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.

Image generated with Artificial Intelligence (Midjourney)

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.

Garanti BBVA Crypto recently launched a variety of advanced new features on its mobile app. With nearly 100,000 users, the app is powered by the bank’s robust infrastructure and highest quality standards, ensuring a simple, fast and secure investment experience.

BBVA is launching a new version of its app in Spain, with a unique native code that is scalable and exportable to all countries where the bank operates. This technological overhaul, which  includes an ambitious artificial intelligence (AI) integration, marks a turning point in digital banking. It represents a decisive commitment to personalization, with a radically enhanced user experience. The new app multiplies the benefits of being a customer: direct access to cards and Bizum to make fast, simple payments, personalized savings plans and a financial coach to help manage finances, among other new developments.

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

The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Climate Change and Environmental Sciences goes to US scientist Camille Parmesan for her pioneering studies showing that “wild species shift their geographical ranges in response to climate change,” moving toward the poles and higher elevations. This groundbreaking discovery laid “the foundations of climate change ecology,” according to the committee.

BBVA has provided £15m in venture debt to Plum, a British personal finance app. The deal will help Plum expand and scale, and reflects BBVA’s growing commitment to the UK as Europe's leading hub for entrepreneurship and venture capital.

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.

Murat Kalkan, Head of Digital Banks at BBVA, participated in the 36th edition The European House – Ambrosetti, held in Cernobbio, to discuss the rise of digital banks. During his address, he shared his views on the competition between incumbents and neobanks, and highlighted how BBVA Italy is disrupting the banking industry in the country by combining the best of digital banking with the strengths of traditional institutions. The result: one of the fastest growing banks in Italy with more than 680,000customers and the top-rated bank by customers in the country according to the Bain & Company NPS Benchmark Report, all achieved in just three years.

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 BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Social Sciences has gone in this seventeenth edition to social psychologists Icek Ajzen (University of Massachusetts Amherst), Dolores Albarracín (University of Pennsylvania), Mahzarin Banaji (Harvard University), Anthony Greenwald (University of Washington) and Richard Petty (Ohio State University) for their innovative contributions that have revolutionized the attitude theory and its practical applications.

BBVA has received the green light from the Spanish Securities and Exchange Commission (CNMV) to provide custody and execution services for cryptoassets trading orders in Spain. After completing this formality, the bank is preparing to launch its offering for its retail customers, which will initially be available with bitcoin and ether.

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.

The winners of the 18th Türkiye’s Women Entrepreneurs Competition, organized by Garanti BBVA alongside Ekonomist magazine and the Women Entrepreneurs Association of Türkiye (KAGİDER), have just been announced at an award ceremony held on February 27.

Photo cover: Garanti BBVA CEO Mahmut Akten and Özlem Kahramaner, Türkiye's female entrepreneur of the year.

BBVA has updated its personal virtual assistant Blue, integrated in its app, making it more personalized. Blue now has enhanced abilities to interact with customers using natural language, provide tailored information on their finances, and perform some of the most common account and card transactions. In parallel, BBVA created a co-pilot to facilitate the daily work of branch employees. With these initiatives, BBVA is moving forward with its strategy to put artificial intelligence (AI) at the disposal of its customers, and mark the beginning of a new stage in digital banking management. The roll-out of the new assistant Blue, with the AI Factory team participating in the technical aspects, will take place on February 20th in Spain and gradually reach all of the bank’s customers.

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.

Girls start to lose interest in science as they approach adolescence. This ‘abrupt’ change takes place at the age of 16, according to a recent Microsoft. On the 10th anniversary of the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, Carmen Lópex, Head of Engineering at BBVA Spain, and Alicia Mancheño, a member of the Technovation Girls Advisory Board, reflected on how to combat the prejudices and stereotypes that turn girls away from these professions.

Exoticca, a leading company in the digitization of high-value travel, has secured a new €25 million financing agreement with BBVA Spark. This debt agreement, which builds on the €4 million agreement signed with BBVA Spark last year, will support the company's international expansion and drive its investment in technology.

The BBVA Foundation has granted its Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Information and Communication Technologies to Anil K. Jain (Michigan State University, United States) and Michael I. Jordan (University of California, Berkeley, United States) for their “core contributions” to machine learning, which have unlocked developments in biometrics and artificial intelligence.

Garanti BBVA Crypto Asset Trading Platform, part of the Garanti BBVA Group, recently announced that Korcan Abalı will be stepping down as CEO and Onur Güven will replace him. Güven has been a senior manager at a variety of renowned financial technology companies.

The BBVA Foundation has honored four researchers with the Frontiers of Knowledge Award for their groundbreaking work in establishing the biological foundations for a new class of drugs. These drugs are highly effective in treating type 2 diabetes, promoting significant weight loss in obese individuals, and reducing their risk of cardiovascular issues.

Garanti BBVA Crypto, a subsidiary of Garanti BBVA, recently entered a partnership with Bitstamp, the world’s longest-operating crypto exchange platform and core liquidity provider. The aim of this partnership is to allow customers to trade in multiple currencies. In addition, investors in both crypto currencies and traditional financial markets can trade a series of approved digital assets, thus helping to boost crypto access and adoption in Türkiye.

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.