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.

Garanti BBVA Pensions was honored with the silver award in the Digital Transformation category of the Smart-i Awards for its innovative approach to digitizing insurance sales on Garanti BBVA Mobile.

It will soon be enough to spot a shirt we like and just ask a voice-enabled AI device to send it home in our size and in a different color, bypassing the entire traditional online shopping process. Artificial intelligence is set to transform shopping into a conversational experience, explained Carmela Gómez, Global Head of Open Banking at BBVA, at the Sibos financial event. AI will also enable companies to anticipate cash needs, open up new financial opportunities for vulnerable communities, and make access to credit easier for gig economy workers.

AI-generated cover image

BBVA has introduced an innovative new feature to its banking app, allowing customers to personalize their Visa cards using Image Playground with Apple Intelligence technology. The functionality is now available in Spain on virtual cards for users with iPhone 15 Pro and newer models, and will soon be extended to physical cards.

BBVA announced the renewal of its technology services agreement with Kyndryl, the leading provider of enterprise technology services, and the creation of two joint ventures in Spain and Mexico. Thanks to this agreement, the bank will improve user experience, invest in talent and guarantee the stability, security, resilience and robustness of its IT operations.

BBVA has launched a new service that enables financial institutions outside Europe to send payments to Spain in just seconds, at any time of day and on any day of the year. The service significantly enhances efficiency for sending banks while allowing recipients to access funds instantly, helping corporates optimize treasury management and offering retail customers a seamless experience.

Garanti BBVA Crypto is now offering trading and transfers in Tether (USDT), allowing users to do business with the popular dollar-pegged stablecoin via the Ethereum network and trade USDT pairs.

BBVA has taken a significant step forward in its data-driven transformation strategy with the successful implementation of ADA, its global data platform, in Mexico and Colombia. This strategic advance seeks to improve and accelerate the bank's ability to offer personalized and relevant products and services to its customers. The cloud-based data platform, built on Amazon Web Services (AWS) technologies, enables the centralized consolidation of analytical processes, ensures real-time access to data, and scales the use of artificial intelligence.

The three-year project, titled Fair Learning, will address the main ethical, technical and regulatory challenges posed by the growing automation of decisions that impact society. A multidisciplinary team of BBVA and The University of Navarra will explore the use of advanced mathematical and statistical methods to correct data bias, integrate philosophical and ethical frameworks into model development, and devise a set of best practices based on international legislation.

BBVA has reached a milestone in its commitment to artificial intelligence, surpassing 1,000 data scientists on staff. To further enhance this talent, the bank offers them a professional development model that allows these professionals to advance in their careers without giving up their specialization. In this innovative approach, technical expertise is placed on equal footing with team management as a path for professional growth, allowing them to remain involved in AI development as they advance in their careers.

Proptech company PropHero has secured financing from BBVA Spark to drive its growth in the Spanish real estate market, where it plans to double its business volume by year-end 2025.

Generative AI with autonomous financial agents, quantum computing capable of spotting fraud in seconds, and banking services embedded in health or e-commerce apps. According to 'Fintech 2040', a report drawn up by BNPL provider Riverty, this could well be how fintech evolves over the next two decades. The study suggests a world where the boundaries between payments, lending, insurance and investment fade, and financial services become an integral part of people’s everyday digital lives.

BBVA continues to drive growth in Europe with the appointment of Walter Rizzi as Head of Digital Banking in Italy, a key role in adapting the bank’s offering to the needs of the local market.