BBVA is the bank with the most mature artificial intelligence strategy in Spain and the eurozone, according to the international Evident AI Index. The report recognises the bank’s progress in embedding AI across its business to create more personalised and intelligent banking for its customers, while also placing it at the global forefront of developing AI-skilled talent.

BBVA has presented the evolution of its artificial intelligence (AI) strategy at an event with analysts and investors, introducing ‘The Frame’, a new common framework for creating, deploying, managing and governing AI agents at scale. After focusing its efforts over the past year on developing specific use cases, the bank is now advancing this standard to extend the technology across the organisation and move forward with its transformation. Carlos Torres Vila, Chair of BBVA, explained that this capability will be critical to delivering more proactive and personalised banking, always for the benefit of customers.

Europe’s Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) Regulation has done more than bring order to the crypto market. It has also laid the groundwork for modernizing financial infrastructure through tokenization.

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.

BBVA has provided BizAway with €10 million in financing to support its acquisition of Dutch company Uniglobe Alliance Travel. The transaction will enable the scaleup to bolster its presence in Northern Europe, expand its customer base in the Benelux region, and move forward with its goal of becoming the leading corporate travel partner across the continent. The financing benefits from the support of the European Union and the European Investment Fund (EIF) under the InvestEU program.

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.

BBVA Corporate & Investment Banking is bringing artificial intelligence directly into ePricer, its digital structured products platform, with a new release designed to make idea generation, pricing and lifecycle management more connected.

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.

The bank has participated from the go-live of Swift’s new retail scheme, a global initiative that establishes a common rulebook to deliver faster, more transparent, predictable and 24/7 international payments for individuals and SMEs.

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.

BBVA has completed a transaction initiated by an artificial intelligence agent on behalf of a cardholder, as part of a live agentic commerce activity that Visa is developing in Europe under its Visa Agentic Ready programme. The payment was carried out using real card credentials and the systems of an active merchant, demonstrating that AI agents can securely complete purchases on behalf of cardholders within today’s payments infrastructure.

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.

Speaking at the Goldman Sachs investor conference on Wednesday, BBVA’s Global Head of Finance, Luisa Gómez Bravo, noted that AI will be one of the key forces shaping the future of banking and will drive a transformation that is greater, faster, and more disruptive than digitalization, benefiting clients in particular: “We believe AI can become a powerful engine for innovation and value creation for clients and, ultimately, generate significantly greater value for our shareholders.”

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.

BBVA and the University of Navarra have completed the first two industrial doctorates in data science under their joint program. This pioneering initiative enables working professionals to carry out advanced academic research into real challenges facing the financial sector. Both theses propose ways of developing AI models that can identify the causes behind financial decisions, not just the correlations.

Photo caption (from left to right): Paul G. Tobin, Global Head of Talent and Culture at BBVA; Paloma Grau, Vice President for Research and Sustainability at the University of Navarra; the newly awarded PhDs Paloma Marín and Jesús Renero; and Jesús López Fidalgo, Director of DATAI. / Source: University of Navarra

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.

Garanti BBVA’s AI journey, launched in 2016, has evolved into Ugi, which today handles more than 6.4 million monthly interactions on average, has 1.6 million active users, and supports more than 300 end-to-end banking transactions. With the integration of generative AI, Ugi can now understand 90% of user requests. Over the past year, nearly 50% of mobile banking customers interacted with Ugi at least once, while the system delivered proactive solutions through 780,000 instant notifications per month.

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.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is already one of the main drivers of transformation in the financial sector and BBVA has been looking closely at how people incorporate it into their work. Training, new internal roles that promote its uptake, and a culture that encourages experimentation are some of the pillars of a strategy aimed at transforming how work is done across the organization.

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.

Christophe Galfard is a theoretical physicist and science communicator, renowned for his ability to explain the great concepts of the universe in an accessible and engaging way. He earned his PhD at the University of Cambridge, where he worked alongside Stephen Hawking, one of the most influential figures in contemporary physics.

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.

In recent years, Europe has been busy developing one of the world’s most ambitious digital regulatory frameworks, covering matters such as data protection and sharing, artificial intelligence (AI), and operational resilience. The result is a robust framework, but also one that is complex and, at times, fragmented. However, since 2023—with the rise in popularity of tools such as ChatGPT—and amid heightened geopolitical tensions, there has been mounting criticism of an approach that is sometimes seen as overly regulatory and as one of the causes of the EU’s technological gap relative to other regions.

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.

The BBVA Foundation presented its Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Climate Change and Environmental Sciences category to Carl Wunsch (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) for his foundational contributions to studies that revealed the impact of global warming on the world’s oceans. The awardee researcher “had the early insight that the ocean plays a central role in regulating Earth’s climate,” the committee noted.

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.