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.

Garanti BBVA recently launched ‘My Family,’ a new section on its Garanti BBVA Mobile app that lets parents manage their children’s finances on a single screen. This all-in-one solution features expense-tracking, educational content and financial products, such as checking accounts, savings accounts, Türkiye’s Individual Pension System (BES) and cards.

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 Spark has granted €4 million in financing to TaxDown, a fintech specialized in digital taxation in Spain with a presence in Latin America. The operation will accelerate the company’s growth, the development of new AI-based solutions and the expansion of its technological team. This financing benefits from the support of the European Union – NextGenerationEU and the European Investment Fund, with with Spain supporting the program through the InvestEU State compartment.

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.

American oncologist Carl June and French geneticist Michel Sadelain have been awarded the Frontiers of Knowledge Award for revolutionizing cancer treatment through immunotherapy based on so-called CAR-T cells. Their work has paved the way for therapies therapies for patients with various types of blood cancer, including leukemia, which have already benefited “tens of thousands of individuals, including many children,” according to the award committee’s citation.

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.

The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Information and Communication Technologies has gone in this eighteenth edition to engineers Joan Daemen and Vincent Rijmen for designing the cryptographic technologies that “underpin today’s digital age,” in the words of the committee, protecting the security of “millions of connected devices worldwide.”

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 completely reshaped digital banking in 2025. With generative artificial intelligence at the heart of its digital strategy, the bank has evolved the user experience, making it more intuitive, more personalized and smarter. Garanti BBVA Mobile has transformed the banking experience by seamlessly integrating into millions of customers’ daily lives.

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.

BBVA’s Turkish unit has introduced a new tool on its Garanti BBVA Mobile app to help customers manage their personal finances, improve their financial health and plan for the future. ‘My Credit Coach’ provides an overview of each customer’s financial situation based on their banking history and offers personalized recommendations.

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’s digital banks in Europe are exploring what could become the first banking app in the world natively integrated within ChatGPT, marking a bold step forward in how financial services integrate with conversational AI. This demonstration shows how people will be able to discover BBVA’s products and services in Italy and Germany through a dedicated BBVA app built directly into OpenAI’s conversational assistant.

Shares, artwork, real estate… in fact pretty much any asset, can now have a digital twin. Tokenization is reshaping investments by making it possible to split tangible, real-world assets into tokens that can be bought or sold in a matter of seconds, with the utmost transparency and with no intermediaries. So what are the steps involved in turning tangible value from the physical world into its digital counterpart?

Just over a year ago, BBVA created its Digital Banks unit, led by Murat Kalkan, an executive with a strong background in diverse retail banking businesses at BBVA, to drive the bank’s push into new markets with a fully digital model.

BBVA has secured a place among the world's leading digital banks, according to Euromoney’s latest report,  ‘The World’s Best Digital Banks.' The study evaluated more than 300 institutions globally, placing BBVA in the leadership category alongside digital-native rivals such as Revolut, Nubank, and Singapore-based DBS.

Garanti BBVA was internationally honored for its design excellence, earning two distinctions from the iF Design Awards for its updated Garanti BBVA mobile app and the Pulse app, and another from the A Design Awards for its ‘My Home, My Car, My Travel’ project — showcasing its highly innovative approach to user experience and digital design.

BBVA Switzerland, together with the Group's Behavioral Economics team, has launched ‘Investing in the Mirror,’ an innovative interactive experience that invites us to reflect on the role of emotions, biases, and beliefs in our investment decisions. It's a different look at the relationship with money that combines technological innovation and behavioral psychology.

BBVA has completed the global rollout of ADA (Analytics + Data + AI), the group's data platform, which is now operational across all geographies within BBVA's footprint, consolidating a unique, efficient, and wholly cloud-based technology model.

At BBVA Summit 2025: Futura, Hugo Nájera, Head of Retail Banking at BBVA Mexico, presented the new digital era of the BBVA Mx app. He explained that hyper-personalization is now at the core of its transformation, allowing the app to adapt to each customer’s needs and preferences through a single, unified channel.