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.

BBVA Spark will take part for the fourth consecutive year in 4YFN, the leading event for startups, investors and corporates held within the framework of the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona. The event comes at a key moment for the unit. Since its launch, BBVA Spark has committed close to €1 billion in financing and, in the past year alone, signed more than 30 deals with innovative, high-growth companies across Europe and Latin America.

BBVA is making its conversational application available to ChatGPT users, allowing them to directly access information about the bank’s products and services in Italy and Germany right from the assistant. BBVA is one of the first financial companies to offer its own app within ChatGPT, one of the most widely used conversational assistants in the world.

For years, discussions around artificial intelligence in business have focused on the technology itself: which models to use, which tools to deploy, and which use cases to prioritize. In many organizations, that stage is largely behind us. AI is now part of everyday operations across multiple functions. As a result, the real challenge has shifted.

BBVA has joined a consortium of eleven major European financial institutions that have formed a joint venture, Qivalis, to launch a euro-pegged stablecoin. The aim is to enable faster and cheaper payments, as well as the settlement of digital assets within a regulated environment backed by all the safeguards that a European bank can offer. The commercial launch is slated for the second half of 2026, once the technical and regulatory developments have been completed.

The financing, closed at the end of 2025, aims to support the scaling of Lanes & Planes, the leading provider of digital solutions for mid-market business travel and expense management. The facility will serve to finance the company's growth. This financing partially benefits from the support of the European Union and the European Investment Fund (EIF) under the InvestEU program.

Garanti BBVA was recently honored with two awards at the 2025 Digital Banking Awards, organized by international financial publishing group World Finance, for the ‘Best Digital Bank in Retail Banking’ and the ‘Best Mobile Banking App.’ The awards are a reflection of the bank’s approach to digital banking and its focus on customers.

In 2025, BBVA successfully completed the global rollout of ADA, its new data and artificial intelligence platform. This technological foundation is key in enabling the bank to offer clients more agile, personalized, and efficient services. Over the course of the year, ADA also received recognition from numerous international organizations operating in the financial and technology sectors.

At the 'Beyond Hype: crypto meets banking at BBVA' event, BBVA Spark brought together leaders from the crypto industry such as Andrei Manuel, founder of Bit2Me, Catriona Wingate, head of banking at BVNK in Europe, Asia and the Pacific, and Kaushik Sthankiya, head of banking at Kraken. The experts analysed the factors driving the growth of crypto companies, the opportunities and challenges they face when coexisting with traditional financial infrastructures, and how collaboration with banks can make a difference.

BBVA has rolled out a roadmap, known as ‘The Eight,’ aimed at ramping up the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to evolve the way the bank interacts with customers, manages risk, automates processes, and strengthens its technological capabilities. This decisive step forward in its transformation will enable the bank to radically improve its range of products and services through innovation and to structurally enhance its ways of working to boost value creation.

Image: Antonio Bravo, Head of Data at BBVA

BBVA and OpenAI have entered into a strategic alliance aimed at redefining the future of financial services through the use of artificial intelligence. The agreement, announced by Carlos Torres Vila, Chair of BBVA, and Sam Altman, CEO and Co-founder of OpenAI, marks a unique and unprecedented level of collaboration in the financial industry to build a radically customer-centric proposition and to drive a more productive and efficient operating model.