When a BBVA customer, whether retail or wholesale, wants to invest in the financial markets, —for example, by buying or selling bonds, shares or currencies— there’s a special place in Ciudad BBVA in Madrid: the trading floor. It's a factory of financial market products, a space where hundreds of specialists work to meet clients’ needs with the best investment solutions. This report opens the doors to the trading floor, and introduces the team of professionals who work there, explaining the products they create and what a typical working day there is like.
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In 2018, BBVA continued the exciting transformation journey it began more than 10 years ago. The goal was none other than preparing for the changes brought about by the digital revolution and improving people’s lives through technology.
2018 was also an important year in the fight against climate change and environmental protection through sustainable financing.
BBVA’s new corporate headquarters in Madrid have become an architectural and sustainability landmark. Architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron have designed not only a smart but an environmentally and people friendly city, reflective of the financial group’s global digital transformation strategy.
Today in Frankfurt, BBVA officially launched its new digital bank in Germany. It combines cutting-edge technology, through one of the top financial apps in the world, with a compelling value proposition: an interest-bearing checking account paying three percent for the first 12 months, and a debit card with a three percent cashback on purchases - both paid monthly and completely free of charges, with no fees. “We’re bringing something new to Germany. A banking experience that combines the simplicity and convenience of a fee-free account, typical of digital actors, with the full range of products, reliability, and trust of a universal bank,” said BBVA CEO Onur Genç.
Ever wanted to manage your money better but weren’t sure where to start? BBVA has taken another step forward in its commitment to improving the financial health of its customers by launching a coach based on artificial intelligence (AI) that supports them in every financial decision. Integrated into the bank’s mobile app, the personal trainer analyzes your circumstances, helps you set goals, and suggests tailored plans so you can achieve your financial goals step by step.
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.
The international publication presented two awards to ADA, BBVA’s global data platform, a pioneer in the financial sector, and to a process that applies behavioral economic techniques to telephone debt negotiation using an empathetic approach with the customer. In addition, its AI Factor was once again recognized as one of the best financial innovation laboratories in the world.
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 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 Bot Talent internal competition has demonstrated the creativity of BBVA employees to come up with innovative and secure uses of generative AI for their daily work. The bank will study the viability of three winning projects from Peru, Mexico and Spain, which propose using ChatGPT Enterprise to enhance customer service for sales agents, streamline the process of granting loans to SMEs, and detect official communications, supposedly from BBVA, that are actually hiding fraudulent messages to steal users’ financial data.
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.
The technological innovations underlying cryptocurrencies, such as cryptography and distributed ledger technology (DLT), can also be applied to traditional assets like financial instruments or fiat currencies. Tokenization enables the "digitization" of these assets, representing them as tokens and granting them properties with significant potential to enhance and improve the financial system.
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.
BBVA Corporate & Investment Banking (CIB) reinforces its commitment to innovation with the integration of BBVA Spark and the group’s Digital Assets & Blockchain strategy. This restructuring strengthens its leadership in advanced financial solutions and the digital transformation of the industry.
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.
BBVA has been implementing various plans and initiatives to attract the best tech talent (engineers, mathematicians, and experts in artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and data management) - one of the most in-demand fields in the job market and a key aspect of the bank’s digital strategy. In the last three years, BBVA has added 10,100 new data and technology professionals to its workforce. The bank expects to boost this number with 1,100 new hires to reach a total workforce of 20,000 people dedicated to these roles.
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.
Quantum computing, new energy sources, and AI agents: 2025 is set to be defined by a renewed drive for potentially disruptive technologies, with global technology investment projected to grow by 9 percent, according to Gartner.
The mass deployment of more than 3,000 ChatGPT Enterprise licenses across the BBVA Group has unleashed a wave of innovative ideas on how to apply generative AI to improve productivity. Quickly locating information to answer legal queries from customers, increasing the visibility of marketing actions, streamlining the management of large volumes of data or helping code development are just four examples of the more than 900 use cases of strategic interest that have already been implemented by the bank’s employees.
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.
In 2023, BBVA chose Amazon Web Services (AWS) to accelerate its data-driven transformation. A year later, and the bank’s global cloud data platform is a reality. Following a process that involved multiple use cases and numerous teams, BBVA has successfully completed the full migration in Europe and Uruguay to its ADA (Analytics, Data, AI) cloud platform. The project involved the complex task of migrating tens of thousands of processes and thousands of users, all with no service interruptions. Given its success, the BBVA Group is now preparing to expand ADA in 2025 to the other countries in which it operates, including Mexico, Colombia, Peru and Argentina.
Reorienting the workforce, attracting talent and improving energy infrastructure are some of the key areas the consulting firm McKinsey & Company has identified for the European Union can unleash its potential in artificial intelligence. This would allow labor productivity in Europe to increase by up to three percent annually by 2030, while reducing the gap with more competitive countries in AI, such as the United States.