korean artist, who taught herself to play the piano and compose, has developed a “singular technique of great solidity” defined “by her refined command of sound and masterful ability to transform it into a play of illusions and metamorphoses, marking her out as one of the great innovators in contemporary music,” the award committee noted.

Techstars Startup Weekend Women Istanbul, organized as part of Garanti BBVA's role as Techstars lead partner in Turkey, has come to a close. Held simultaneously with events in 40 cities around the world, the Istanbul leg took place at Salt Galata from March 6 to 8, coinciding with International Women's Day.

BBVA has created an artificial intelligence assistant with ChatGPT Enterprise to support data analysis at Internal Audit, from validating and designing tests to interpreting results. The solution—always with a human overseeing it—enables more consistent use of analytics and is expected to increase productivity by around 10% in audits that call for large-scale data analysis. It also reduces manual and repetitive tasks and frees up time for activities where human professional judgment is essential, such as analyzing anomalies and assessing risks.